Thought as a Technology

Broad origin: This essay arose out of my attempts to make sense of the work of some of the great interface designers, including Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Bret Victor, and others. See, for an entrée, Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect, Kay and Goldberg's Personal Dynamic Media, and Victor's Media for Thinking the Unthinkable. On internalizing signs found in the external world: See the work of Lev Vygotsky, especially "Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions", Chapter 4 in an edited and translated collection of some of Vygotsky's writing, "Mind in Society", Harvard University Press (1978). On using using computers to create new (micro-)worlds: See the work of Seymour Papert, especially his book "Mindstorms", Basic Books (1980). On reifying hidden representations: This was inspired in part by the work of Steven Wittens, especially his extraordinary rendition of the Fourier transform. Of course, the heuristic is used in much other work, but Wittens' work shows it in a particularly sharp and effective form. On reifying deep principles: This was inspired in part by Kasper Peulen's Euclid: the Game, which builds up an interface using ideas from Euclidean geometry. Again, this heuristic is used widely, but Peulen's game shows it in a particularly well distilled form.