[Notes from the bootstrapping jam...]

The goal: Open-ended imagining of what our experiences in lab could look like a year from now.

Participants: Nagle, Paula, Josh, May-Li, Bret, Toby, Glen

We started by independently thinking about what aspects of our work we would want to explore in our brainstorming, or what problems we might want to solve. A "domainstorm", or "metastorm", as it were. Here are our brainstorm sketches:

Nagle sketched out a menagerie of future work concepts. He imagined

  * a plush laptop lapdesk he could watch videos on, but which would let a labmate join him in his watching

  * Traylo: Trello For Trays™ – use physical cards to track progress on parts of a project – everyone has their own tray, but card movements can be synchronized between collaborators

  * a coaster printer, to automatically produce printed foam-core cards like Glen's video coasters

Paula:

Josh:

May-Li:

Bret:

Toby imagined what making his "object identification & tracking" whiteboard could look like a year from now. He wants to be able to pull in images (from the web and previous projects), text, physical objects, etc., and to organize them together. He is interested in moving between informal and more polished modes of presentation: when can you just write with a whiteboard marker, and when should you print a typed caption?

Glen:

After going around and showing off the stormings of our brains, we identified themes:

  * Group communication: What will dynamic@ become? How do we share our progress with one another and solicit feedback? And how does passive transfer occur?

  * Documentation: How do we record processes and events for future reference?

  * Coordination: Scheduling, project management, etc.

  * Programming: Creating/modifying/examining systems with dynamic behaviors.

  * "Spatializing": A hacked-together term for doing the kind of authoring we do when we make posters.

  * Sketching: Fluidly exploring ideas through images.

Another axis of variation was proposed:
  * We have present activities which must be carried in some form into our future system (hopefully in improved versions).

  * We imagine future activities which might become possible in our future system.

And later in conversation, another distinction was made between:

  * Tools we might build to facilitate communication / collaboration / "human" activities, and

  * Tools we might build to actually make the stuff we're making (dynamic representations).

(I might call these tools for "epistemic" and "pragmatic" action, respectively, but that might not be quite right.)

Most of our conversation ended up being about communication and documentation. We didn't take notes, and I won't try to recapitulate the whole conversation. I will just riff off of the sketches which a few participants helpfully prepared.

Currently, when someone finishes a prototype, they will often send it out to dynamic@ as a way to document their work, share it with the group, and solicit feedback. We imagined ways this could work in a more thoroughly dynamic lab. Could the appearance of new work be broadcast from where it lived, rather than through a mailing list? Could comments and discussion occur right on the artifact itself?

We spent some time puzzling over the question of why we didn't do this now, with post-it notes and such...

  * Maybe post-it notes are too transient, and we prefer discussion to occur somewhere where it can be archived.

  * Maybe it is too hard to stay informed as to where the latest post-it notes are being posted (or the latest projects are being put up).

  * Maybe there's not enough space on/near our artifacts to have full discussions, or using physical tokens for conversation is awkward.

  * Maybe we just don't have a culture of having back-and-forth conversations on physical objects, or we feel uncomfortable violating "other people's space".

It seems like the right tools in our Room OS could overcome these obstacles.

Here are some sketches on this theme:

Toby fleshed out his vision of "poster" authoring and distribution. This included the concept of a "ritual" to mark that a poster was done and ready for reading, analogous to a git commit. Some folk liked the idea that this "ritual" could include shooting a short video of the author showing the poster to someone else, to help guide later viewers in their understanding of the work. Here's Toby's sketch:

All of the above was about asynchronous communication. We spent a few moments toward the end of the jam talking about synchronous or semi-synchronous communication. How should we communicate as a group in real-time? How should we get each other's attention to ask questions without breaking each other's concentration? Would it be useful to record and archive face-to-face conversations?

Other than a short foray into "programming" topics, we didn't get beyond talking about "communication" – just a piece of the future-lab puzzle. There's a lot more to jam about! Let's jam.

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 6:25 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

On Feb 12, 2016, at 4:23 PM, Virginia McArthur wrote:

Hello Team,

 

I updated the calendar today with our two Jams for next week along with moving the team lunches to Tuesday starting on the 23^rd. 

 

Bootstrapping Jam: Monday the 15^th

Imagining life without laptops – building blocks for use cases to help define the system we need to create.

 

Budget Jam: Friday the 19^th

Group collaboration to list out all possible expenses for the coming year.

 

The group discussed today to move the Monday standing lunch to Tuesday to allow for long weekends, holidays or Monday working from home.

 

Other discussions of note:

1. Interactive and Telepresent white board with LA – Nagel and Paula to own with Alex

2. We will be breaking down research into ownership of review – each group will do a 10 minute presentation in 2 weeks.

3. Glen and Paula will plan a Field Trip for us this month

4. We need an Imagination Jam follow-up to technically think about how would we build these concepts; what are the system needs to pull them off?

 

 

 

 

Virginia Ellen McArthur

Executive Mom/Chief Facilitator

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