Dynamic Medium
- thoughts prompted by Alan Kay and Bret Victor (notation)
- computing right now seems to simulate old mediums (books/movies) instead of becoming its own medium
-
Bret Victor says that dynamic medium is:
- computational (can simulate, calculate, etc...)
- responsive (responds to stimuli)
- connected (exchanges information)
- dynamic medium could be a great cognitive medium
Kay began to understand that what he wanted to create was an entirely new medium - a medium that would be fundamentally different from all the previous static media of history. This was going to be the first dynamic medium - a means of representing, communicating, and animating thoughts, dreams, and fantasies as well as words, images, and sounds.
- dynamic medium seems like an obvious substrate for cognitive medium
- allows simulating and solving things visually
- thoughts can be freely recomposed and rearranged (with better history handling in software)
- ideas can be linked together to create new ideas
- authoring - creating, especially in domain of the dynamic medium
- so the idea is to use dynamic medium to reinvent representations of thought (imagining, creating, explaining, ...) with dynamic representations
- this is related to ideas of Embodied Cognition, Epistemic Actions, spatial thinking, and the Dynamic Medium
- Dynamic Medium could be great for thinking this way - if only we had proper tools!
- would such imaginary tools be good only for transferring knowledge, or also for gaining new knowledge? - in other words would I invent calculus just by having access to a Dynamic Medium that works this way?
- most powerful interfaces so far were static - how much more can we do in the Dynamic Medium?
- generic Simulator is one idea
- what would be a Second-Order Tool Building tool for inventing "interfaces" (in the broad sense described above)?
Collection of random thoughts of how working in the dynamic medium might look like.
Szymon Kaliski © 2021
