Humane representation of thought: a trail map for the 21st century

Bret Victor
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引用次数: 19

Abstract

New representations of thought -- written language, mathematical notation, information graphics, etc -- have been responsible for some of the most significant leaps in the progress of civilization, by expanding humanity's collectively-thinkable territory. But at debilitating cost. These representations, having been invented for static media such as paper, tap into a small subset of human capabilities and neglect the rest. Knowledge work means sitting at a desk, interpreting and manipulating symbols. The human body is reduced to an eye staring at tiny rectangles and fingers on a pen or keyboard. Like any severely unbalanced way of living, this is crippling to mind and body. But less obviously, and more importantly, it is enormously wasteful of the vast human potential. Human beings naturally have many powerful modes of thinking and understanding. Most are incompatible with static media. In a culture that has contorted itself around the limitations of marks on paper, these modes are undeveloped, unrecognized, or scorned. We are now seeing the start of a dynamic medium. To a large extent, people today are using this medium merely to emulate and extend static representations from the era of paper, and to further constrain the ways in which the human body can interact with external representations of thought. But the dynamic medium offers the opportunity to deliberately invent a humane and empowering form of knowledge work. We can design dynamic representations which draw on the entire range of human capabilities -- all senses, all forms of movement, all forms of understanding -- instead of straining a few and atrophying the rest. This talk suggests how each of the human activities in which thought is externalized (conversing, presenting, reading, writing, etc) can be redesigned around such representations.
思想的人文表现:21世纪的轨迹图
新的思想表现形式——书面语言、数学符号、信息图形等——通过扩大人类集体可思考的领域,促成了文明进步中一些最重大的飞跃。但代价是令人衰弱的。这些表示是为纸张等静态媒体发明的,只挖掘了人类能力的一小部分,而忽略了其他部分。知识工作意味着坐在办公桌前,解释和操作符号。人类的身体被简化为一只眼睛盯着小矩形和手指在笔或键盘上。就像任何严重失衡的生活方式一样,这对身心都是有害的。但不那么明显,但更重要的是,它极大地浪费了人类的巨大潜力。人类天生就有许多强大的思维和理解模式。大多数与静态媒体不兼容。在一个围绕纸上标记的局限性而扭曲自身的文化中,这些模式是不发达的,不被认可的,或者是被蔑视的。我们现在看到了一个动态媒介的开始。在很大程度上,今天人们使用这种媒介只是为了模仿和扩展纸时代的静态表征,并进一步限制人体与外部思想表征的互动方式。但是,动态媒体提供了一个机会,可以有意地发明一种人性化和赋权的知识工作形式。我们可以设计出动态的表现形式,利用人类所有的能力——所有的感官,所有形式的运动,所有形式的理解——而不是使一些人紧张而使其余的人萎缩。这个演讲表明,思想外化的每一个人类活动(交谈、呈现、阅读、写作等)都可以围绕这样的表现重新设计。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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