(2019-09-18) Tashian At Dynamicland The Building Is The Computer

Carl Tashian: At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer. This computational research lab is reinventing computer programming

array of projects spread out across several work tables

enough art supplies to rival any Kindergarten

Giant posters line the walls... Bret Victor, the engineer-designer who runs the lab, loves these information-rich posters because they break us out of the tyranny of our glassy rectangular screens.

In one corner of the building, there’s a library. The books are centered around STEM but reach well into the arts and humanities

Dynamicland is a non-profit that resides somewhere between an academic research lab and a Silicon Valley startup,

inventing a new computational medium.

maps had to be invented, and the invention of the map transformed civilization. It greatly expanded our cognitive reach

Of course, every medium has limits. What is at first liberating eventually becomes a prison that constrains our expression and our range of thought. Because every medium has limits, there’s always an opportunity to invent new media that will expand our ability to understand the world around us, to communicate, and to address major problems of civilization.

We’ve extended $0.05 pencils and $0.005 paper by creating $200 digital pencils and $1,000 digital tablets. By carrying forward some of the elegance of pencil and paper into the digital realm, we cheat ourselves out of discovering entirely new approaches.

That’s what Dynamicland has been looking for: New approaches. Media that can only grow out of the substrate of computing and electronics.

iterative chicken-and-egg dilemma; a long-term push and pull between the medium and the work created with it. For the invention of the Smalltalk programming system in the 1970s at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), each 2–4 year research cycle followed the same steps:
Build applications in the language
Based on that experience, redesign the language
Build a new system based on the redesign.

Over the course of a decade, researchers went through five of these cycles before issuing the first public release of Smalltalk

The Smalltalk research team was led by computing pioneer Alan Kay.

His lifelong work is to create a dynamic computational medium — and dynamic literacy — for children.

he argues that the conditions for critical long-term research that can really benefit humanity rarely happen inside of corporations because of the market’s obsession with quarter-by-quarter financials. To make real progress, research needs to be protected from that.

In 2013, Kay began to partner with Vishal Sikka, the affable tech executive and Mr. Bean doppelgänger, to create a new lab to reinvent computing in the spirit of Xerox PARC. Sikka was committed to Kay’s vision, and as the CTO of SAP he had the resources to fund it. The lab was called The Communication Design Group (CDG)

Kay hired three principal investigators: Dan Ingalls, Vi Hart, and Bret Victor, offering them space and time in San Francisco.

Traditionally, programming languages exist within a holy trinity: The language, the tools, and the operating system. The trinity allows programmers to become masters of a general-purpose toolset that works across many languages

there is a subculture of programmers — with Victor as its natural center — who believe that programming is in a Dark Age because of this near-universal commitment to the trinity.

We need programming systems that break out of the trinity, that feel alive and fluid and that are situated closer to the domains most people care about. Spreadsheets hint at an alternative

Scratch, a popular programming system for children developed at MIT, is designed for play and creativity.

Working with Sikka and his team at SAP, CDG spent all of 2013 putting an insulating layer between themselves and SAP so that the research could happen.

The researchers believed they had at least 5–7 years of funding

The work paid off, and 2014 was a very fruitful year

The exploratory openness of the lab was hampered in the summer of 2014, just a few months after CDG’s opening party, when Sikka left SAP abruptly. Having lost their internal champion at SAP, CDG’s longer-term future was looking unclear.

Kay largely protected the researchers from this disruption. At the time, Victor’s team was creating a prototype system called Hypercard in the World, which allowed people to attach hyperlinks to physical objects.

In late summer 2014, CDG hosted a Game Jam that was a real shining moment of fast-paced collaboration and prolificacy. Friends of the lab came over and made a dozen Hypercard in the World projects

Over the next year, more exploratory prototypes were built. “I would do these weird art projects,” Schachman said. He hosted a Mirror Hacking Workshop where he invited people to create sculptures using laser-cut mirrors. At the time it seemed unrelated to the research, but upon reflection he had a big insight about collaboration and the power of eye contact, and working with physical materials, and allowing people to see what others are doing.

Meanwhile, the relationship with the corporate overlords at SAP gradually broke down, and by early 2016 it was clear that CDG needed a new home. Around the same time, Victor made it clear to his group that they needed to come together and build a single system, rather than work primarily on individual research projects. Several researchers didn’t want to go along for the ride, and left.

By May 2016, Kay was able to charm Y Combinator’s president and A-type startup whisperer Sam Altman. They created Human Advancement Research Community (HARC) inside of YC Research and absorbed the CDG researchers there. Altman generously agreed to fund HARC out of pocket while they waited for other promised funding to come through.

That arrangement lasted a little over a year. In July 2017, just a few months after HARC moved into a beautifully renovated building in old Oakland, Altman abruptly defunded the lab. It’s unclear why he pulled the plug.

a person close to Altman told me that by July his excitement had shifted from HARC to OpenAI.

Amidst the ashes, a burned-out Alan Kay left for London, and the research groups disbanded.

Bret Victor’s group, however, had one thing keeping them going: Just two weeks before they learned about HARC’s demise, the group’s new programming system — Realtalk — had taken its first baby steps.

Inspired by the potential of their new system, Victor’s research group opted to go out on their own, take over HARC’s Oakland space, and start fundraising for themselves.

three major design principles from the research that were incorporated into Realtalk:

• The medium should be communal and accessible. People should learn and collaborate through awareness
• The medium should allow people to think with their bodies
• The medium should expand people’s agency and liberate their creativity.

Realtalk grants computational value to everyday objects in the world. The building is the computer

the deeper idea is that when the system recognizes any physical object, it becomes a computational object.

A music sequencer by Te called Beats of the World lets you design rhythmic loops with felt tokens. GeoKit by Omar Rizwan is a giant interactive wall map.

I press Control-P, and a laser printer spits out a page with my program written on it.

Place this page onto any surface and you will see its output projected on top:

Realtalk projects come to life by writing one or more programs on pages, and physically arranging them on a table. Pages can easily communicate with each other, making composition and interactivity easy.

Aside from paper, there are also dots. The computer vision algorithm recognizes M&Ms, little felt tokens, even painted fingernails as dots

When you place a page on the table, the code on it is continually running. When you make changes, the feedback is immediate. There’s a feeling of dancing with code that’s hard to describe

Realtalk programs are constantly remixed and passed around. They become physical memes and are reprinted and copied and modified.

Victor’s commitment to treasuring deep ideas is his greatest strength and greatest weakness

The risk, however, is that nothing is ever considered done and therefore nothing is ever shared. Or that every share is provisional. He seems to want to be understood so deeply that no expression of his ideas is ever quite deep enough

Victor and his team have been burned out on fundraising, which requires an incredible amount of time and energy. Also, he has his own sense of when a research cycle is done, and he doesn’t want funding to dictate that

It may be what he needs, however. The funding rollercoaster has been an instrumental driver at Dynamicland. The lab has benefitted from external accountability to reign in the very personal creative research work

“I don’t know what the solution to reaching a large audience is,” he says. “Maybe it takes a hundred years.

We need more organizations like Dynamicland, occupying the space between startups and academic research labs.

Is Realtalk the future? No. In the larger arc of the research, it’s just a single iteration. It’s a suggestion: Maybe by going back to the drawing board, and redesigning things further down the stack, we can escape the Dark Age of the command line, and computational literacy itself can become more accessible and communal.

Victor’s dream is to be able to experience an entire scientific paper — or the entire global supply chain — in a computationally-driven room. To explore the data with more richness and depth than would be possible on a single screen. And on the most existential level, his hope is that the research might help to avert human extinction. If we can understand the complexity of our world more broadly, we’ll be in a better long-term position to mitigate risks that may threaten civilization. (grand challenge)

When I first visited the lab at an open house in early 2018, I thought of Children’s Television Workshop in its heyday: Countercultural, research-backed, subversive, experimental, sometimes brilliant, always underfunded.

*what are his inner motivations?

A desire to expand awareness. To be more “in the world.” To experience the full complexity of reality just as it is. To explore the creative potential of empty space. To be free of the conditioned thinking of peers. To break out of prisons of representation.*

Victor left the Bay Area last fall and is taking a sabbatical to recover from the intensity of years of fundraising and management of the lab.

He seems to be on a spiritual quest, seeking an insight that Alan Kay calls “a kerpow.” An opening into a new dimension.

This is clearly his life’s work. He often flashes a sly grin as he tells stories about Dynamicland, looking like a little boy who knows he’s gotten away with something very clever

He seems tired. CDG was his first management role. For a prolific maker, that’s a big shift that requires a lot of energy and personal growth

says he has tried to treat Dynamicland like a biological containment facility. He’s concerned that there’s been so much damage done by half-baked ideas stolen from research labs by entrepreneurs. “The thing about taking a deep idea and making a mass-produced, superficial treatment of it, is that after that point it becomes impossible to see the deep idea,” he says.