Bret Victor ·
Drawing Dynamic Visualizations

This talk will present a tool for drawing dynamic visualizations.

Throughout the history of science, pictures have been essential thinking tools -- diagrams and graphs, drawn with pencils or pens on notepads or graph paper.

Such static pictures are now obsolete. The computer is a medium of dynamic pictures -- visualizations driven by parameters and data. These visualizations are an unprecedentedly powerful way to discover, understand, and communicate. But how can we draw them?

We can do direct-manipulation drawing with tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator, but such pictures are static, not dynamic. And we can create dynamic pictures with tools such as D3, R, or Processing, but such pictures are coded, not drawn. We have no means to draw dynamic pictures -- to create data-dependent pictures via direct manipulation of the picture itself.

This talk will discuss the importance of both drawing and dynamic pictures, and will demonstrate a dynamic drawing tool that embraces both.

Bret Victor (@worrydream) 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. He presented "Inventing on Principle" and "Stop Drawing Dead Fish", and wrote "Magic Ink", "Learnable Programming", and "Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction".