Thoughts on Bret Victor

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/36579366 w=400&h=225]

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Bio: Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis.

For more on Bret, see http://worrydream.com.

This talk was given at CUSEC 2012 (http://2012.cusec.net).

It’s… I wish I knew about him earlier. His work is amazing and incredibly heart-felt. I quote him:

An author can write a book. A musician can compose a song, a animator can compose a short, a painter can compose a painting. But most dynamic artists cannot realize their own creations, and this breaks my heart.

- worrydream.com

Replace “dynamic artist” with “interface designer” or “animator” and that’s basically me in a nutshell. I want to be able to make a working UI using drag-and-drop, but – ha! Impossible, obviously. I can use Balsamiq for drag-and-drop, but I won’t be able to prototype more complex or novel interactions. I can use Flash or VB to mockup something that feels just like a working interface, but to get it into a real product I (or someone else) would essentially have to scrap everything and start over with real code.

My work feels – disposable. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be, but the fact that I can’t make something real is just sad. And I’ve resigned myself to it, really.

I hope someone comes up with a way to combine UI design and UI programming. I really do.

But there’s more to it than this.

—-

When I first started this website, I just wanted a space on the Interwebs that I could call my own. Yes, there’s me on Facebook, DeviantArt, LiveJournal, Flickr… but I needed a homebase, so to speak.

I also wanted a portfolio website. Great! I thought. Kill two birds with one stone.

A while later, I opened a WordPress account and started populating it with stuff. About that time I was starting to get worried about internships, so I talked to the career services lady in career services.

“And oh, by the way,” I said, after we talked about that, “I’m starting a portfolio website. Would you have any advice for that?”

Apparently she did not, but she offered to take a look at it for me. I gave her the URL and went on my merry way.

A couple of days later my pageviews increased by a multiple of 10. She had shown it to her colleagues at work, and she sent me an email with their collective judgment. Basically:

Be more professional. Show them stuff you did as best as you can – and that’s it.

That’s great advice – if my only goal was to get hired. (It’s a good goal, though. Money is nice.) I mean, the reason I want a portfolio page is so that people can see my work and, based on that, determine if they want me in their organization. That much is true.

But  I did – and I do – want this webpage to be something more. I want it to be a projection of my identity in virtual space, and I want it to do that by showing the things I’m interested in, the things I’ve been doing, the people I find inspiring, and by displaying a visual style that uniquely describes me.

This site, as it is, does not  do any of that to my satisfaction. I have ideas and beliefs about design that, based on this site alone, you would not pick up on. For example, I believe that design is a powerful tool for influencing behaviour on a societal scale. You probably didn’t get that from reading my entry about designing a fitness app for the elderly.

This is where Bret’s video comes in. (Yes, this digression was not a digression.) It reminded me of a goal I had forgotten in favor of my job search. And while a job is important, in the end it’s merely a short term goal. In the long term, I have much bigger fish to fry.

More on that to come.