Tool by Bret Victor, Josh Horowitz, Luke Iannini, Toby Schachman, Paula Te, Virginia McArthur (2017 – present)
Dynamicland is a communal computer, designed for agency, not apps, where people can think like whole humans.
No normal person sees an app and thinks ‘I can make that myself.’ Or even ‘I can modify that to do what I actually need.’ Computational media in Dynamicland feels like stuff anyone can make. … A humane dynamic medium gently leads people down a path from playing, to crafting, to remixing, to programming.
Dynamicland is an authoring environment, and everyone is an author. People make what they need for themselves. They learn through immersion. The true power of the dynamic medium — programmability — is for everyone.
I’m curious if anyone here has firsthand experience with dynamicland. From what I’ve heard thirdhand, the programming experience doesn’t seem vastly different from traditional programming. The runtime environment seems vastly different though. I’m interested in more embodied forms of computation that allow you to do more physical manipulation.
I haven’t visited myself, but perhaps @akkartik has…? I believe there were at least some people in our chat room who mentioned visiting at one stage or another…
Yes I’ve been there, and there was lots that was cool about it. However, I feel like I didn’t get the full Dynamicland experience. Part of the problem was that both times I went when it was crowded. But I can’t go whenever because I believe it wasn’t always open to outsiders.
Some of the photos I’ve seen seem like a very different experience than mine. I think kids in local schools or some other organizations would have experienced something far more convivial. This is part of the problem in interfacing with atoms: all the old issues of scalability and geography pop back up.
Yeah, I didn’t have a good sense of that. From third hand, it seems to depend on the programs developed with it. Some programs allow you to leave the keyboard on the shelf and just interact with objects on the table. Other programs require more access to the keyboard which seems like it might break the illusion. In this regard Dynamicland seems similar to any other platform. It’s just that the best case for a well-designed app may be much more immersive than when you’re interacting with just the tips of your fingers.