Bret Victor

purveyor of impossible dreams

Chapter Four

This is what I'm doing with my life.

Dynamicland

Chapter Three

Toward a humane medium for seeing, understanding, and creating systems.

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

Chapter Two

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.

Blurts

Chapter One

Some choice artifacts from the first 80% of my life.

Projects

Our Choice: (2010) Infographics redefined. A multimedia edition of Al Gore's book on climate change. I designed the interactive infographics.
Apple: (2007-2010) Inventin' shit.
BART Widget: (2005) Train schedules, novel UI.
bkasm: (2004) Fancy DSP assembler.
Alesis Ion, Micron, Fusion: (2003-2005) Music machines.
Crosstalk Coding: (2001) Bus encoding to prevent crosstalk delay.

Small Things

Interactive Library: Discover, browse, play. A prototype of a site to browse and play interactive fiction. Click to visit.
Resistor Decoder: Chart beats software.
Trip Phrases: Pay attention to what people pay attention to.
Alligator Eggs: Lambda calculus for 8-year-olds.
Households How to design an interactive infographic.
Visualizing Graph Edge Weights Keep the hot path hot.
Inline Spellcheck: Knock 'em down.
Tom Oreb: Art analysis as comic.

Ancient History

“Art”

The management assumes no responsibility.

Electric

Words & Pictures

Headers
Game Jam:
Saltwater: Unfinished animation for The Saltwater Room by Owl City.
Emilia Fanart for Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love. Go play it.
Albatross
Lipograms
Adjectives
Blind Date
Home Is All The Choices On The Way
Freedom
Departure

Shirts

Flyers

Desktops

Archae- ology

Oatmeal

Other people's things

Contact