Discussion no.05, Doing with Images Makes Symbols

Link to the viewing

Who is Alan Kay?

This weeks discussion is from Alan Kay. Alan Kay is a computer scientist known for several things. Primarily, he is known for working at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where the contemporary desktop metaphor and windowed GUI for operating systems was developed. Many people in fact cite this as the place, from which, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs "stole" the windowed GUI seen in contemporary operating systems.

He also pioneered what is called Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with a language called Smalltalk. Although Kay was critical of latter implementations of object orientation in languages like C++, we have seen versions of objects in the Python code we've been using.

# "time" below is an object
# "sleep" is a method of that object
time.sleep(0.2)

# "cp" and "pixels" are objects
cp.pixels.fill((255,0,255))

In both of the above examples, we have the object and then use the dot operator or period in order to access properties or methods of the objects. The point being, this allows us to create code that is reflective of structures we might see in the real world.

# examples of objects we can create:
person.eyes.squint()

car.wheels.accelerate(66)

He was also instrumental in the development of Scratch a visual programming language designed for children after similar projects like Logo (by Seymour Papert) that were aimed at a younger audience.

What is going on with this talk?

Kay talks about a number of things in the talk including notable historical examples of interfaces,

This is another normie UI talk in that it is a conventionally celebrated computer scientist, talking about (what is now) conventionally celebrated history in computer scientist. This is not the only history or way of looking at this history but it is a jumping off point, from which to talk about other perspectives.

Things to think about

  • many of the historical examples that Kay cites are pretty much defacto, what computers look like today (interfaces, windows, objects, etc.), what do you feel or think about these examples and that some of them are as far back as 60+ years in the past?
  • How do you interpret the title "Doing with Images Makes Symbols" and what from the video do you see as justifying or reenforcing that interpretation?
  • Respond with your thoughts on the thoughts about human learning and how they might be applied to your projects, and could be applied to interface design.

What to submit

Please provide a .PDF, .TXT, .MD, or .RTF file that" evidences your reading and comprehension of the material