Did I ever mention the time people at Apple criticized me for writing emails that were too long? As a jab at myself I responded by emailing everyone the text of War and Peace. My attempt at humor backfired when, from my office a few minutes later, I could hear groans, complaints, and fists on desks—“I can’t get my mail—it crashed.” “Mine too.” “What the hell is going on?” Oh no. I guess War and Peace was just too much for the servers or clients at that time to handle (I should have known because even creating the email required a delicately crafted AppleScript to get all the text into a message since copy and paste would crash my mail client).
Anyway, this absolutely remarkable Dynamic Medium email thread poster reminds me of that story. I think this was a bold and ambitious thing to do—exactly what research groups should be doing.
What strikes me about the image is how much space it does (and doesn’t) take up. There is simply no way to gauge the physical size of an email thread in one’s own mind.
This photo below does a good job contrasting the old tiny rectangle world (red circle) and the new world of email thread posters in physical space.
Of course, I can’t wait to see these photos of the poster printed out in an updated poster of the email thread. It makes me curious to explore visual feedback loops in the Dynamic Medium, of which printing this thread with photos of the printed thread will be an example.
I’m not particular engaged with the new Apple Watch, but I was quite thrilled when I saw this photo of one…
On Apr 29, 2015, at 5:34 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
I printed out our emails as a 20'-long poster.I had no idea what it would look like. Now that this first draft is out, we can think about how to size and arrange things, and how to mount it and make it dynamic. (Search and highlight; laser-point to messages, images, and links; connect to the research gallery, etc.)To me, there's already something powerful about simply seeing everything -- ALL of the group's email ever -- in a contained and bounded form, like a map. It's also fun to browse around.-Bret Victor, Printing Out Emails Research Institute<IMG_7565.jpeg><IMG_7562.jpeg><IMG_7568.jpeg><IMG_7561.jpeg><IMG_7569.jpeg>