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.

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.

Talks

• The Future of Programming: A history lesson.
• Seeing Spaces: A place for makers to understand what they're making.

Talk Notes

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

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.