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Media for Thinking the Unthinkable on Vimeo
- The differential equations demo (19m 54s) is an incredible piece of interface design.
- It’s hard but powerful to integrate Jerome Brunner’s enactive (interactive), iconic (visual) and symbolic representations in a single screenpage. It feels like a constraint solving problem. It would be interesting to read research into the different resources that a representation can use, and which representations make the best use of which resources. For example, limited resources include space, the meaning of a colour, the meaning of brightness, the meaning of shape, the meaning of xy/z differences, the meaning of proximity, the meaning of movement…
- He talks about not just seeing the behaviour but interacting with it. Which makes you think: do the best media let you interact with the other representations to modify their values, rather than to just produce new representations (eg when he interacts by dragging the button on the final (visual) graph in the differential equations interface and it changes the number in the (symbolic) equation in a way)?
- I would like to hear more about the relationship between the work being done and the tool that you make for it. The data graphing tool he demos towards the end (31m 17s), is super cool and flexible, especially in the way it abstracts the relationships between steps that progressively draw a diagram (eg defining the arrows on the ends of the lines). But it seems likely that the capabilities of the tool follow the needs of his work. Sometimes, people build a tool that is general enough to support several projects, or even general enough for millions of people to use. How can you derive a general purpose tool from your own work?
#notebook