Tools for Thought

🚧 This page is a #stub

Interface design:... developing the fundamental primitives human beings think and create with.

Michael Nielsen, by way of Shan Carter at OpenVis 2018 video.

(Paraphrasing) Bret Victor (Private) observed that there are sounds humans cannot hear (but dogs can), so we build machines to pick up ultrasonic frequencies. What tools/media would enable us to think currently unattainable thoughts?

Backlinks to this page: on notation, visual encodings, media, and tools

Overlapping ideas

Simulations
Explorable Explanations
Authoring environments for interactive documents
Visual programming / visual information retrieval

References

Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak (Private): Transformative Tools for Thought
Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg: Personal Dynamic Media / the Dynabook at Xerox PARC (PDF)

Streams

Future of Coding slack (newsletter)
Bret Victor (Private)
- Essays: http://worrydream.com/
- Videos: https://vimeo.com/worrydream
Prathyush: history of interface ideaas
Tudor Girba's work on Moldable Development (Private)
- https://gtoolkit.com/docs/moldable/
- The data has no inherent shape, the tool gives it the shape
- The tool must be moldable in order to suit the question you have for the data at the moment
Acko's Mathbox demos

Books

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (h/t Anh-thu)
Tufte's collection

Resources

Manuel Lima's Visualizing complexity
- http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm
Lewis Leahy's Traffic Explorable Explanations
Nicky Case's explorabl.es
https://meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/
- "Advancements in technology are made by getting the right expert's attention at the right time... likelihood of this happening is enhanced by being in a dense network"
  - Connect to Niall Ferguson's "Square and the Tower": virality of an idea depends less on the inherent nature of the idea, and more on the shape of the network that the idea hits

Backlinks