Götz Bachmann’s Ethnographic Research on Dynamicland

While it would be inaccurate to describe the Dynamic Medium Group as secretive — they do share videos of their prototype and there are many detailed reports online from people who visited their space ​ with whom knowledge is shared freely — it is obvious that the publicly available information is highly moderated. Little is available on the history, inner workings, and processes of the group. ​

The Dynamic Medium Group’s vision is rooted in the idea that the computer revolution of the ’70s and early ’80s was cut short, primarily by premature com­mer­cia­li­za­tion. While the computer as a medium was still unfolding its potential, and way before it could do so entirely, it was solidified into commercial products, thereby stifling its free growth. Once corporations had built their businesses on the ideas developed so far, they were only interested in incremental change that could easily be integrated into the products, rather than revolutionary new ideas.

Because of this cautionary tale and to avoid repeating history, the group is wary when it comes to public attention and deliberately reserved in what it shares. It is therefore equally surprising and delightful that they gave German anthropologist and ethnographer Götz Bachmann full access to visit them, watch and interview them, even read their internal communication and write about them. Between 2015 and 2017 Bachmann spent eight months in total with the group during four field visits. In the meantime, he has published several reports and articles ​.

Bret Victor and many of the engineers of the Dynamic Medium Group are highly renowned in the interaction design community and the default mode to look at their work is admiration. Bachmann’s reports are particularly interesting because of his outsider’s perspective — not only from the group but more importantly from the wider “tools for thought” community in general.

In this note, I want to summarize findings from the various publications by Bachmann and put them in context. The focus here is on the history of the Dynamic Medium Group and what can be learned about the way they work — not the thing they are building. ​

Table of Contents §

1. Founding & Funding
2. Research Agenda
3. Team Members
4. Scaffolding, Staircases, Stacks, and Bootstraps
   1. The First Two Years — Scaffolding
   2. Rising Tensions — Towards Bootstrapping
   3. A Staircase Towards a Dynamic Spatial Medium
   4. Bret Victor’s “Yak Stack”
   5. Megalomaniacal Techno-Solutionism?
   6. The First Generation Leaves
   7. Building Dynamicland
5. Links & Literature
   1. Publications by Götz Bachmann
   2. Publications by Members of the Dynamic Medium Group
   3. Notes from Visits to the Lab
   4. Interviews with Members of the Group
   5. Other

Founding & Funding §

The research group was initiated by Alan Kay, who proposed it to Bret Victor in March 2013. It was one of the multiple research groups initiated by Kay at the time, as part of his newly founded “Communication Design Group” (CDG). The goal of the CDG was to create a research lab in the spirit of Doug Engelbart’s “Augmentation Research Center” from the ’60s or the Xerox PARC of the ’70s and ’80s, where Kay did some of his most impactful work. ​

It can also be seen in a line with Kay’s efforts with “STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming”, a project of Kay’s “Viewpoints Research Institute” (VPRI) which ran from 2006 to 2012. Victor is listed as an author in the project’s final report from 2012, though he is not mentioned in any of the project’s previous yearly reports. In STEPS’ first annual report from 2007, Vishal Sikka, CTO at SAP is listed as an advisor. It was Sikka who told Kay in 2013 that SAP would fund the CDG and that he could hire several principal investigators to start new projects, one of which was Bret Victor ​.

After Sikka surprisingly left SAP in 2014, the relationship with the company continued until early 2016, when the CDG projects became a part of YC Research’s “HARC” (Human Advancement Research Community). ​ This change in funding coincided with an internal crisis within the project, which will be discussed below.

The relationship with YC Research would not last very long: barely a year later, in July 2017, HARC was defunded rather unexpectedly ​. I wasn’t able to find any details about the funding of the group since then, other than that the “Dynamicland Foundation” became a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity in July 2020. The concept of fundraising seems to be difficult given the nature and timespan of their work, particularly because the goal is to resist the commercialization of their ideas. Nonetheless, it is necessary to keep the project going: Bachmann mentions that the group published their website in early 2018 “as part of their search for funding” after they previously “avoided exposing Dynamicland to the online public as much as possible” ​.

Research Agenda §

Bachmann tracks the development of Bret Victor’s ideas and goals through his influential talks and points out how a sort of “radicalization” is happening.

• In “Inventing on Principle” from 2012 Victor shows several demos, all of which are implementations of his personal principle “creators need an immediate connection”. The point of the talk does not lay in this principle and its demos, however, but in the encouragement that all engineers should look for their own principle to orientate their work on: “[…] his talk did not recommend that other engineers follow his principle; instead, he advised them to make their own” ​.
• In “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable” from 2013 Victor’s focus starts to shift towards the idea of a medium: he wants to use media to create representations that enable people to understand systems. “He stated that engineers have the opportunity to develop new thinking tools that could fully tap the possibilities of computers and be a powerful aid for understanding and building complex systems. His demos are trials for a project of this kind. This talk was, therefore, a variation of Victor’s personal principle, which he had presented in the previous talk, but now it was reformulated from the perspective of media theory. Victor’s principle was no longer one of many; it had become ‘the’ king of principles.” ​
• In “The Future of Programming”, held later in 2013, Victor takes on the role of an engineer from 1973, presenting several scenarios of how the future of programming might play out. The ones he describes as absurd and unlikely are the ones that actually happened, the ones he hopes for, “which would continue what has been done until then (i.e. prior to 1973) in terms of its radicality and vision” ​ failed to materialize — but are of course pointing towards the work Victor hopes to do nowadays. Victor places himself in the line of Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, suggesting that he is directly continuing their work — however shifting the focus from technical solutions to a more abstract “medium”.
• In “Seeing Spaces” and “The Human Representation of Thought” from 2014, Victor starts talking about the medium in more specific terms, placing particular emphasis on the idea of a “spatial medium” that leaves behind the confines of the small screens and moves computing into the room. By now, Victor’s ideas have moved far beyond what he can show in small demos, his talks are founded mostly on theories and visions: “[…] Victor did not have anything left to show except radical ideas.” ​

The goal of the project was now clear: To help this new “dynamic spatial medium” come into being.

Team Members §

According to Bachmann’s writing, the members of the group in the beginning were ​:

• Bret Victor
• Glen Chiacchieri
• Chaim Gingold
• Toby Schachman
• Michael Nagle
• Robert Ochshorn

The second generation of members, joining after most of the first generation left in 2016, was, in addition to Bret Victor and Toby Schachman ​:

• Paula Te
• Josh Horowitz
• Luke Iannini
• Virginia McArthur

Bachmann last visited the group in 2017, so some more recent members are missing from this list:

• Weiwei Xu (between 2018 and 2019)
• Omar Rizwan (until 2020)

Further contributors were:

• Matthias Graf (Research Intern, 2015)
• Jennifer Jacobs (Research Intern, 2016)
• Kritika Kushwaha (Residency as part of her Masters Thesis, 2018 — Report)
• Eli Kosminksy (Residency, 2018 — Report)
• Sofy Yuditskaya and Ria Rajan (Residency, 2018)
• Nicky Case (Residency, 2018)

As of early 2022, only Bret Victor and Luke Iannini are mentioned as staff on the about page of the Dynamicland website, all other members of the second generation are listed under “former staff”. ​

Scaffolding, Staircases, Stacks, and Bootstraps §

Falling for the myths of Silicon Valley would be as much a mistake as underestimating their power.

Bachmann, 2017a, p. 67 [translation mine]

As a social scientist, Bachmann pays particular attention to the metaphors engineers and designers like to throw around rather liberally and the myths (and counter-myths) they found their beliefs in.

The First Two Years — Scaffolding §

During the first two years of the Dynamic Medium Group’s work, the strategy to approach the new medium was to have individual members of the team work on their own projects without much coordination and create many different prototypes, hoping to get a shared sense of the possibility space.

Bachmann describes the lab at this time as feeling like a “giant brain”: “The abundance of prototypes, books and manifests spread around the room made me feel as if I was sitting within a ‘giant brain’ […]: in a shared, associatively interwoven, growing room of ideas.” ​ Seemingly contrary to this feeling, Bachmann writes that there appeared to be little direct collaboration, or even communication, among the members of the group: “The members of the group often didn’t seem to notice on another. They did not greet each other. They went to lunch together, but this was often a silent affair. When they finished their work in the evening they left wordlessly.” ​ There were, however, some forms of collaboration, centered around the prototypes: “riffing”, “dropping” and “jams”. Bachmann describes them like this:

• “riffing” — sending and documenting a prototype to the others via email, who then respond not just with comments but also with new prototypes, that try to develop the ideas of the previous prototypes further in surprising ways.
• “dropping” — leaving prototypes or posters in the room for others to explore without any comments.
• “jams” — the entire group occasionally spending 30 to 60 minutes to create “mock-ups” (very rough prototypes) in response to a given topic, then “riffing” on those. Longer jams with external visitors took place too.

It was the prototypes created during jams, in particular, that seemed to have a specific quality: In contrast to the prototypes for the member’s own projects, the goal of these prototypes was not to eventually get “ready to ship”. They also weren’t “proofs of concept” meant to substantiate anything or “demos” meant to impress people. These prototypes were “working artefacts” and “traps for potentialities”, a form of poking in a “space of possibilities” ​: “It was about speculating together and in the form of artifacts, in order to gain some intuitions for properties of the new medium.” ​ In his investigation into the role and meaning of “promises” in the development of new technologies, Bachmann adds the perspective that these prototypes were also “promise-artefacts, which are to be read as a promise, as evidence for the promise, and as promising even more than what it evidences, all at the same time.” ​

An important aspect of the prototyping culture was that all of the prototypes were documented through their email announcements and the subsequent chain of reactions.

Bachmann describes that during this time there was a sense that their primary work at the moment was “scaffolding”. He points out that there were three distinct (and somewhat conflicting) notions of what that meant: On the one hand, their prototypes were the scaffolding, and they were hoping to develop a sense of the medium as it exists in-between that, much like scaffolding is erected around a house to be built. On the other hand, scaffolding could mean that they used technologies that were opposing to the principles of what they were aiming to do because it was “only” scaffolding. Lastly, scaffolding could also mean that they were developing tools, with which further, more advanced tools could be developed, in the same way, scaffolding is stacked on top of itself.

Rising Tensions — Towards Bootstrapping §

Be that as it may, most of the members’ time and energy went into their individual projects. After two seemingly productive years, tensions started to arise.

One of the things that became an issue was a trend one could observe in the general “tools for thought” community during those years too: Bret Victor’s early talks had worked too well. His impressive demos and strong case for his personal principle had indeed inspired people — to try and build similar things, or variations of his demos. These prototypes often were focused on improving the way software is created, or on (the creation of) explorable explanations — both of which are very interesting and important topics, and many of the prototypes built by members of the group during that time have since become inspiring software projects themselves ​. But they were not necessarily steps towards a dynamic spatial medium.

There were some early prototypes that made some progress in that direction. In particular the “big board” — which contained the idea of code printed out on sheets and information projected around it — and the “room system” — which connected several prototypes throughout the room —, later further developed into “Hypercard-in-the-World” — which combined these ideas into a prototype that is already clearly a precursor to the Dynamicland known today ​ — seemed promising.

However, these prototypes failed to gain natural traction with the other engineers in the group, who kept working on their projects (using their screens, rather than the spatial medium). This led to a crisis in the group — in early 2016, Bret Victor had grown frustrated: After two years there were prototypes for lots of different things, but the few that moved towards a dynamic spatial medium weren’t at a point where they could be shared with others, and it seemed like the other engineers weren’t intent on getting them there. Writes Bachmann: “Victor grew even more desperate: He was unable to assert himself within the group, and he believed that his external prestige was suffering because he still had nothing he felt he could show for his work. All the prototypes were either for something other than a spatial medium or were so sketchy that he did not think they had the necessary features to substantiate his ideas and authority.” ​ Victor felt that a change was necessary. In order to make progress towards a dynamic spatial medium, they had to start taking “bootstrapping” seriously.

A Staircase Towards a Dynamic Spatial Medium §

In April 2016, Victor sent an email announcing that there would be some far-reaching changes to the way they worked. He introduced two new metaphors: that of the staircase that they were trying to move up on, and that of the stack that they were trying to drill down into.

Victor declared that they would have to come together to develop a “platform”, which would be the first of a “staircase” of such platforms, which would eventually lead them “up” towards the dynamic spatial medium. Once they had built this first platform, they could return to a phase of experimentation in order to figure out what the next platform, the second step of the staircase, might look like. By building platform on platform on platform and so on, they would finally live up to the ideal of bootstrapping they had aimed at from the beginning and have a chance at eventually reaching the dynamic spatial medium.

The platform we’re building this year is not the ‘dynamic medium’. The platform will be ‘technology’, not timeless or transcendent. But it should make possible the exploration and perhaps invention of new kinds of rep­resen­ta­tion-for-understanding, which will then make a bit clearer what the medium for these rep­resen­ta­tions should be, which will then inform the design of the next platform ad transcendum.

Bret Victor describing the platform principle in personal communication from April 2016; cited from Bachmann: “Strapping und Stacking” (2019a, pp. 287 – 288)

But this would require all of them to spend one year solely focusing on building the platform, rather than working on their individual projects. Victor believed it was the only way to go and reminded them of the Dynamic Medium Group’s proclaimed goal: “Our goal is to invent an in-the-world dynamic medium, capable of hosting in-the-world dynamic representations of systems, which enable the people, who need to understand these systems to mutually understand them together.” ​ Putting their individual projects on hold to invest their energy into this shared goal was a big ask, so Victor framed it by formulating a new, higher aspiration for the work of the group: Their motivation wasn’t the invention of the dynamic spatial medium for its own sake, but to save the world.

Bret Victor’s “Yak Stack” §

In his email Victor explained his reasoning by describing the metaphorical “Yak Stack”:

On a given day, you might be designing a messaging protocol to implement a pub/sub system to make a network of IMPs
to make sensor data easily accessible throughout the room
to implement an object model, based on observation
to enable authoring of dynamic media in-the-world
to represent complex systems that used to be unseeable
to understand complex systems that used to be ungraspable
to introduce new forms of human thought and communication
to expand humanity’s thinkable territory
to escape tribalism and lift humanity to a sufficient level of enlightenment that technological power can be used responsibly, not destructively
to prevent the world from tearing itself apart

Bret Victor’s “Yak Stack”, described in personal communication from April 2016; cited from Bachmann: “Strapping und Stacking” (2019a, p. 289) [highlight mine]

The goal is not to get lost in the day-to-day business on the top of the stack, but to keep the eyes on the motivations in the lower part of the stack.

Victor himself points out how the final part of the list is prone to be seen as being ridiculous: “The items at the top of the yak stack are easy to talk about, they lend themselves to lunch chat and status reports.”, he writes, “The items at the bottom are abstract, hard to articulate, emotionally charged, unfashionable, easy to mock, even embarrassing. At least, I often feel like I can’t discuss these things with anyone.” ​

Megalomaniacal Techno-Solutionism? §

He is right with this diagnosis: In a radio interview with Bachmann ​, the journalist somewhat smugly references this passage as being equally cocky and naive, not that different from Silicon Valley’s mantra of “make the world a better place”, which is usually shallow and capitalistic. But Bachmann responds by offering a more nuanced perspective: Doesn’t almost everybody who got to choose their profession freely claim to aspire to a somewhat naive higher goal? As a professor at a university, he has to believe in the values of the enlightenment and believe that his students will become better people through the education he gives them. Of course, he knows full well that this is a romanticized and idealized perspective that does not reflect what is really happening. But even while being aware of this, he still has to somehow believe in it one way or the other. Doesn’t the journalist believe, I might add, that his work is in service of truth versus structures of power and is integral to a functioning democracy, even though what he is actually doing is interviewing an anthropologist about his work on a group of engineers for a general interest story?

I’d be lying if I said that the logic reflected in the stack doesn’t appeal to me personally in a way.

The essence of the stack is often understood as saying: “I want to save the world and I figured that becoming a technologist is the best way to do that.” — and thereby on the one hand looking down on the work of other people, who might have a much more direct impact on their community, on the other hand saying: “My technology will save the world”, or even worse “I’ll be the one that saves the world”. But that would be reading the stack from the bottom up in a form of reverse reasoning. A more accurate way of phrasing it is this: “I became a technologist because it is something that I am good at, that I enjoy, that pays the bills — in this capacity, what can I do to leave the world a better place than I found it?” A question one absolutely ought to ask oneself, I’d say. It will not be answered by the stack, but the stack is a call to remember to ask this question more often in our daily work.

I am also wary of the superficial critique of this being techno-solutionist thinking: Of course, thinking that (a specific) technology will be or directly lead to the solution to all our problems is naive — but thinking that technology won’t be any part of the solution is equally naive. ​

Bachmann describes the group’s worldview as being radically pessimistic — the world will tear itself apart when we don’t do something — while being desperately optimistic — we might be able to actually prevent that if our ideas work.

The First Generation Leaves §

But of course, Victor’s introduction of his “Yak Stack” was also a power move, meant to substantiate his decision to focus on building the “staircase” at the expense of the other member’s personal projects. Who could say no to saving the world?

Well, apparently most of the members of the group could — except for Toby Schachman, all of the members of the first generation left the project during this time. The reasons varied: some felt that they were asked to be mere assistants working on Victor’s ideas, rather than being able to contribute their own. Others started to doubt that the dynamic spatial medium was the thing that would enable them to reach their lofty goal. Bachmann mentions that one engineer decided to stop being an engineer at all, thinking that this was not the best way that he could contribute to “human happiness”. Here he is most likely referring to Glen Chiacchieri, who wrote an insightful, emotional blog post about leaving tech­nology to become a therapist.

Building Dynamicland §

Over time, the second generation of members joined the group and they began working on the first “platform”, which turned into Dynamicland.

Once again there were conflicts within the group regarding the exact nature of their undertaking: “Some engineers emphasized, like Schachman, the social aspects of the emergent medium (often described with the adjective ‘together’), others, like Victor, the ability of understanding complex systems, others, like Paula Te or Luke Iannini, were particularly interested in the medium’s political potentials.” ​ But “[…] in time, a fragile compromise was found. An important factor was that Victor now permitted — initially to a large extent against his beliefs — the new spatial dynamic medium to have more objectives than just establishing new ways of thinking. A new objective was to promote new types of ‘togetherness’, not only as a means for common understanding, but as a goal on its own. The research group also prevailed with their wish of involving other users outside of themselves, such as kids. The group increasingly started to speak of themselves as a ‘community’. These compromises remained fragile, but they were sufficient to enable the group to work together on an especially demanding part of their endeavor: the construction of a technical system that would finally be a prototype for exploring a dynamic spatial medium, a bootstrapping system that would shape their work, and a demo for the principle-driven stance of the group and the newly achieved compromise regarding ideas and sense-making processes.” ​

And so they started building their operating system, called “Realtalk”, based on the ideas of the “Hypercard-in-the-World” prototype. The core idea was to take object-oriented programming literally, by turning the objects in the system into actual physical objects (or the other way around). After a while, Realtalk was built in itself recursively, allowing for constant open manipulation and adding another aspect to the idea of “bootstrapping”.

Realtalk became operational in the summer of 2017 but had to be rewritten because the first version was too slow. The second version, which was more minimalistic in some aspects, was able to deliver on its promise — Dynamicland was born.

Since then, a continuous flow of visitors was invited into the lab to play with the prototype and build their own ideas using the system, or often “riffing” on other people’s prototypes. Pages of code are kept in binders that are available as libraries to build more things on. The new forms of social interactions, togetherness, and spatial collaboration seem to actually be emerging.

No, just quiet

@Dynamicland1 on 21. October 2020 responding to someone wondering if they have become inactive

It was around this time that Bachmann last visited the group and apart from enthusiastic reports on Dynamicland from visitors, little information about the group’s internal goings-on has emerged since. Bachmann reported that a process of an alternating cycle of one year of playful exploration, followed by one year of working on stabilizing the system has been established. Carl Tashian writes that in July 2019 work on Realtalk-2020, a new iteration of the platform started. At the time of writing this, the last tweet from the Twitter account of the Dynamic Medium Group is from October 2020 and states that they continue working on the project — quietly. In December 2021 a private letter was sent to friends of the group, announcing the next phase of the project. In July 2022 Bret Victor shared the stage with biologist Shawn Douglas at the “2022 Foresight Designing Molecular Machines Workshop”, presenting recent work done with Realtalk while being embedded in Douglas’ lab.

Links & Literature §

Publications by Götz Bachmann §

• Bachmann, G. (2017a). Silicon Valley. In T. Beyes, J. Metelmann, & C. Pias (Hrsg.), Nach der Revolution: Ein Brevier digitaler Kulturen (S. 66–76). Tempus Corporate. [German]
• Bachmann, G. (2017b, May 8). Utopian Hacks. Limn.
• Bachmann, G. (2018). Dynamicland. Zeitschrift Für Volkskunde (ZfV), 114(1), 29–50. [German]
• Bachmann, G. (2019a). Strapping und Stacking. Eine Ethnografie der Suche nach einem neuen Medium. In S. Gießmann, T. Röhl, & R. Trischler (Eds.), Materialität der Kooperation (pp. 275–300). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. [German]
• Bachmann, G. (2019b). Dynamicland. Journal for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis (JEECA), 3(1), 31–51.
• Bachmann, G. (2021). The Promise of the Promise — The Dynamic Medium Group in Oakland, California. In C. Ernst & J. Schröter (Eds.), (Re-)Imagining New Media: Techno-Imaginaries around 2000 and the case of “Piazza virtuale” (1992) (pp. 15–30). Springer Fachmedien.
• Brants, D. (2018, March 10). Götz Bachmann, Medientheoretiker. In Zeitgenossen. SWR2. [Interview, German]
• Brown University. (2016, March 14). Terms of Media II: Actions Conference - Work - Goetz Bachmann. [Talk] ​

Publications by Members of the Dynamic Medium Group §

• dynamicland.org — The official Dynamicland website contains content similar to that of the analog printed “zine” that the group created to hand out to visitors.
• Dynamicland Foundation 501(c)(3) application — This “Narrative Description of Activities” was written as part of the application for non-profit status for the Dynamicland Foundation, sent to the IRS. Victor describes it as “not a bad description of Dynamicland and its goals, at least filtered for the sensibilities of an IRS examiner”. It certainly is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the group’s goals and ambitions.
• Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit — Omar Rizwan describes one of his projects at Dynamicland: “Geokit”, a toolkit and library for building and viewing maps. In the post, he shows how it works and explains how it is built. You can also see the principle of having different kits sitting in folders on a shelf, ready to be used and remixed. The post is also linked on the research notes page of the Dynamicland website.
• The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland — This post by Toby Schachman is the only other research note published there. He described how people can remix each other’s work and how new ways of collaboration emerge.
• Notes from Dynamicland: programming Raspberry Pis — In this note, Omar Rizwan argues for the use of Raspberry Pis in the Realtalk system and shares some information about the “Realtalk” protocol.
• Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist — Glen Chiacchieri writes about his decision to not just leave the Dynamic Medium Group, but technology altogether and become a therapist instead.
• Epic – A series of interactive educational tools for children as part of my residency with Dynamicland — Kritika Kushwaha created “Epic” during her time as a resident interaction designer in 2018 it is “a series of interactive educational tools for children that encourage socializing, learning and bonding in children by interacting with physical interactive objects at home, school and third spaces such as libraries and makerspaces”, prototyped in Dynamicland.
• Shawn Douglas / Bret Victor: Nanoscale Instruments for Visualizing Small Proteins — In July 2022 Bret Victor shared the stage at the “2022 Foresight Designing Molecular Machines Workshop” with Shawn Douglas, a biologist at whose lab they are currently testing Dynamicland in the wild. In the second half of the talk Victor talks through some of the tools they built for Douglas’ work in the lab.

Notes from Visits to the Lab §

Most of the visits shared here seem to have taken place in 2018.

• Dynamicland on Twitter — The Dynamic Medium Group sometimes shares videos of visitors playing with their system on their official Twitter account.
• At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer — Carl Tashian’s excellent in-depth blog post on the history and process of Dynamicland.
• The “Next Big Thing” is a Room — Steve Krouse wrote this in-depth article, which is one of the most shared introductions to Dynamicland.
• Dynamicland — These are the notes Krouse created for himself while visiting Dynamicland. They are pretty unedited, and therefore a bit difficult to read, but all the more intimate and insightful.
• Dynamicland Zine Notes — The same is true for these notes he made while reading the Dynamicland “Zine”, a printed booklet that is shared with visitors to the space.
• An Introduction to Dynamicland — Andy Toone describes his visit to Dynamicland.
• Experiments in Dynamicland — Geoffrey Litt describes his experience playing around in Dynamicland for a few days, building some prototypes himself.
• Dynamicland and the Whimsical Digital Object — Olivia Kan-Sperling describes her visit to Dynamicland, with particular focus on the “object-oriented” nature of the system.
• A visit to Dynamicland — Gian Pablo Villamil describes his visit to Dynamicland, with loads of photos and videos.
• Dynamicland & me — Andrés Cuervo describes the things he built while visiting Dynamicland.
• Experiencing Dynamicland – A New Computational Medium — Nicole of Saturday Kids shares photos from their visit to Dynamicland, during their trip to the US in 2018.
• Dynamicland // Hardware Field Trip — In this video from hackster.io, they share what the lab looks like on a busy day. In this additional video, they share stills of some basic code examples in Realtalk.

Interviews with Members of the Group §

• Computing is Everywhere: Bret Victor and Dynamicland — Paul Ford and Rich Ziade interview Bret Victor.
• Exploring Dynamicland: Omar Rizwan — Steve Krouse interviews Omar Rizwan. Especially interesting is the section where Rizwan describes his first impressions while visiting Dynamicland and how they changed when he was working there.
• Compassion & Programming: Glen Chiacchieri — Steve Krouse interviews Glen Chiacchieri.

Other §

• The Art of Research – A History by Vi Hart ​ — Vi Hart, the principal researcher of a different group at Kay’s CDG describes the first years of her project in this post. There are many connections to the history of the Dynamic Medium Group and some interesting photos of their first space in San Francisco, that they shared.
• Dynamicland (aka HARC) by Shelly Huber — Shelly Huber is an architect. It does not become quite clear from this page, but it seems like she helped the Dynamic Medium Group plan their new studio in Old Oakland, where they moved when they became a part of HARC. In addition to some photos of the space, the page also contains a floorplan, which is quite interesting: It seems like they took some inspiration from David Dewane’s concept of the “Eudaimonia Machine” which divides offices into certain zones that form a gradient towards increasingly deep work. ​ On the floor plan, their office is clearly separated into public, semi-private, private, and quiet spaces.