Recent Output

Here are some interesting things for you to look at.

Essays

• The Ladder of Abstraction: A systematic approach to interactive visualization.
• Learnable Programming: Designing a programming system for understanding programs.
• A Brief Rant: On the future of interaction design.
• What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change: A personal view.

Demos

• Inventing on Principle: On living for a cause.
• Stop Drawing Dead Fish: The computer as an art medium.
• Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: Direct-manipulation data graphics.
• Media for Thinking the Unthinkable: A medium for science and engineering.

Yearnings

• The Future of Programming: A history lesson.
• Seeing Spaces: A place for makers to understand what they're making.
• The Humane Representation of Thought: A trail map for the 21st century.

Talk Notes

• Notes: Drawing Dynamic Visualizations
• Notes: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
• Notes: The Future of Programming
• Notes: The Humane Representation of Thought

Things I'm Thinking About, aka “Research”

Tools and techniques for reducing abstraction and indirection.
Encouraging people to understand and create via exploration and intuition.

Dynamic Pictures

• Dynamic Pictures: Why do we make pictures by writing code? How can artists draw data graphics, visual interfaces, and other pictures that change?
• Magic Ink: A treatise on a new approach to UI design. Interaction considered harmful.
• Substroke: Sketch of a dynamic drawing language.

Explorable Explanations

• Explorable Explanations: What is active reading? How can readers ask questions, explore scenarios, and change assumptions?
• Tangle: JavaScript library for authoring reactive documents.
• Ten Brighter Ideas: Explore energy conservation scenarios.
• Scientific Communication: As sequential art.

Kill Math

• Kill Math: Why do we model the world using abstractions invented for pencil and paper? Can we solve quantitative problems without manipulating symbols?
• The Ladder of Abstraction: A systematic approach to interactive visualization.
• Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System: See everything, touch anything.
• Scrubbing Calculator: Scrub your numbers. Algebra without symbolic variables.
• Simulation as a Practical Tool: Model, simulate, visualize.