The Utopian UI Architect : An ex-Apple interface designer’s — Bret Victor's 40-year plan to redesign not just the way we use computers, but the way we think with them
"In the introduction to his “Kill Math” project...
Victor declares that “the power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols"
"With the invention of the printing press, we invented a form of knowledge work which meant sitting at a desk, staring at little tiny rectangles and moving your hand a little bit. It used to be those tiny rectangles were papers or books and you’re moving your hand with a pen"
"Now we’re staring at computer screens and moving our hands on a keyboard, but it’s basically the same thing. We’re computer users thinking paper thoughts"
"So what would “post-paper” thoughts look like? Victor admits he has no idea. He just has a conviction about the medium that will enable them"
"The important thing isn’t thinking about computers or programming as they are today, but thinking about moving from a static medium like marks on paper to a dynamic medium with computational responsiveness infused into it, that can actually participate in the thinking process"
"To Victor, whether the UI of the future relies on interactive screens and graphics, data mapped onto tangible objects and materials, or something in between, is beside the point"
"One of the big barriers with computers today is certainly the physical interface, but this isn’t a technology problem"
"The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before"
YES!
A ui innovation doesn't just "solve" a problem, render a set of interactions, cater to people's needs or whatever or simplify but actually introduce entirely new ways of being, new ways of thinking about stuff
"The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official mathematicians could handle"
"But then once Arabic numerals came around, you could actually do arithmetic on paper, and we found that 7-year-olds can understand multiplication. It’s not that multiplication itself was difficult. It was just that the representation of numbers — the interface — was wrong"
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