I would also like if each prototype had some context. Maybe who made it, the date, and possibly some of the email text.

Agreed. The label printer seems like an easy step toward spatializing ideas. I would hope for even larger prints on the poster, big enough to see from a distance. We have the whole 3d-space of the lab to use so let's use it!

I would also like if each prototype had some context. Maybe who made it, the date, and possibly some of the email text. If this were dynamic, I could imagine touching each picture would reveal this context peek-quotes-style.

I've made one of these collages for my own work so I remember what I've done:

<Screenshot 2014-12-08 00.41.04.png>

(these are actually iframes with css-zoomed live pages)
​

What we're driving at, I think, is a "spatial memo", but less formal than that implies. I've lately had the same thought that our emails are a terrible archive, distributed among individuals and not visually browsable. I like that our emails are informal—no extra effort needed—but wish they were archived better, or could even turn into publishable, collaborative digital documents.

Longer term, I really wish our filesystems were set up memex-style. Everything you look at and create is serialized and added to a big browsable list both on the tiny rectangle and in a physical space. You could selectively add things to a shared CDG branch and all of us in the lab would have access to it. I would imagine that this would even bleed into real life, so that the places we travel and the people we see could be in this list—the notebook of life. 

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

I love it when you share prototypes, ideas, snapshots of works in progress, and weird things you've made.  But I hate it when these things get buried in the bowels of our email and forgotten.

Along with a representation gallery, I also wanted the lab to have a research gallery, where everything that everyone made would get a permanent square of reality forever, to be browsed and pointed at and walked past every day.  I'm still not sure how to do that well, for interactive things.  But after some of the recent email threads, I've come to think that a representation-gallery-like paper gallery would be better than nothing.

I'm basically thinking of a kind of group work blog (shared, chronological) but on foamcore instead of the web.  But I'd like to make it as easy as possible to add to it, so it actually happens.  The current idea is to get a color label printer, which will sit next to a big blank poster,

<Screen Shot 2014-12-07 at 9.50.58 PM.png>

and anytime you send out an email with a screenshot of your thing, you also send the screenshot to the label printer, then slap the label on the next available slot on the poster.  (If you're feeling extra lazy, maybe you just do the printing step, and someone else later will flush the label queue to the poster.)

This wouldn't just be for Big Important Things, but basically anything you made that day that seems at all interesting.  If it's worth emailing out, it's worth 4" x 3" of our lab.

As I was trawling the archives to gather some initial material (to seed the poster with at least the highlights of the last year), I came across Toby's old proto-shadershop interface, which I had forgotten about.  I really really would like us to work in a space where it is not possible to forget about these things.

<Screen Shot 2014-12-07 at 10.26.30 PM.png>

Any thoughts?

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