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[Applause] so um unlike the previous session I don't have any prizes to give out I'm just going to tell you how to live your
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life this talk is actually about a way of living your life that most people don't talk about as you approach your career you'll hear a lot about following
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your passion or doing something you love I'm gonna talk about something kind of different I'm going to talk about following a principle finding a guiding principle for your work something you
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believe is important and necessary and right and using that to guide what you do the three parts of this talk I'm first going to talk about the principle that guides a lot of my work and try to
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give you a taste of what comes out of that and I'm gonna talk about some other people that have lived this way with the principle are what they believe in but these are all just examples to help you
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think about what you believe in and how you want to live your life so to begin with me ideas are very important to me I think that bringing ideas into the world
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is one of the most important things that people do and I think that great ideas in the form of great art stories inventions scientific theories these
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these things take on lives of their own which give meaning to our lives as people so I think a lot about how people create ideas and how ideas grow in a particular what sorts of tools create a
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healthy environment for ideas grow now I've spent a lot of time over the years making creative tools using creative tools thinking about this a lot and here's something I've come to believe
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creators needed an immediate connection to with are creating so that's my principle creators need an immediate connection to a thick rate and what I mean by that is when you're making
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something if you make a change or you make a decision you need to see the effect of that immediately there can't be a delay and there can't anything anything hidden readers have to people see what they're doing so now I'm
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going to show you a series of cases where I noticed that that principle is violated and I'll show you what I did about that and then I'm going to talk about the larger the larger context which I do this work so to begin with
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let's think about coding here's how coding works you type a bunch of code into a text editor kind of imagining in your head what each line of code is going to do and then you compile and run
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and something comes out so in this case that's just JavaScript drawing to a canvas and it draws this little scene with the tree but if there's anything wrong with the scene or if I want to
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make changes if I have further ideas I have to go back to the code and I edit the code compile and run see what it looks like anything wrong I go back to the code most of my time is spent
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working in the code working a text editor blindly without an immediate connection to this thing which is what I'm actually trying to make so I feel this goes against this principle I have
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that creators need an immediate connection they're making so I try to come up with a coding environment I thought might be more in line with this principle hat so what I have here is
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I've got this picture on the side and the code on the side and if this part draws the sky and this draws the mountains it draws the tree and when I
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make any change the code the picture changes immediately so the code in the picture are always in sync there's no compile and run I just change things in the code and I see things
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change in the picture and now that we have this immediate connection between the code in the picture we can start thinking about ways of changing the code of than typing so for example this number here is the full length of the
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branches if I want to control that number I just point my mouse to it hold down the control key and I can dial it up and down so I can see what it looks like for big bridges or small branches and I can
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converge on what feels right to me artistically and this works ready number the code I just point to it dial it up and down and some of these numbers here I know what they do but still kind of surprising to see him do
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it and other ones are just completely surprising so down here I've got um I've got this for loop or I'm counting to 16
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I'm putting 16 little pink blossoms on every branch and I can turn that down for Less blossom returns up for more but look at what I'm doing here I'm just kind of moving that number up and down
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around 20 or so and it has this really interesting shimmering effect it kind of looks like the the wind is blowing through the tree and the first time I saw this I immediately started thinking about how I could use this effect for an
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animation how would I ever have discovered that if I had to compile and run between every change so much of art so much of creation is discovery and you can't discover anything if you can't see
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what you're doing so I've shown you adjusting the code let's add some code so I'd like to put a Sun up here in the sky so I go to the end of the draw sky function and I want to fill a circle so
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I start typing context fill circle and as soon as I start typing I get this autocomplete list of the different fill methods so those are the different things like a type there fill circle fill rect fill text and as I move up and
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down this autocomplete list I immediately see which each of them is doing so I don't have to imagine what it would do from the method name I don't have to look at the documentation I just
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see it see it immediately so I want the circle and I'm going to adjust the x-coordinate and the y-coordinate change the radius of it and that looks about
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right probably should be yellow so I'm going to set the fill style context fill style same autocomplete as before choose fill style give me white by default and
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I can change that color code the same way I change any number went to it hit the control key and you got color pellet so I could choose a nice yellow for my my son
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although the white was kind of interesting I thought time didn't expect that but with white it now looks like the moon instead right hey look it's night time so having this immediate connection
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allows ideas to surface to develop in ways that would be impossible before but there's still a problem here I think
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which is I've got this picture and I've got this code over here and I have to maintain the mapping between the two in my head so I've got all these lines of code and just looking at this line I don't immediately know what it does so
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here's what I can do I can hold down the option key my cursor changes to a magnifying glass and now as I roll over each line of code its highlighting the picture of what's being drawn in that
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line so if I want to know what's going on in this function I just kind of roll down the function and see what let's see what highlights so here I've got two
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calls to draw a mountain I don't know which is which that's that mountain that's that one and this has to work the other way to that if I see part of the picture I need to know what code was responsible for drawing it so I do the same thing I hold
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down the option key and now as I move over each pixel of the picture you'll see on the right it's jumping to the line of code that drew that pixel so that drew the sky and that drew the
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tree that drew the blossom so this is really important for maintaining that mapping but it's also really useful just for navigating around so you know I want to make the or make the Sun a little bit bigger so I jump there like it's a
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little bigger don't bring up the tree a little bit so I jump there break up the tree a little bit don't bring up an ounce a little bit so I jump there bring up the mountains a little bit and I can make these changes as quickly as I think
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of them and that is so important to the creative process to be able to try ideas as you think of them if there's any delay in that feedback loop between
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thinking of something and seeing it and building on it then there's this whole world of ideas which which will just never be these are
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thoughts that we can't think ideas are very important to me and the thing about ideas is that ideas start small ideas start out tiny and weak and
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fragile in order to develop and mature ideas need an environment where the Creator can nurture them you kind of take care of them feed them and shape their growth and to me that's what this principle of media connection is all
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about and because ideas are so precious to me when I see this principle violated what I see ideas stillborn or stunted because the Creator can see what they're
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doing I feel that's wrong and not wrong in the sense of violating some UI guideline or going against some best practice but wrong in a deeper sense than that and I'll come back to this but
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I want to show you another example of following this principle so in this code here there's no state there's no person state so there's no time there's no interactivity and I was thinking about
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how would we handle those aspects of coding in a way that's in line with this principle I have creators need an immediate connection so what I have here is a little platformer game so here's my
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little guy can run around taking jump you can die and the code friend is over here so this code makes them run around this makes them Chum just makes them collide with
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things and down here I've got some code for this little turtle and the turtles not doing much right now because I haven't finished writing his code so I'm just going to do that right now say on
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each tick his exposition plus equals his Direction times the time interval one sixtieth of a second time some speed which no no it could be fast could be
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slow it's negative he walks backwards and these are all ideas I can use for other enemies but I think turtles are supposed to be slow so that's a good speed for a turtle and then up here I've
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got some code that says when my guy collides with the turtle you get some Y velocity so he bounces into the air and the turtle gets stomped so that looks like that and make sure to get some
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effort of it the problem is I don't want the player to be able to get up here yet I want the player to bounce off the turtle and go through this little passageway down here and I'll have to go
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around and you know solve puzzles and whatnot to come back and get the star so the turtle is too bouncy right now now of course I can just turn that down in the code and now I can try it but now
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it's not bouncing enough and so well it's nice that I can have adjust the code while it's running Steff having to stop and recompile and find my place again I can't immediately see what I need to see which is whether or not he can make
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that jump so here's what I'm gonna do I'm going to bounce off the turtle and pause the game so I paused the game and now there's the slider up here which
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lets me rewind through time and now I can rewind to back before I made the jump and change the code to make them less bouncy and now when I move it forward it's going to simulate forward using the same impact controls
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the same keyboard commands that record us before but the new code this is not
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good enough I need to be able to see changes immediately I need to be able to see immediately whether or not my bounciness is correct
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none of this stuff and if you have a process of time and you want to see changes immediately you have to map time to space so here's what I'm gonna do good bounce off my turtle pause the game
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and now hit this button here which shows my guys trail so now I can see where he's been and when I rewind this trail
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in front of him is where he's going to be this is his future and when I changed the code I change his future look and find exactly the value I need so when I
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hit play he slips right in there so creators need to be able to see what they're doing if you're designing something embedded in time you need to be able to control time you need to be able to see across time
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otherwise you're designing blind as I was playing with this I know it's fun to play with gravity so I can make revenue a little negative and he starts to float up in the air and I can kind of play
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with that and try to get them to try to stay there and you could probably make an entire game around just just mechanic hair it's gravity manipulation in fact I bet I could
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fiddle with any part of this code and come up with an idea for a game even if I just if I just comment out the first statement in the code now Mike I can't move left you can only move right which
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sounds kind of silly but Terry Cavanagh actually made a beautiful game around that concept called don't look back terry cavanagh he made another really wonderful game which you might have seen called V billed as letter V six times
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and the way that game works is that you can't jump instead you can only flip upside down and you fall up instead of falling down so it kind of works like this that you'd foam on the ceiling or
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you can walk around on the ground and so you'd have these levels which kind of look like this and you'd kind of walk around and you have to learn how to navigate terrain like this and so if you
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had like something like that you would be able to jump over he'd have to like flip over and flip over and you got an amazing amount of gameplay about out of this concept so again being able to try
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ideas as you think of them this example in the last moment the tree these are both very visual programs we're able to see our changes just by seeing how the picture changes so I was thinking about how we could do more
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abstract coding that's more in line with this principle how can we write a generic algorithm in such a way that we can see what we're doing so that's an example let's take a look at binary search super quick refresher on how
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binary search works you have an array of values that are in order and you have a key which is the value that you're trying to locate within the array and you keep track of two variables which are the lower and upper bounds of where you think that value could possibly be
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right now it could be anywhere and you look right in the middle of that range what you find is too small then he has to be after that look in the middle the range what you find is too big the key has to be before that and you kind of
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keep subdividing your range until you narrow in on value you're looking for and in code binary search looks like this and from my perspective you can't
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see anything here you can't see anything I see the word array but I don't actually see an array and so in order to write code like this you have to imagine an array in your head and you essentially have to play computer you
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have to simulate in your head what each line of code would do on a computer and to a large extent the people that we consider be skilled software engineers are just those people that are really good at playing computer but if we're
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writing our code on a computer why are we simulating what a computer would do in our head why isn't the computer doesn't do it and show us so let's write
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binary search function binary search takes a key and an array and then over here on this side it's saying okay it takes key in an array such as what give me an example need
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something to work with here so first since my array might be a b c d e f and let's say for instance we're looking for the d so now let's start
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coding the lower balance starts out at 0 over here says lo equals 0 nothing amazing there upper bound starts out at the end of the array so high equals array Lanes
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minus 1 and over here it says high equals 5 so I have my Abstract formula and the code over here it's give me the concrete value corresponding to these
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example arguments so I don't have to maintain this picture in my head it's just showing it to me so now I need the the index in the middle of the array so I'm gonna take the average of those two
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emitted equals low plus high over 2 and well that's obviously not right 2.5 is not a valid array X so I guess I need to round this off so I'm going to add the
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floor function and it round it down to 2 and I caught that book literally the second I typed it instead of writing the entire function in 20 unit tests so now I get the value out of the array and
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then I need to subdivide my range which so there's an if statement which I'll just paste in here so in this case the the value I found is less than the key so it's taking this first branch of the if statements this
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is adjusting the lower bound of course the key was smaller then it would take this French at the if statement and adjust the upper bound or if the key was C then we would have just happened to
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find it on the first shot and we'd return the index so this is the first iteration of this algorithm and now what we need to do is loop we've subdivided the array we need to keep
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subdividing until we narrow in on what we're looking for so each a loop I will just loop while one do all this and now what we have are
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three columns corresponding to three iterations of this loop so this first column here is exactly what you saw before low and high span the entire array we found a C it was too low so we have just
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our lower bound loop up to here second iteration bouncer tighter we found an e at just the upper bound third iteration loop up here low and higher the same we've narrowed it down to a single
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candidate is indeed the key we're looking for andrey returned its index so there's nothing hidden here you see exactly what the algorithm is doing at every point and I can go up to here try
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different keys so I can see how the algorithm behaves for these different input arguments and by looking across this data I can develop an intuition for how this algorithm works
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so I'm trying different keys here and say I tried looking for a G and this looks a little different it's not actually returning and the reason for
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this is I'm looking for a key which is not actually in the array and the only way of breaking out of this loop is by finding the key so it's kind of stuck here looping forever so we can take a
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look at this and see what went wrong worst algorithm going off the rails these first few iterations look fine but this this iteration looks weird because lo is greater than hi where our range is
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completely collapsed so if we get to this point then we know the key can't be found so I see this faulty condition error I say oh that's not right lo has to be less than or equal to high okay well I'll just put that over as the
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condition of my well statement lo less than or equal to high and then that would break out of the loop and I would return some Sentinel to say that could be found so here we have three iterations the loop
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couldn't be found we return the non valid value so that's what it might be like to write an algorithm without a blindfold on so I've got this principle again that creators need to be able to see what
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they're doing if they need this media connection what they're making and I've tried to show this principle through three coding examples but that's just because this is a software engineering conference I thought I was supposed to talk about programming but to me this
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principle has nothing to do with programming in particular it has to do with any type of creation so I'd like to show you a couple more demos just to show you the breadth of what I have in
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mind here so to begin with let's take a look at a different branch of engineering so here I have an electronic circuit that I drew I'm not quite done
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drawing it so let me finish up there and now we have a working circuit I mean I assume it's a working circuit I don't actually see anything working here so
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this is exactly the same as writing code that we work in the static representation but what we actually care about is the data the values of the variable so we can't see that here now in a circuit the variables are the
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voltages on these different wires so each of these wires has a voltage that's changing over time and we have to be able to see that now if I was building the circuit on a lab bench building it physically I could at least take an
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oscilloscope and kind of poke around and see what's going on the different wires what's going on here or here so at the very least I should be able to do that so what I have here is a plot of the
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voltage on this wire over time we can see it's high it's low high and low so this is clearly oscillating if I built this physically also I would actually be able to see the circuit doing something
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so in this case I've got these two LEDs up here these are LEDs the lights presumably they're there for a reason I can hit play and watch it simulate out in real time so now you can see what the
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circuit is doing in order to design a circuit like this you have to understand the voltage on every wire you have to understand how all the voltages are changing throughout the entire circuit and just like coding
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either environment shows that to you or you simulate it in your head and I have better things to do with my head than simulate what electrons are doing so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna spread these out a little bit so the same circuit
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just spread out a little bit and I'm going to add the voltage at every node so now you can see every voltage throughout the circuit and I can even hit play and watch it all kind of
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simulate out in real time although what I prefer to do is just move my mouse over it and I can kind of look in areas that are interesting to me and see what the values are I can compare any two
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nodes so if you look at say the node over here while I mouse over this one you see the shadow of the one I'm messing over is overlaid on that the shadow of the one I'm asking over is actually overlaid on all of them and so
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I can compare any two nodes just by mousing over one of them and looking at the other one and again I can immediately see results of my changes so I've got the 70k resistor here I want to
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change its value I just click and drag it and now I see the waveforms changing immediately and you'll notice that when I click and drag it leaves behind the shadow of the waveform before I started
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dragging so I can compare I can immediately see the results of my changes to golden rules of information design show the data show comparisons that's all I'm doing here but even this
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isn't quite good enough what we're seeing here are the voltages but in electronics there's actually two data types there's voltage and there's current and we're not saying is the current flowing through each of these components in order to design a circuit
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you need to understand both the voltage and the current you need to understand the interplay between the two that's what analog design is so what I'm going to do is spread these out a little bit more and now I'm going to replace
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each of these components with a plot of current going through it overtime so each of these blue boxes represents a component and you can see which component it is because as a little badge in the corner a little icon but
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now you can see everything that's going on in circuit you see how the current changes you can see how voltage and the current changes there's nothing hidden there's nothing to simulate in your head
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so what we have here is a different way of representing the circuit just in general you could draw any circuit with these blocks but instead of being made out of little squiggly symbols it's made
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out of data and I think it's important to ask why do we have these squiggly symbols in the first place why do they exist they exist because they're easy to draw with pencil on paper this is not
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paper so when you have a new medium you have to rethink these things you have to think how can this new medium allow us more media connection to what we're making how can this new medium allow us to work in such a way we can see what we're doing it's really the same
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situation with programming our current conception of what a computer program is a list of textual definitions that you hand to a compiler that's derived straight from Fortran and Algol late 50s those languages were designed for punch
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cards so you would type their program onto a stack of cards and hand it to the computer operator it's the guy in the bottom picture and you would come back later so there was no such thing as interactivity back then and that
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assumption is baked into our current notions of what programming is C was designed for teletypes so that's Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie up there where she made C and there are no video
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displays in this picture Ritchie is basically typing on a fancy typewriter that types back to them and anytime you use a console or terminal window you're emulating a teletype and even today
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people still think of a Ruppel or an interactive top level as being interactive programming because that's the best that you could do on a teletype so I have one more demo I'll show because I want to emphasize that this
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principal media connection it's not even about engineering it's about any type of creation so I want to move to a different field entirely so let's think about animation so I've got
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this painting here with the tree and leaf on it and I want to make a little video with the leaf kind of drifting down in the tree and the normal way of doing this in a conventional animation
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package like flash is through keyframes so you basically say where you want the beef to be at different points of time and then you hit play and see what it looks like so I'm gonna say okay at
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frame 20 I'm gonna create a keyframe and the leaf should be there at frame 43 to keyframe and leave me there and I am just totally guessing here I cannot see
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the motion I cannot feel the timing I'm just throwing things in time and space so I've got this leaf at different points in time I'm gonna add a tween which tells flash to connect the dots and then I'm going
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to hit play and see what it looks like and it looks ridiculous it looks like billiard balls bouncing back and forth and the thing is I kind of know what I want right it's a leaf I want Leafs
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drifting down from a tree and I can even kind of perform that see with my hand leaf drifting down from a tree the flash doesn't know how to listen to my hand but maybe there's a new medium that
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doesn't know something about listening to my hand so what I'm going to show you here is a little app I made for performing animation and we're not really set up to do live demo off the iPad so I'm just
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going to play you a video of me making a video the way the scenes gonna play out is the lease is gonna kind of drift down for the tree and it seems gonna pan over and the rapids gonna do something and um two
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things one this is gonna move pretty quickly and second I'm gonna be using both hands at almost all times so I've got these different layers the background mid-round the foreground I'm
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choosing which letter to move using a left thumb I'm gonna move my leaf to position move my bunny offstage and start time rolling and I'm going to
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perform the leaf drifting down from the tree run it back check out how that looked the motion looks pretty good but the leaf kind of needs to rock back and forth so I'm
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gonna pull out a rotation controller run it back find where the lease is about to break off and record the rotation and I had a little flip there just because it felt right in the moment it wasn't even
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planned stop because I want to pan over so I want to drag a whole bunch of layers at once I grab all the layers into the list I turn down the sensitivity of the background layers so they'll move slower for a kind of parallax effect I only want to move horizontally so I pull out a horizontal
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tracker and check out how it looks I don't quite like the parallax so I adjusted savea's a little bit try out again I like that better so I get ready
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to go I run it back to the beginning so I can kind of get back into the rhythm for the peace relief hits I wait a beat and I start panning and I don't know how
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many frames I waited I don't know how long it was I went when it felt right so I pan over to this winter scene and kind of slowed down stop and then I run it back because I'm gonna do something
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bunny throw away this tools comes I'm done with them and wait until I think my bunny should move and he hops away and I've got a few different poses from a
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bunny so I pull those out and then I find the point where the bunny is about to take off the ground which is right there I switches pose and I kind of toggle between the poses as he hops away and then I run it back because
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I want to check out how it looked and I'm just going to bring that up full screen for you this is the piece you so I made that in two minutes performing with my hands like a musical instrument
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very immediate connection between me and what I was trying to make one of the inspirations for this tool was an animation that I tried to make several years ago not that one but it
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also began with the Leafs drifting down from a tree and I spent all day in flash trying to keyframe that leaf could do it and so that was the end of that you know
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I I still have my storyboards sometimes I play the music I wrote for the piece but the piece itself is locked in my head and so I always think about the millions of pieces are locked in
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billions of heads and not just animation and not just art but all kinds of ideas all kinds of ideas including critically important ideas world-changing
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inventions life-saving scientific discoveries these are all ideas that must be grown and without an environment in which they can grow or their creator can nurture them with this immediate
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connection many of these ideas will not emerge or Thole emerge stunted so I have this principle that graders need an immediate connection and all those demos
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that I just showed you simply came from me looking around noticing places where that principle was violated and then trying to fix that that's really all I did I just followed this guiding
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principle and it guided me what I had to do but I haven't said much about the most important part of the story which is why why I have this principle why I do this
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when I see a violation of this principle I don't think of that as an opportunity when I see creators constrained by their tools their ideas compromised I don't
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say oklet an opportunity to make a product an opportunity to start a business or an opportunity to do research or contribute to a field I'm not excited by finding a problem to solve I'm not in this for the toy of
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making things ideas are very precious to me and when I see ideas dying it hurts I see a tragedy to me it feels like a
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moral wrong it feels like an injustice and if I think there's anything I can do about it I feel it's my responsibility to do so not opportunity but responsibility now this is just my thing
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I'm not asking you to believe in this the way that I do my point here is that these words that I'm using injustice responsibility moral wrong these aren't
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the words we normally hear in technical field we do hear these words in association with social causes so things like censorship gender discrimination
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environmental destruction we all recognize these things as moral wrongs most of us wouldn't witness a civil rights violation think oh good an opportunity I hope not
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instead we've been very fortunate to have had people throughout history who recognized these social wrongs and saw it as the responsibility to address them and so there's this activist lifestyle
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where a person dedicates themselves to fighting for a cause that they believe in and the purpose of this talk is to tell you that this activist lifestyle is
00:37:46
not just for social activism as a technologist you can recognize the wrong in the world you can have a vision for what a better world could be and you can dedicate yourself to fighting for principled
00:37:59
social activists typically fight by organizing but you can fight by inventing so now I'd like to tell you about a few other people who have lived
00:38:10
this way starting with Larry Tesler Larry has done a lot of wonderful things in his life but the work I'm gonna tell you about he did in the mid 70s at Xerox PARC and at the time it really wasn't a
00:38:25
such thing as personal computers the notion of person computing was very young and Larry and his colleagues at Parc felt that I had transformative potential that personal computing could change how people thought and lived and
00:38:39
I think all of us in this room would agree that they turned out to be right about that but at the time software interfaces were designed around modes so in a text editor for instance you
00:38:51
couldn't just type and have words appear on the screen like on typewriter you would be in command mode if you wanted to insert text you'd have to press I to go into insert mode an escape back out to command mode or maybe you hit a to go into a pendant to move text around you
00:39:05
hit M to go in a move mode and they'd have to select them you being a mode to select and move things around and Larry would watch people using the computer let me actually pioneered the concept of
00:39:17
software user studies another thing that he did but he would watch people using the software and he found that many people even after training and weeks of use many people were not becoming comfortable with the computer and he
00:39:31
believed that it was these modes that were to blame him that the the complexity of modes was a kind of barrier that many people couldn't get across and so this kind of represented a
00:39:43
threat to this dream of what personal computing be so Larry made it his personal mission to eliminate modes from software and he formed a principle no person should be trapped in a mode his
00:39:58
slogan that he would go around saying was don't mode me in and he had it printed on a t-shirt and this principle in formed everything that he did he he thought about it with all the work that you did and eventually he came up with a
00:40:11
text editor called gypsy which essentially introduced text editing as we know today there was an insertion point and when you typed words appeared on the screen to select text he invented
00:40:24
Moses election with click-and-drag so you just click and drag over the text you want to select like he's using a highlighter one of the first uses is drag to move text around he invented these commands that he called cut copy
00:40:36
paste where you select and cut later on you paste in whenever you're ready you've never trapped in a mode after switching between modes when you hit the W key on the keyboard you could W on the screen always and he would watch people
00:40:50
using his software and he found that someone who had never seen a computer before which was most people back then could be up and running like half-hour so this was clearly a transformative change in enabling people to connect
00:41:03
with computers and his ideas about mote lessness spread to the rest of the desktop interface which was then being invented a park at the same time and today they're so ingrained in the computing experience that we kind of
00:41:16
take them for granted now I said that Larry made illumination of modes his personal mission that's actually his words and if you think he's exaggerating
00:41:29
here's Larry's license plate for the last 30 years [Music] nowadays of course Larry has a website at know modes comm and he is on Twitter
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snow modes and so like I said Larry has done a lot of amazing work in his career but his self-identity is clearly associated with this cause and so I'd
00:41:57
like to ask what what exactly did Larry do like how would we best describe what Larry did a typical biography might say
00:42:09
Larry Tesler invented cut copy paste which is true but I think that's really misleading because this invention was very different than say Thomas Edison
00:42:21
inventing the phonograph Edison basically just stumbled over the technology for audio recording and he built it out as a novelty and yeah he came up with like a list of possible applications for the technology but he
00:42:33
didn't have any cultural intent whereas what Larry did was entirely a reaction to a particular cultural context so another thing that you might hear is that Larry Tesler solved the problem of
00:42:45
modeless text manipulation solve the problem and you know obviously that's true you worked on this problem for a long time eventually solved it but I think that's really misleading too
00:42:56
because this problem that he solved only existed in his own head nobody else saw this as a problem for everybody else modes were just how computers worked
00:43:10
it wasn't anything wrong with them any more than we think there's something wrong with having two arms it's just that was a fact of life so the first thing that Larry did was that he recognized a wrong that had been
00:43:23
unacknowledged in the culture and the thing is that's how many great social changes began as well so 150 years ago Elizabeth Cady Stanton had to stand up
00:43:35
and say women should vote in everybody else sadly that's crazy what are you talking about today we recognize gender discrimination is wrong back then it was part of society losing
00:43:47
she had to recognize it and she had to fight it and to me that's a much closer model to what Larry did than the Thomas Edison model of inventing a bunch of random technologies werke patented now
00:44:01
to be clear I'm not making the judgments about the relative importance or impact of these two people I'm just talking about their motivations and their approach both of them recognize a cultural wrong they envisioned a world
00:44:13
without that wrong and they dedicated himself to fighting for a principle she fought by organizing he fought by inventing and many other seminal figures in computing had similar motivations
00:44:27
so certainly Doug Engelbart Doug Engelbart's basically invented interactive computing the concept of putting information on a screen navigating through it looking at
00:44:40
information in different ways pointing to things and manipulating them he came up with all this at a time when real time interaction with a computer was just almost unheard of today he's best known as the inventor of the mouse but what he really invented was this
00:44:52
entirely new way of working with knowledge his explicit goal from the beginning was to enable mankind to solve the world's urgent problems and his
00:45:03
vision he had this vision of what he called knowledge workers using complex powerful information tools to harness their collective intelligence and he only got into computers because he had a hunch that these newfangled computer
00:45:15
things could help him realize that vision everything that he did was almost single mindedly driven by pursuing this vision here's Alan Kay Alan Kay ran the
00:45:28
lab at dark spark where we got the desktop interface so things like windows and icons command menus he also invented object-oriented programming lots of other things his goal and I quote was to
00:45:42
amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it isn't that great his approach was through children he believed that if children became
00:45:55
fluent and thinking in the medium of the computer meaning if it programming was a form of basic literacy like reading and writing then they become adults with new forms of critical thought new ways of understanding the world and we'd have this more
00:46:08
enlightened society similar to the similar to the the difference that literacy brought to society and everything they did everything he invented came out of pursuing this this
00:46:21
vision this goal with children and following principles that he adopted from PJ and Montessori Jerome Bruner these people who had studied how
00:46:32
children think and the figure probably most widely associated with software activism is Richard Stallman Stoll men started the canoe project which today makes up a big chunk of any Linux system
00:46:46
he also started the free software foundation wrote GCC the GPL many many other things his principle is that software must be free as in freedom and he has very precise meaning associated
00:46:58
with that statement he's always been very clear that software freedoms and that of moral right and wrong and he's taken a particularly uncompromising approach in his own life to that all of
00:47:10
these tremendously influential people dedicated their lives to fighting for a particular ideal with a very clear sense of right and wrong often really fighting against an authority or a mainstream
00:47:23
that did not recognize they're wrong as being wrong and today the world is still very far from any of their ideals so they still see a world in crisis and they keep fighting they're always
00:47:34
fighting now I'm not saying that you have to live this way I'm not saying that you should live this way what I'm saying is that you can that this lifestyle is an option
00:47:51
that's available to you and it's not when they're going to hear about much your career counselors not gonna come back to you and say you should start a personal crusade in a social field they might but not in technology instead the
00:48:04
world will try to make you define yourself by a skill that's why you have a major in college that's why you have a job title you are a software engineer and you'll probably specialize to be a
00:48:17
database engineer or front-end engineer you'll be given front-ends and asked to engineer them and that can be worthwhile and valuable and if you want to spend your life pursuing excellence in
00:48:29
practicing a skill you can do that that is the path of the craftsman that is the most common path the only other path you really hear about much is a path of the problem-solver so I see entrepreneurship and academic
00:48:42
research is kind of two sites that coin there is a field there's a set of problems in that field or meets in the market you go in you choose one you work it you make your contribution there maybe later on you
00:48:54
choose another problem you work it make a contribution there again that can be worthwhile valuable and if that's what you want to do then you can take that path but I don't see Larry Tesler on
00:49:06
either of those paths I wouldn't say that he was contributing to the field of user experience design because there was no such thing he didn't choose some open problem to solve he came both some problem that only existed in his own
00:49:18
head and no one else even recognized and certainly he did not define himself by his craft he defined himself by his cause by the principle he fought to upheld I'm sure if you look at Wikipedia
00:49:32
it will say that he's a computer scientist or user experience something but to me that's like single Lisbeth Cady Stanton was a community organizer no Elizabeth Cady Stanton established
00:49:44
the principle of women's suffrage that's who she was that was the identity she chose and Larry Tesler established the principle of most lessness had this vision he brought the world to
00:49:56
that vision so you can choose this life or maybe it'll end up choosing you it might not happen right away it can take time to find a principle because finding
00:50:12
a principle is essentially a form of self-discovery that you're trying to figure out what your life is supposed to be about what you want to stand for as a person it took me like a decade ten
00:50:24
years before any real understanding of my principle solidified that was my 20s when I was young I I felt I had to live this way but I would get little glimmers of what mattered to me but no big
00:50:37
picture it was really unclear and this was very distressing for me what I had to do was just do a lot of things make many things make many types of things
00:50:47
study many things experience many many things and use all these experiences as ways of analyzing myself taking all these experiences and saying does this resonate with me does this propel me do
00:51:01
I not care building up this corpus of experiences that I felt very strongly about for some reason and trying to make sense of it trying to figure out why what is the secret ingredient to all these experiences that I'm reacting to
00:51:12
so strongly now I think everyone's different and all those guys I talked about they have their own origin stories which you can read about I will just say that confining yourself to practicing a
00:51:25
single skill can make it difficult to get that broad range of experience which seems to be so valuable for the sort of work and finally if you choose to follow
00:51:40
a principle a principle can't just be any old thing you believe in you'll hear a lot of people say that they want to make software easier to use or they wanted to light their users or they want to make things simple that's a really
00:51:53
big one right now everyone wants to make things simple and those are nice thoughts they maybe give you a little kind of give you a direction to go in but they're too vague to be directly actionable Larry Tesler like simplicity
00:52:05
but his principle was a specific nugget of insight no person should be trapped in a mode and that is a powerful principle because it gave him a new way of seeing the world it divided the worlds are right and
00:52:18
wrong in a fairly objective way so you could look at somebody selecting text and ask is this person in a mode yes or no if yes yet to do something about that and likewise I believe that creators
00:52:32
need powerful tools it's a nice thought that doesn't really get me anywhere my principle is that creators need this immediate connection so I can watch you changing a line of code and I can ask
00:52:44
did you immediately see the effect of that change yes or no if no I got to do something about that and again all those demos that I showed you came out of me
00:52:57
doing that of me following this principle and letting it lead me to exactly what I needed to do so if your guiding principle embodies a specific insight it will guide you and you'll
00:53:10
always know if what you're doing is right there are many ways to live your life that's maybe the most important thing you can realize in your life is that every aspect of your life is a choice
00:53:27
with our default choices you can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path that's been laid out for you you can choose to accept the world as it is but you don't have to if
00:53:42
there's something in the world you feel the wrong and you have a vision for what a better world could be you can find your guiding principle and you can fight
00:53:53
for a cause so after this talk I'd like you to take a little time and think about what matters to you what you believe in and what you might fight for
00:54:05
thank you you
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