Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 19:00:17 -0700
From: Glen Chiacchieri
Subject: Re: Mirror Hacking Workshop (whiteboard comic)
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. My intuition before seeing it was to make it more digital, but the shadows, magnets, and misshapen strips of paper look great.

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 6:54 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
I plan on publishing it as a web comic, though perhaps more "digitized" than the link I sent.

I really like it as photos of a whiteboard, magnets and text-strip shadows and all!  It looks so real.  Why not keep it that way?


On May 27, 2015, at 6:02 PM, Toby Schachman wrote:

Here is some in-progress documentation of my documentation for the Mirror Hacking Workshop I taught at Gray Area last weekend.

Yesterday I used the photo printer to print 4x6's of Mokey's photos from the day. I magneted them to the whiteboard and organized them into the outline of a narrative.

<2015-05-26 18.17.56.jpg>

The photo prints with a single sphere magnet are perfect for moving around on the whiteboard. They slide really nicely.

Today I wrote and printed "fortune cookie" captions for the images. I printed at 3.5" width and cut them by hand / with the paper cutter.

<2015-05-27 17.27.00.jpg>

It would be nice if there were a more flexible way to do this on the fly. I wrote all the text and then printed it. I've been batching edits to waste less paper.

I took pictures of the comic and laid it out on a webpage to see what it would look like.


(The copy of a copy degradation of the images is kind of interesting...)

I enjoy working this way. It feels good to stand, work with my hands, organize information at a "big picture" scale. There is something to being able to move quickly from digital to physical and back, which is also what the workshop was about.

I'd appreciate any feedback on how the content and flow of the web comic could be made better.

My goals are to faithfully document the workshop, to convey the spirit of it, and to put forth an argument that technology workshops should be structured differently, to encourage others to explore workshop formats like this.

I plan on publishing it as a web comic, though perhaps more "digitized" than the link I sent.