When I was a graduate student at the�MIT Media Lab�fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from�Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, "oh, that's very nice, when we did that at PARC ...." Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or ? well, you get the idea ? I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, "oh, that's very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ...." All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it's not entirely new (which nothing can ever be).
Monday, May 28, 2012
Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: The Once And Future Visual Programming Environment
When I was a graduate student at the�MIT Media Lab�fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from�Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, "oh, that's very nice, when we did that at PARC ...." Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or ? well, you get the idea ? I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, "oh, that's very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ...." All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it's not entirely new (which nothing can ever be).
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