Seminar on "Biomolecular design in Realtalk", Bret Victor's latest talk; Dec 24 @ 9AM PST

tl;dr: join me on Dec 24 at 9AM PST to discuss Bret's latest talk. Please watch the  talk before attending; bring your noticings, wonderings, and ideas. [GCal]

For me, Dynamicland is the most uniquely fascinating project on the future of personal computing. Like all radical ideas, it resists summary, but crudely: it's a startling vision of highly malleable computing, instantiated in the physical world so that it becomes naturally embodied and social.

It's tough to talk about Dynamicland in part because there's been no official presentation or publication about it. In fact, I believe its PI, Bret Victor, hasn't given a public talk in about eight years.

But I was delighted to see Bret give a talk on its recent progress in July, at a conference on designing molecular machines. That talk is publicly available online, though it's somewhat obscured: it's listed as a talk not by Bret, but by his collaborator Shawn Douglas. Shawn does fascinating research on DNA origami; he speaks for the first 14 minutes, teeing up the scientific context for the work Bret presents in the second half of the talk.

I saw Bret present the same talk again a couple weeks ago, and I realized it might be fun to discuss, particularly in connection with (or in contrast to?) our past few seminars on projects in malleable computing.

Since I'm already familiar with Realtalk, the most interesting thing for me in this new talk is that Bret has embedded himself (with collaborator Luke Iannini) in Shawn's biology lab. They're getting their hands dirty in the wet-lab experiments, gaining real intimacy with that serious context of use, and solving meaningful problems. I love seeing this work grounded in that way; I'm quite unhappy with my own work's lack of this kind of context.

If Dynamicland is totally new to you, here are a few more resources you might find interesting:

• From lab members:
  • Toby Schachman, “ The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland “
  • Omar Rizwan, “ Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit “
• From others:
  • Carl Tashian, “ At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer “
  • Christoph Labacher, “Götz Bachmann’s ethnographic research on Dynamicland”
  • Gian Pablo Villamil, “ A visit to Dynamicland “
  • Steve Krouse, “The ‘next big thing’ is a room”