Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2015 16:03:52 -0700
From: Toby Schachman
Subject: Re: a computing system for dynamic spatial media
It's a great synopsis from my point of view. And it's great to see all our relevant projects on a timeline like that (time feels sloshy on the research gallery).

It might be tricky to convey the spirit of the project without experiencing the concrete examples, so it's good that you're including a guided video tour.

Your Hypercard-in-the-World interface with blessing, attaching, etc. is also a good resource because it connects it to Hypercard, which they will be familiar with. It's workings (attaching scripts, webpages in iframes, etc) are concrete from a computerist's perspective. But maybe sending particulars about this would spoil the kinds of ideas you're hoping to get from the meeting.

I wonder if something should be said about your thoughts on scrolling, and how scrolling enables hide-it-under-the-rug complexity. We take scrolling as a given, as the only way we can access digital information. This is especially so with smart phones, where scrolling/panning/swiping is the default gesture. So it might be useful to call it out in particular as a phenomenon imposed on us by screens and something worth rethinking.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 8:39 PM, Bret Victor wrote:
[draft]

The week after next, I've invited Yoshiki, Alex Warth, Dan Amelang, and Dan Ingalls to come over so we can talk about maybe designing a language / runtime for the room. They asked for something to read to get them up to speed.

I plan to send them a video tour of the space, followed by this pdf:

[2015-07-09-system-150.pdf]   (View in Chrome!  It crashes Preview.)

(I'm going to add links from the pdf to emails and other references, but I haven't done that yet.)

If you prefer, you can view this as a poster -- it's on the whiteboard by my desk.

I'm kind of just using the meeting as an excuse to do this write-up -- I think it's valuable to make things like this as a way of getting my head around this big and unknown and impossible project.  Most of the stuff relevant to "what should we actually build" is in the last column, "Desiderata", although I haven't really separated "feasible" from "fantasy future".  I think that's what will happen at the meeting.

This is a draft, comments welcome.  (e.g., you could leave sticky notes on the poster)

-Bret