In other words, Victor practices what he preaches: he doesn’t use computers to build better mousetraps, but to explore and communicate ideas in a way that uniquely exploits the properties and possibilities of a programmable, dynamic, interactive medium. He sees himself less as a designer/developer/engineer than as a researcher of computer-augmented creativity, much like his mentor Alan Kay (who pioneered graphical user interfaces and object-oriented programming) and his hero Douglas Engelbart (of “The Mother of All Demos” fame).
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What Victor does have are several years’ worth of surprisingly persuasive research projects in the form of software demonstrations, interactive essays, and live talks. “I spent fifteen years making things that millions of people used,” he says, “and I was ready for something else.”
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His most visible standalone app is an OS X Dashboard widget (remember those?) for planning trips on San Francisco’s BART rail system he also designed interactive infographics for Al Gore’s “Our Choice” iPad app and “invented features for Mac OS X Lion” during his stint at Apple. Victor doesn’t have a string of high-profile startups or software launches to back up his big talk. But instead of designing interfaces and exploring use cases for tomorrow’s glass-screened gadgets, Victor’s “forty-years-out vision” concerns nothing less than redesigning computing itself - not as a product or service, but “as a medium of thought.” He’s still part of a close-knit internal prototyping lab (the Communications Design Group) bankrolled by a huge tech corporation ( SAP). Seven years later, in 2014, Bret Victor is still looking at “what could happen” to human-computer interaction in the near future. “We were the ones looking at what could happen five or ten years from now.” “Everyone was focused on the next product release, what needed to happen six months from now,” he says. Soon, Victor says, the iPad became “a real project” and his group was reassigned to tinker with other experimental hardware. Victor spent the next two months making “an app every week, explor new UI ideas” as part of a three-person “internal R&D prototyping group” that Apple had assembled. Maybe twenty other people in the world knew about it. “It was an early prototype of the hardware. “I said, ‘What is this?’ and they said, ‘We don’t know yet,’” Victor recalls. iPods still generated a third of the company’s revenue. The original iPhone was only a couple months old.
When Bret Victor came in for his first day of work as a “Human Interface Inventor” at Apple, he found an iPad sitting on his desk.
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