From behind me, Bret said: ‘Watch this,’ and pointed a small green laser at one of the books. The spine – the physical spine – lit up and above the bookshelf the book itself exploded onto an empty swath of wall. The entirety of its contents, laid out page by page by some hidden projector. The laser tracked by some hidden constellation of cameras. In his hand, Bret held an iPad, and as he pointed the laser at various projected pages they appeared on his device. As he slid from page to page on the iPad, the corresponding pages on the wall enlarged. It was a way to view both the macro and micro of a book – the overarching structure of the whole and the minutiae of the paragraph. The margins, it must be said, were gorgeous.布雷特在我身後說：“看這個”，然後用一個小型綠色雷射指著其中一本書。書脊——實體書脊——亮了起來，書架上方的書本身爆炸到了一大片空牆上。它的全部內容，由一些隱藏的投影機一頁一頁地展示出來。雷射由一些隱藏的攝影機群追蹤。 Bret 手裡拿著一台 iPad，當他將雷射指向各個投影頁面時，它們就出現在他的裝置上。當他在 iPad 上從一頁滑到另一頁時，牆上相應的頁面就會放大。這是一種從宏觀和微觀角度看待一本書的方式——整體的整體結構和段落的細節。必須說，邊緣非常華麗。

Traditional visual environments visualize the code. They visualize static structure. But that's not what we need to understand. We need to understand what the code is doing.Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure.”http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

Before you can manipulate anything you have to define a set of affordances. If you have no affordances you have... nothing.A lot of programming is really about manually creating affordances that can be applied to specific domains. The traditional medium for this is text, with dataflow diagrams a distant second.People often forget that this is still symbolic programming. You could replace all the keywords in a language with emojis, different photos of Seattle, or hex colour codes, but we use text because it's mnemonic in a way that more abstract representations aren't.Dataflow diagrams are good as far as they go, but it doesn't take much for a visual representation to become too complex to understand. With text you can at least take it in small chunks, and abstraction/encapsulation make it relatively easy to move between different chunk levels.

With computer interfaces, you hardly ever interact with something in an immediate way. I want a comment to appear on this site but instead I am writing this text in a white box and not where the comment would appear. All the computer interactions are mediated by these in-between steps. (An example for unmediated interaction would be cooking. What you chop is what you get

To me, the the most interesting part of Bret Victors ideas lie in the re-embodiment of disembodied interactions. The computers choreograph us anyhow, but often in a very poor and limited way – only our fingertips and our eyes move a bit. Why not make the choreography of interaction richer? Why not create a computer-aided full-body choreography of interaction?

Bret Victor is trying to: Share the magic of computers and dynamic media with everyone Help people; do engineering for a cause, for a higher purpose Build creative tools for human expression Empower people; help everyone see and understand through insightful representations and humane interfaces Provide direct manipulation tools and immediate feedback Liberate us from the constraints imposed by poor tools and stale ways of thinking Encourage active reading and informed discourse Reinvent the way we represent thought Build a career around a guiding principle

Victor points out that the Internet age was built on a non-commercial research culture that incubated the underlying technologies for decades. The personal computing and Internet industry exploited this culture, generating massive global wealth, but then failed to meaningfully contribute back. The dominant players today are "not planting seeds for a humane future". And so, we find ourselves at crossroads: now is the time do decide what the future of computing will look like. Will Victor have more success than Engelbart in winning funding to fully realise his vision? Will we curl ever deeper inward into our shiny rectangles, or are we witnessing the dawn of a new era in social, humane computing?

Operationally Dynamicland, Victor's research lab, follows the spirit of Douglas Engelbart and Xerox PARC, who decades ago invented the technologies and principles that became the foundation of the computer revolution and the information age. This first DL instance in Oakland is being realised by a small non-profit research group with a long-term orientation, something Victor is highly passionate about.

"I just have this feeling that instead of making toys for rich kids, or devising ways to make computers go 5% faster, I could somehow somehow somehow be using my skills to save lives. Or significantly improve the global quality of life. Or something big and noble and hopelessly idealistic like that."

In my view, Victor is part of a transitional tech generation, who were both a little late to experience both sides of the personal computing revolution, and a little too early to truly belong in the saturated social media culture we live in today. Victor certainly thinks about the future of technology by drawing on the thinkers of past generations for insight and inspiration. Victor is early Web, but more Xanadu at heart.

Bret’s magic bookshelf reminded me of a quote by Alan Kay. Explaining his Dynabook concept to a group of children in 1968, he said: ‘I want to be able to do all the things you can do with a book, but be dynamic.’ There was something about the playful quality of the magic bookshelf that felt like it had achieved spiritual lockstep with Kay’s goals. The bridging of the digital and physical seemed oddly and unexpectedly fresh, prescient, like a rich vein worthy of continued mining.

The next step, Bret said, was to get all of the books properly scanned and indexed. Soon enough, you’d be able to type in any search term, and the related physical volumes would glow, their collected relevant pages appearing above. But this was possible only by performing your own scans, owning your own data, placing it in an open, malleable format. A supple data source, it seemed, was the only way to hold forth these investigations.

From behind me, Bret said: ‘Watch this,’ and pointed a small green laser at one of the books. The spine – the physical spine – lit up and above the bookshelf the book itself exploded onto an empty swath of wall. The entirety of its contents, laid out page by page by some hidden projector. The laser tracked by some hidden constellation of cameras. In his hand, Bret held an iPad, and as he pointed the laser at various projected pages they appeared on his device. As he slid from page to page on the iPad, the corresponding pages on the wall enlarged. It was a way to view both the macro and micro of a book – the overarching structure of the whole and the minutiae of the paragraph. The margins, it must be said, were gorgeous.

In early August I visited Bret Victor’s Communications Design Group research laboratory in San Francisco. Against the far wall of the lab’s library stood a 10-foot wooden bookshelf. It was stuffed with manuals on the history of computers and programming and interfaces, novels and countless non-fiction books.