Dynamicland

[Spencer Salazar]

Probably everyone has seen this by now:

https://dynamicland.org/

Being built by the legendary Alan Kay and also Bret Victor who is an influential thinker in this area. 

Does anyone understand it? Im sympathetic to the concepts but there are not many practical details offered.  

Spencer

--

Spencer Salazar, PhD

Special Faculty

Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design

California Institute of the Arts

ssal...@calarts.edu | +1 831.277.4654

https://spencersalazar.com 

[jarm]

Have to confess I am a big fan of Alan Kay and Bret Victor - hence the links in the welcome message.

This project at first glance seems a little peculiar - why are they using paper instead of screens, aren't screens more dynamic? This is why I think they've gone down this path:

1) This current system is the cheapest possible 'operating system level' instantiation of Bret's long term research agenda (http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf)

2) They need a public exhibition / collaboration space in order to fundraise and get the word out, since their Y Combinator Research money is coming to an end (I think). This gives them long term viability with any luck.

3) Bret was really tired of screens and wanted to demonstrate the latent social potential of computing with even meagre means.

In terms of 'practical details' or current lack thereof, I think their motivation is to prototype designs now that can guide applications of future technologies that are more dynamically capable. And once those technologies arrive I think their goal is to be first in line to show off the potential.

[Jack Armitage]

Just wanted to add to this that the group have had an ethnographer following them for a few years.

There's a long form article here: https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/

And I just discovered this talk yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dweVuJBoK6o

The talk especially I find exceedingly interesting, as it goes into quite a lot of detail about how they apply media theory in their bootstrapping practice. Highlight quote (around 24mins):

In the Communications Design Group (CDG), prototypes work decidedly against usefulness. That's the mantra, against usefulness. To be very clear, this being against usefulness is not the being against usefulness of artists, who like to do their autonomy. It's also not the grumbling hate of engineers who hate users, stupid users who don't understand their products. The paradoxical reason for the need to avoid usefulness is the experience that usefulness can stop the overall longer process of bootstrapping. Yes, at the end of the process of bootstrapping, products need to be shipped. But before this happened, usefulness is feared, at least for many researchers in the CDG, as a trap. Once you produce useful tools, they reify. Usefulness reacts to present users, and present users are not the future users that the lab is working towards. Useful prototypes stop being pointers of something larger, more long-term than what the prototype achieves. Useful prototypes become a means to an end demand, too much attention, become solutions, and maybe even are in danger of being turned into opportunities.