Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2022 13:31:47 -0800
From: Bret Victor
Subject: Re: Student Design Project

Hi Jessica,

What is the symbolism behind your windmill icon?

It's a reference to Don Quixote ("tilting at windmills"), along the lines of pursuing impossible dreams.

What does it mean when you say the followers of design “were taught to answer questions" and that "they could not question the questions themselves”?

Something about being trapped within the assumptions of a field or framework, taking the field or framework as a given. When I was studying design, I got the impression that the inventors of a field (the people doing work which would retroactively be categorized as initiating a field, but at the time was uncategorizable) had a very broad set of skills, concerns, and influences, whereas practitioners who joined an already-established field (and subsequently taught it) seemed to have a much narrower viewpoint and set of concerns.

If we take UI design as an example: the two names most strongly associated with inventing the graphical interface are Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay. If you look at Engelbart's 1962 manifesto, you'll see it's not directly about graphical interfaces or even technology, it's about his goals for humans and humanity, and the intrinsic capabilities of the human being. Kay's Early History of Smalltalk cites a whole host of humanists as key influences, including Montessori, Piaget, Bruner, Holt, Suzuki, Dewey, and Arnheim. Both Engelbart and Kay had real engineering backgrounds (they had built working systems themselves, with their hands) as well as other fields (e.g. Kay had a molecular biology background), and they worked in active collaboration with others with diverse backgrounds in difficult fields with high standards (e.g. mathematics, physics). Both Engelbart and Kay saw their jobs as building novel compete systems from the ground up, and they saw the role of interface as giving people access to the full power of the system, which included programming, not just choosing from menus. (That is, programming and graphical interface were inseparable.)

I was attracted to the range of ideas and arguments and imaginative possibilities surrounding these early workers. I'm using Engelbart and Kay as exemplars here, but there's a similar imagination on display in the work of, say, Ivan Sutherland, Randall Smith, Jef Raskin, Richard A Bolt, etc.

Several decades later, "UI/UX" was an established field, and when I studied the output of these later practitioners, I mostly saw... proscriptive squabbles over how to style buttons? I'm being glib, of course. I saw people who could skillfully execute effective designs within a genre, and who could hold vigorous discussion and opinions on details within that genre, but exhibited a narrowness of purpose, a narrowness of background, skills, and influences, and an enormous body of unacknowledged assumptions which I found unappealing and unhelpful for the directions I felt pulled in.

Something that I realized recently in school is that we are taught and encouraged to design for social innovation to go against the power dynamics of a capitalistic society,

It's very difficult to do such work with high standards; that is, work that has an honestly plausible path to being significant as opposed to palliative. Especially work built upon tools which are themselves products of the dynamics that you are trying to go against.

My own conviction is that a genuinely informed and wise society cannot be built upon people poking at apps on corporate-controlled screens. Building yet more apps will only exacerbate the problem. New foundations are needed, not just apps, hacks, and discourse, and new foundations are very difficult.

I talk about that a bit here.

but it really is hard not to fall into a soul-eating UI/UX job at a tech company without the right resources.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean by "the right resources", but I will say that one thing that helped me in my younger years was living cheaply. I didn't buy many things, I lived in low-rent rooms with housemates, etc. This meant that I could alternate between working a job while saving up money, and working on my own stuff independently while living off savings. These latter periods were absolutely critical; that's when all the important work happened. The employment periods were also useful for learning from other people and other contexts — even in a soul-eating job, there's a lot to learn if you seek it out — but the work itself wasn't consequential.

Designing for a Utopia and investigating for possibilistic outcomes is a heavy burden, how and where do you find the motivation for this venture of what-ifs?

You only get one life. How can you not use it for the most important purpose?

History is a great motivator, in particular, understanding the astounding human potential that has been unlocked by certain key inventions in the relatively recent past. The opportunity to do it again, to continue humanity along that path, is irresistible. I go into this here.

(You have to be careful with “Utopia”, though.)

While working on the non-profit long-term research group Dynamicland, are there any hardships you encountered?

I can't think of much that wasn't a hardship. The website puts a cheery face on it (as websites are supposed to do, which is dumb), but most of the work was done in a context of ongoing funding crisis and management neglect, the stresses of which ultimately led many people to emotional breakdowns and such. Compounded by the fact that the purpose of research is to push into the unknown, which is another source of uncertainty that's intrinsically emotionally difficult for many people.

Given the conditions we were working under, I think it's miraculous anything happened at all.

As most tech-related works aim for profit, what components are implemented to resist the commercialization of ideas?

Our strategy is to avoid productization entirely, by creating a medium that people learn to make for themselves, stewarded by new public institutions. You can read a bit more detail here.

You wrote, “The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, ‘What world was he trying to create?’ By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself.” What world are you trying to create?

Probably best described by the research agenda. A world in which people think and communicate using powerful, contextualized, evidence-backed representations.

In design school and the “real world”, there is such a heavy focus on designing for hybrid spaces and AR/VR. What are your thoughts about this direction and are you planning to do work in this field?

As I mentioned above, once something is a "field", it's already over. Those in particular are kind of "hammer looking for a nail" fields, pre-developed technologies looking for something to apply to, and their starting points are (in my opinion) already intrinsically inhumane.

Dynamicland grew the way it did because it started from "media" rather than "technology". We were concerned with the effective representation of ideas, we started making posters, murals, board games, and then saw the need to make those representations even more effective by adding computation to them. Computers were not the starting point. I touch on that story here and here.

Actual last one! You don’t have to answer this as I realize it is personal…but have you achieved your stretch goal yet?

Haha, that page of my website is a holdover from a very long time ago, and even at the time, it was kind of just a poignant joke. Rest assured that the goal has been achieved several times over, with the most recent achievement being quite sufficient for this lifetime.