(2017-10-26) Miliano Dynamicland And Design Studio

Vitorio Miliano: Dynamicland and Design Studio: In 2013, Bret Victor shared A few words on Douglas Engelbart, criticizing retrospectives of the Mother of All Demos which didn't consider Engelbart's intent. 2013-07-03-VictorAFewWordsOnDougEngelbart

In 2014, Bret Victor delivered Seeing Spaces, a talk and comic explaining the idea of a "seeing space," like a workshop or maker space, but for enabling understanding (Sense-Making) instead of building.

Also in 2014, Bret Victor delivered Words Are Obsolete: Explaining and Understanding through Dynamic Models, rolling up a bunch of examples (his own and others) of explorable explanations, reactive documents, and software tools that try to make systems more self-evident and understandable.

And then, years later, my Twitter timeline blew up with retweets from Dynamicland participants.

This is the Realtalk project coming out of Y Combinator's HARC research lab, where Bret Victor is now. Dynamicland is a workshop that supports programming through physical objects and interactions, with the entire room as the programmer's IDE.

Getting the program out of the screen and on to the table helps us learn from each other

In 2011, Will Evans published a series of articles about design studio, a collaborative design process originally from architecture, and industrial design, and not unrelated to art critique

In processes like Product Discovery, the design studio method is used to facilitate participatory design

The video and the comic for Seeing Spaces both open with photos of rooms, workshops, kitchens, craft spaces. Almost all the photos with people in them have many people in them, showing participants working simultaneously in the same physical space, with the same tools, gaining the same shared understanding.

What if seeing spaces are really supposed to be spaces for facilitating everyone seeing those things? All your colleagues, all your friends, all your stakeholders, all in the same space, able to see all the data and all the tools, gaining a shared understanding?

A seeing space could then be non-technical, like a design studio is, as long as it supports the three types of seeing. Interviews and debriefs could serve for seeing inside. Audio and video recording and replay, note-taking and analysis, could serve for seeing across time. Scenario planning could serve for seeing across possibilities