Bret Victor

Bret Victor led the team that founded Dynamicland and invented Realtalk, the world‘s only self-hosted spatial computing system.

Previously at Apple, he designed the earliest user interface concepts for the iPad and several other new hardware platforms. His work established Apple’s internal future-interfaces prototyping group, whose inventions have shipped in billions of Apple products.

His later public-domain work on next-generation programming interfaces has been viewed millions of times, and directly inspired numerous products, companies, and academic papers.

His work has won the Apple Design Award twice. Computing pioneer Alan Kay has called him “one of the greatest user interface design minds in the world today”, and design legend Edward Tufte recognized him as a “design theory wizard, at the cutting edge of interface designs for programming, seeing, reasoning”.

He has electrical engineering degrees from Caltech and UC Berkeley.

I’m dedicated to making progress on a medium and culture in which all people deeply understand the real world, and each other.

Some ingredients and their suppliers:

• authorable dynamic media (Alan Kay)
• powerful representations (Edward Tufte, Seymour Papert)
• powerful environments (Ed Hutchins, Maria Montessori, game design)
• mind as toolkit, internally (Kieran Egan), externally (Doug Engelbart)
• knowledge in the hands (skilled crafts, musical performance)
• human-scale environments built by self-sufficient communities (Christopher Alexander)
• an “electrical engineering” rather than “computer science” perspective (computation is for adding magic to real-world activities, not for interfacing with virtual simulations)
• the goal of an enlightened sustainable democracy (Alan Kay, Neil Postman)