Alan Kay at MIT Media Lab 5th Anniversary Event (1990)

never know what Nicholas was going to say actually the turned out that the

bearnaise on the hot dog didn't sell well if I remember we're no longer on

that board anniversaries get people to

think of other anniversaries there lots

of them happening this year one of them is the 50th anniversary of Fantasia and

Fantasia I think for many of us in this audience and at MIT and elsewhere was

something we grew up on as a kind of a

dream of bringing our ideas to life and a lot of us saw the computer is a way of

more quickly with more depth more

dimension more meaning to be able to project ideas that we had within within

ourselves into this magic new medium and have them come to life just as the

disney people did with great art but much more laboriously many years ago I

think a good way to start this this lecture is to think 40 years ago not 50

the 40 years ago was the when two very

diverse very at opposite poles machines

were introduced to the to the world and

one of them of course was the UNIVAC one the first commercial digital computer

thing that a digital computer its people's minds it had whirling tape

drives the first whirling tape drives and it predicted an election not long

after that on television and so it became in the public's mind what a

computer was all about now in the other

machine that was at the farthest pole of

thinking from the univac one also came about 19

50 and I actually spent quite a bit with some assistance this summer trying to

find some film footage of it because I was sure that some must exist and after

much scurrying around in England then looking at old newsreels and so forth we

finally found what i think is the earliest footage of this machine which I

think symbolizes the transition from the

UNIVAC 1 to what's going to happen over the next 10 years and i think i need the

the slides off because i'm going to show some video thank you

in a simple Ville on the outskirts of Bristol lives Dr. Grey Walter a

neurologist who makes robots as a hobby they are small and he doesn't dress them

up to look like men he calls them tortoises and so cunningly have their

insides being designed that they respond to the stimuli of light and touch in a

completely lifelike manner

this model is named Elsie and she sees out of a photoelectric cell which

rotates above her body when light strikes the cell driving and steering

mechanism sends her hurrying towards it if she brushes against any object in her

path contacts are operated that turn the steering away and so automatically she

takes avoiding action

Mrs. Walters pet his Elma, Elsie's brother in the darker vest he works in

exactly the same way

Dr. Walter says that his electronic toys work exactly as though they have a

simple two cell nervous system and that with more cells they will be able to

do many more tricks already Elsie has one up on Elmer when her batteries begin to

fail she automatically runs home to her kennel but charging up and in

consequence can live a much gayer life

so I officially present this footage to

Nicholas Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky for it means something to each

one of this this is the original tortoise that inspired the logo turtle

and it also inspired a lot of early work

in artificial intelligence and what's interesting about the way the last 40

years have transpired is that digital computers have taken over but in fact

where things are going now are much more towards the kinds of control systems

kinds of what you might call wet mentalities that device like the great

Walter turtle has well the biggest

problem with with computers is that they

were larger than than human scale and the mechanisms we have in our mind for

dealing with things are larger than human scale are those of religions so of

course we had a priesthood and special

time special rituals all of that stuff and a lot of what has happened in the

last 40 years has been to try and find ways to bring the machine into human

scale without losing any of its promise

what I'd like to do is give you a couple

of ways that I think about this stuff and one of them is thinking in general

terms about the way humans have extended themselves over the last several hundred

thousand years and of course the first one that we think of is that we extend

ourselves through tools levers screwdrivers wheels and so forth less

often we think of language and

mathematics as tools but they also are ways of creating objects for things that

we want to deal with and we manipulate them and all of these tools allow us to

extend various of our senses and for a long time we thought of the computer as

a kind of a tool and one of the ways that we've grappled with it is to try and make it

act more like the kinds of tools that were used to now less often thought of

extension is one that was identified many years ago by mumford who said for

most of the history of human beings most of the machines that we've built have

had other humans as moving parts he called these mega machines and societies

groups an organization like this the media lab all of these are a consequence

of our ability to take on other people's

goals our interest in taking on people's goals and our interest in getting people

to take on our goals of course agents

can take on a goal and can manipulate tools to carry out our wishes while

we're doing things but more importantly an agent can deal with other agents and

I think of the the M word here for

agents as being management so to me a tool is something that we look at and we

manipulate and an agent is something that looks at us and we manage the agent

and of course the mainframes were neither and so the struggle was started

in the 1950s in 1962 try and find a way of bringing this into some sort of human

scale now I like to show you a couple of early efforts

here's a picture that could have been taken in somebody's office here at MIT

but actually it was taken in 1965 this

is Douglas Engelbart sitting at his

first version of a what you might call not a personal computer but personal

computing he has a mouse he has a black on white 19 inch screen and here's the

kind of media that he dealt back sat

exactly branch on me and let me look just that low and I see it oh I can say

I'd like to see one line only I can see

but there's another thing I can do theres a route I said i have here

so here I'm it i'll need a different pictures of you so here's what i do with

a picture drawing capability here so slight and lamp if i start from work and

here's the route i seem to have to go to pick up all the materials and that's my

plan for getting home tonight but if I want to I can say the library what am I

supposed to pick up there I can just point to that you know oh I see overdue

books and all while there was a statement there with that name go back what if I once my supposed to pick up

the drugstore hmm I see you interesting all right market can do things if I want

to just say I'd like to interchange projects and can materials bingo and

they're all numbered right if I care to look interchanging them very quickly

cans are going to get interchange with products they do it and all gets me

numbered so that's a very tool based way

of thinking about things you're indicating things on the screen moving

them around Engelbart was one of the of

a number of people in the 50s and 60s that realize that although you could

drop a computer and break it just like you can drop a book into a fire and burn

it that the contents of the computer or

of the book can be a story or a description of things that can't exist

physically in the world you can have a story in a book about a place that has an inverse cube law doesn't seem to

exist in in this world the computer can

add more dimensions than this world has to a way of looking at data and so that

if you have a 15 dimensional space of

interesting things the computer can give you 16 dimensions and bring all of the

interesting points together at one one place and that led to a number of

different ways of thinking about the

computer Engelbart's metaphor was the computer as a vehicle he thought of the

big mainframes as being like railroads that were owned by institutions and the

institutions decided when you could use them and decided what you could use them

for and Engelbart wanted to be Henry Ford he

wanted everybody to have their own vehicle used to say phrases like we need

to deal with thought vectors and concept space I don't think he knew what that

meant we certainly didn't but it sounded

great and it gave rise to this notion that in order to bring the computer down

into our world we have to have some way of interacting with it in a closer

fashion and so the the urge was to bring the computer cycles closer to the user

and that's what gave rise to machines like this and this is one that I

designed it's a picture of it on its own display back in the late 60s and it even

had a user interface on it although back

then there's a wonderful phrase about user interface user interfaces was

called it's when the flesh hits the steel and that phrase is very much about

because there's really no notion of there being an intermediary between you

and the hardness of the machine and this this machine have multiple windows and a

number of other ideas on it but it was a little bit like trying to make an apple

pie from random ingredients found in the kitchen you don't have any apples so you

decide to use bananas you don't have any flour so you grind up Cheerios and so

forth I randomly substituting for all of the ingredients in a typical pie you can

make something but in this case this

turned out to be a bit of a mess only

graduate students liked it sort of the

kiss of death for any computer system

reason of course as graduate students are going through a rite of passage when they're trying to prove how smart they

are and how many amazing things that they can remember and so they turn out

to be pretty much the world's worst user interface design right I was a graduate

student when I designed this so I'm speaking with authority now right about

the same time that this was going on there is a whole different way of looking at interaction and one of the

ways that I used to illustrate that is some film footage taken at rand

corporation on a system that they made

for Rand economists and other non computer types The Economist's of course

are that group of people that if you lay them end to end they still won't be able

to reach a conclusion and the Economist

didn't even like to type they like to write things on legal pads and they said

the RAM people can't you do something about that so here's an example of something that was adapted from some

early work here at MIT by Marvin Minsky and war entitlement to do a system that

would interpret gestures as expressed on

a data tablet so here's what that looks like

first we erase a flow arrow then move

the connector out of the way so that we may draw a box in its place the printing

in the box is being new commentary only in this case the box is slightly too

large so we may change its size where modern day window control came from

literally then dry flow from the connector to the box attached a decision

element to the box and dry flow from it to scan we then erased the flow arrows

attached to the process post new area and move the box to a new position this

allows us to draw a new box well that

was a tremendous change in the way we felt about using computers I had a

chance to use that for half an hour in 1968 and felt like I was thinking my

hands right through the glass of the display and touching the information

structures directly inside unlike Engelbart's system which I had called a

personal computer this to me was

intimate this is an intimate way of interacting and so for me and for a

bunch of other people in the 60s 1968

was my year for thinking about the

possibility of there being three major ways of interacting with a computer of

three paradigms three frameworks for thinking about interaction and the thing

that clinched it for me was seeing going

out and visiting Seymour's one of Seymour's first installations in a

school watching them use the logo turtle

the descendant of the great Walter turtle, cause Seymour had this terrific idea that

wouldn't it be great to let kids actually build the kinds of mechanisms

that would animate a turtle around and they would learn a lot about their world and

a lot about thinking about the world from from doing that and I've never

recovered from that because once I saw that to me the computer was no longer a

vehicle in the nation at risk report the

recommendation is that every child in the US should have one semester of

computers in their senior year of high school that's their strong

recommendation about computers and that's driver's ed that is treating the

computer like a vehicle it's not the cars aren't important it's that they

aren't central the central things to us are the media the intermediaries with

how we work with the world and if you can get rid of that slide that'd be

great I think everybody has figured that

out by now thank you the that led to

thinking of a computer in a completely different way this is a cardboard model

I made in 1968 just since become known

as the dynabook and we actually loaded

this cardboard model up with a variety of lead pellets to try and find out how

heavy it could be before people would always take it with them not find an

excuse to leave it behind and turns out

that the weight that we determined has not yet been reached by any computer company so this machine is still a bit

in the future but it expresses a different kind of relationship with the

machine and something that wants to start much earlier in the life of a

human being and so one of the ways of

thinking of it is if we compare these three

ways of looking at it we can say well where is the computer in the past it was

in the glasshouse today in personal computing it's on our desk and in the

future it's going to be with us all the time in California will weave it into

our t-shirts Nicholas said 10 years ago

that will know in the future appears when our cufflinks committed communicate

with our watched by means of satellite

it's when such hyperbole is not outrageous that you know a paradigm

shift has actually happened and as an interesting analogy here to the history

of publishing in 1400 AD there are three

hundred ninety two books in the Vatican Library one of the largest libraries in

Europe and in 1452 or thereabouts--

Gutenberg printed his first Bible and

that Bible the 42 line Bible was as big as the hand-written manuscripts that

have been so laboriously copied by monks during the Middle Ages and the

reason it was that big is that that was what books were if you look at pictures

woodcuts or you visit the modern

recreation of what a library was like then they didn't shelve the books most

libraries back then had so few books that each book had its own reading table

and the books were chained to it you look at this table table book with

chains the thing that comes to mind inescapably is a time-sharing bullpen

because these are institutionally owned items and Gutenberg didn't know what

else to do but to make them that size and much more interesting revolution

happened a few years later when Aldus now has a company named after him Aldus

Manutius who was a Venetian publisher did two remarkable things first he was

one of the major driving forces behind publishing things other than

Bibles and he isn't he and his sons over the next century published 40,000

different books most of them from gathering up Greek and Roman writings

spreading them all over Europe he did one other thing that will forever endear

himself to me he decided that book should be this big and he decided they

should be this big because that was the size that saddle bags were in Venice in the 1490s in other words Aldus realized

something very important and that is the books could now be lost and because they

could now be lost they could now be taken with they now could go out and

become a mass medium now again we're in

this interesting stage because we're not in a place where r we're willing to have our computers be lost watches their $10

swatch watches or something like that willing to have them be lost maybe a

pocket calculator it's not a tragedy if it gets lost paper and pencil it's not a

tragedy but still with our multi-thousand dollar computers sitting

on our desks we're actually still in the Gutenberg era and the interesting thing

about history is that nothing that happened between Gutenberg and Aldus

counted none of those behavior patterns

had anything to do with what happened in the post Aldus area as we went into the

16th century so drawing curves as a way

of predicting the computer doesn't work very well when you're in these interesting transition periods well

another way of looking at these three

paradigms is to ask what kinds of information do we use letter and numbers

with institutional computing fonts and graphics on modern personal computing

and as Nicholas likes the show with his imploding his teething rings for the

media lab as he likes to call them that it's going to be all media coming together because the computer is a meta

media its content is all media all

intermediaries that one is pretty much of a no-brainer but it's amazing

how long it has taken for that to even that simple idea to sink in how do we

print impact printing big laser printing

personal laser printers with personal computing and no printing as we move on

into the next ten years because the information is going to be too

interesting to destroy by printing it out right now is an index of how paltry

our use of the computer is that we can actually print it out and feel good about it we actually haven't heard

anything because our information for the most part is not in dimensionally

intertwined it's not in the form of a dynamic simulation it's not any of the

things that the computer is really about

field of interaction feels like line editing on institutional computing

layout on computers like the Macintosh

moving things around but in the new

paradigm it's going to feel more like conducting because we're going to move from passive information to active

information we're going to move from objects to agents and so it's going to be

a little bit more like summoning forth lots of assistance at different times

and checking out what their goals are and our they're checking out what our

goals are and and so forth so each one of these is a completely different way of thinking about it and one of the ways

of thinking about the differentiation between the institutional and the

personal here is that even when graphical interfaces were done in the

60s for the most part all interfaces were thought of their main task was

accessed to function so this notion that

inside the computer is sort of something like a big nuclear reactor or a power station there's all that function and

what we need to have is a way of getting to each of these pieces of function will

map them into control keys and and double control meta y keys and that way

of thinking about things and the revolution that made the second

paradigm the personal computer paradigm is going from that stance to realizing

that the main job of the user interface is to make the user aware of what the

possibilities are in other words the user interface now goes from being

control of function to a learning environment and of course I should

mention that the the main job of the

intimate computer user interface is to do a lot of learning itself so we go

from no learning or learning of the most back-breaking kind to making it easier

for the user to learn and then finally we want the system to learn how do we

give commands we have to remember everything and type see and point where we

are now and in the future is going to be asked and gesture because the computer

is going to be watching us not us just watching it what kind of languages do we

program it in weekly modular data

structured procedures cobol one of the surest predictions that we can make

about the future is that 10 years from now there will still be a lot of COBOL programmers this personal computing way

of doing things is pretty much object-oriented after right far fewer

lines of code and there's a new kind of programming that people are starting to do called agent oriented programming and

one way of thinking about all of these paradigms is to compare them with

architecture of taking a civilization like the Greeks whose main way of making

big buildings was post and lintel pilot block box like that and you get

buildings about this size and if you

want to make a building a lot bigger and let in more light this architecture doesn't work you have to change to a

different kind of architecture like the gothic arch and if you do that you can make

buildings much larger with about the

same amount of material and when they say just about somebody he doesn't have

enough bricks to make a wall that might not be a slam because you might have

enough bricks to make an arch he's got enough bricks to make an arch she's a

lot better off than people who only have enough bricks to make walls and of

course the big change in the last several hundred years is going from structures that just push against each

other to this notion of the higher

strength of materials under tension if you get materials that you can tense as

well as compressed you can make structures like geodesic domes that will

fit over all of the cathedrals that have ever been made in the world and these are completely separate ways of thinking

about things and one of the answers to the question that's the title of my

lecture is what is the next computer

revolution going to be like well it's going to be technologically it's going to be like what I just told you that

we're going to intimate machines they'll always be networked there will be

information utilities the systems will

learn and so forth now for many people this is big news but in fact if you go

back in the history of computer science you find people like Marvin Minsky and

John McCarthy writing papers in the late 50s and early 60s about this this

happens to be not just the fifth anniversary of the media lab but it's

also the 20th anniversary of Nicholas's book called the architecture machine

which is all about this third way of looking at things now for my standpoint

since I am not particularly enamored of technology this is a very incomplete

answer and I would like to try and go to

a different way of thinking about things that involves people much more strongly

and to do that we have to have some sense

of how people's minds work this is for

many years and in engineering is where the rubber met the sky because engineers

tend to like controllable elements and people aren't all that controllable and

as a behavioral mechanism we are exasperating and so there's been a

tendency of actually trying to get people to be more like machines rather

than the other way around and give you an example of why this is difficult to

deal with take a look at one of my favorite pictures here and what you see

here let's pretend we're in school because actually we are in school we're in a university let me give you an

English sentence about this picture what we've done with this picture is to take

a picture of a young girl extracted her eyes and mouth turn them upside down and

put them back into the picture and then turn the entire picture upside down that

sound reasonable to everybody okay so

having said that you should be completely prepared than for what it looks like right side up I'm going to

turn this back because I've discovered nobody will listen to me when it's on the other way so this is one of the

flaws of trying to give lectures in English because a nation is actually not

convertible except outside of the human

domain within the human domain we actually have different parts of our

brain that respond the things in different ways and this is one of the reasons why McDonald's doesn't run print

ads saying if you eat a McDonald's hamburger you'll become a better looking

person because in English it's absurd so

instead what they do is to run an ad showing pictures of really good-looking people eating McDonald's hamburgers and

a different part of your mind takes that

information and makes a different kind of inference the kind of inference that the ad people want you in fact we have a

part of our mind that thinks things are more true if they rhyme so if I were to say to you

a big mac and fries will slender your thighs sound more convincing the whole

idea here is that as people started to

suspect about starting about a hundred years ago with Freud Piaget Brunner

Minsky and Papert that what we don't have inside of our head is the oneness a

vast beautiful seamless fabric of

mentality but instead what we have is something much more like a patchwork quilt and in fact the patchwork quilt

has little mechanisms that pop us from one part of the quilt to another

whenever we get too close to one of the boundaries and it's you have to do things like this to show that there is

an actual patchwork quilt there so we have this idea of multiple mentalities

and Piaget was one of the first to study

the very different ways that children have of dealing with the world as they

move through stages of development early in a child's life an object is to grab

it a hole is to dig it thinking is doing

in many ways later on the child is more

visually centered child says there's more water in the tall glass when you

pour from the squat class the tall one because it looks that way and then

finally it around 11 or 12 there's a

facts and logic stage where logical operations are carried out and the child

can make deductions based on facts like there can't be more water because where

would it go where would it come from so forth now of course at least this was

true in 11 and 12 year old Swiss French kids in America there's a lot of

evidence that American kids never get to this facts and logic stage

now Brunner in the 50s and 60s redid

some of Piaget's experiments but he added some twists so he took the water pouring

experiment and after the kids said there's more water in the tall glass

Brunner put a cardboard so the kid couldn't see the tall glass anymore and

the kid would change his mind back say oh there can't be more and then Brunner

would take whip Brunner would take the cardboard away and the kid would say oh

but look there's more water Brunner would put the cardboard back and the kid would

change his mind again so if you have any six-year-olds you'd like to torment and

what Brunner was in his way was getting

closer to this idea of multiple mentalities as well that it isn't just a

metamorphosis like a caterpillar into a butterfly which is pretty much the way

Piaget thought of it but actually different modules being able to deal

with it within different ways and a change in dominance to express the

piaget expression now there are many things that you can do with this suppose

you wanted to design a user interface for a computer that was like a tool and

we have to think about what each of these mentalities actually does so an

example the body-centered one is the one that knows where we are in space we can

close our eyes and touch our nose when in touch our hands behind our back if

you blind us we can still orient ourselves but if we aren't as

unfortunate enough to suffer a brain lesion that takes part of a limb out of

our body map then even though it's physically attached to us it's like

somebody else's so this orienting

centering groundedness is something that the body mentality brings to us the

visually sent mentality is wonderfully

adept at dealing with various kinds of tricks for instance if we were to put a

hundred images of animals on a wall you'd be able to find the elephant

almost four times as fast as you could the word elephant if the images were

replaced words now let me try and experiment this I realize that this is a very academic

body here but let me ask how many people

here watch television be honest okay how

many people flip channels all right how

many people have ever flipped a channel randomly into a movie they haven't seen

for 18 years how long did it take you to

recognize that you'd seen that movie before how long yeah somewhere between a

half a second and a couple of seconds think about what that meant 18 years ago

you saw a movie you didn't know you're

going to be tested on it you randomly

without any preparation pop into the middle of it and all of a sudden in 30

frames or so of seeing that movie you suddenly recognize what it is think of

what that means in the context of your entire life most people can remember

what's going to happen next if you stop the movie after they've recognized that

they know what the next scene is going to be so that is a mentality that begged

to be exploited and what it says is that

we should always be able to present about a hundred things in the visual

field because the user can be aware of them subliminally and if we present them

in recognizable scenes the user can store hundreds thousands millions of

different scenes and remember that they

were there before then finally the symbolically centered mentality is much

more interested in changing things so if

its biggest problem is finding the right context because it is not a context

chooser so if your visual mentality work

the way your symbolic one the first thing you opened your eyes and saw in

the morning would be what you'd be staring at several hours later that

doesn't work so well so we have a grounding mentality we have a flitting

around mentality that's aware of lots of things and we have one

likes to make chains and somehow we should be able to put all of those things together here's one of the ways

whoops sorry can you turn that off please that's the end of the slides we

want to be able to put these things together and if we do we'll find

ourselves fitting much more closely to the way human mentalities work

so this is a 22 month old little girl and she has never lived in a world not

densely populated by Macintoshes her

mother is my accountant both her mother and father work at home each of them has

a mac this is back five years ago in 1985 and when I found out the little

girl was interested in computers I gave

her an apple to which she rejected she

wanted what her folks had now I have to warn you hear that not to be impressed

because this is not her first time on the machine she's been using the

computer for about six months so she's actually a fairly experienced user and

long time ago we designed this user interface for children but never any of

this young so it's really interesting to see a child used the machine that was

actually designed for them and so here

she's using the visible menus of mac paint and I saw it I thought all right

this is impressed i've i've never seen a child this young is this machine before but ok I it should work but then what

happened next really amazed me she wants a fresh sheet of paper so she goes to

the closed box on the window she saves her old drawing with a pop-up and she

goes to the pulldown to get a new one

well that was pretty and that was a home movie made by her father and we did

about another 10 hours of testing this child on various Macintosh applications

and we discovered it across applications she was about seventy percent literate

that is she could take a really complicated application like aldus pagemaker a desktop publishing

application started up make marks and it print the marks out save the marks away

get the marks back about seventy percent of the things that Macintosh users

expect from application to application she in her horizon already by age 22

months okay so that answers one question

about this notion a computer illiteracy

one when we're talking about situations

like literacy and illiteracy they don't really obtain when the object in

question is a professional that we don't

have a term called healtharcy and ill-healtharcy because medicine is a

profession there wasn't a term called literacy and illiteracy back in the

Middle Ages when writing was a profession as soon as you spread it out to the public you start getting

interested in these notions of can people access things made for them by

others that's like reading but what about the more important thing can

people make things that are like the things that other people make so here's

an example of something that we did about 15 years ago

and this is the logo turtle with a different architecture and it's a little

application like Mac draw object oriented illustration system designed

and built by 12 year old girl so this is an

end-user program not a program that you'd buy in a store for ninety-nine

dollars from egghead software has lots of features you can change size and move

things around because of the change in architecture of going from normal data

structure and procedure programming to object-oriented programming the amount

of code she had the right to do this application was only about a page long so this is not a large program and one

of the things that you have to do when you're working with any kind of novice user is make sure the programs they

write are not terribly long well so that

was an attempt to get kids and users to

be both able to access and able to

generate the same kinds of things that we're going to run on their paradigm of

computing but now we have a new paradigm of computing it's going to involve

agents and artificial intelligence so a

few years ago I got interested in the idea of trying to set up a design a

system that would allow children to do artificial intelligence kind of

programming in other words they would be making things now much less like robots

and much more like the gray Walter turtle things that mimic life in a

number of different ways I like to show you a bit of that project this project

is done in a rather large scale we have an entire school it has now 375 children

12 teachers and we've been working there for about five years and one of the

things that we found is that technology is not something that you can put in

like raisins in a plum pudding there's

all this other stuff is the entire life of the child that you have to consider

and the framework of the school we're lucky to find a terrific school

to Los Angeles bussing school so it's a

public school and the children are all shapes sizes colors Creed's ethnic

backgrounds bussed in most of them for more than an hour to get to the school

those of demographers paradise and we

found it very interesting to introduce ideas into the school in a gradual

fashion I'd like to show you some of those

so that the kids are all kinds of kids

and one of the things they've done here is to tear up part of their asphalt

playground and build a garden this

garden was actually designed by the children you'll see a little bit you'll get an idea of how children could design

something like this in in just a minute

and because we're studying animals as

well as plants they have a pond that has

all kinds of life forms and the children actually built this garden themselves

now I'm not going to explain to you what's going on here see if you can

imagine what it is now I'll tell you in a bit what are they doing with these

balloons well what they were doing is designing a city and one of the reasons

we do some of the design work with balloons is because urban renewal is

really easy the idea of to know the

world one must construct it because is strongly tied into designing a

programming environment for children because what we wanted to do is not so

much experience things that other people have set up to be more like experiencing

a television program or maybe an interactive video disc we want them to

actually make the simulations themselves because it's in making the simulations

that the active design is most powerful

now next few minutes I'm going to show you three large-scale projects that

we've been doing at the school one of

the things we tried to do here was to both challenge the kids and to go much

deeper than they ordinarily are asked to go by the state educational board this

first one is a year-long project in city building and

the kids that participate in it our third and fourth graders so there are

seven and eight and nine years old in

this project starts in September and runs through the entire year and this

will give you an idea of it I think this

is all almost all no no mrs. hansal tool

I know but they still are everything is part of anything

I know but there already something we should make something out of

this is already something, this is already something, this is already something

severything everything, this is only styrofoam everything is made out of something

I know everything is made out of something

from a balloon doesn't mean we don't have a design knowledge now to make

buildings exactly like they would have to make it a hundred years we're making

models ideas for what buildings could be

like in a hundred years we don't have the materials we're going to happen 100 years I did red stripes right

okay did you get that color name red red

what do you belviq i'm doing a factory

wait do it again and stay here and do

the character park you'll be the building y'all be the building yes why

on the prison and he's the building these the buildings okay welcome to

fantasy mall we have lots of stuff the

building collapsed he was trying to see the moon and there nothing collapsed my

apartment building and on the top is a

swimming pool never got this is a cold day in rainier so you can have an indoor

central and it's a hot you open it up and you can I here down here tomorrow

he'll be our future city is opening as you can see i'll transfer k our monorail

has just been strong

and all the buildings are beginning to look like buildings all the buildings

are being checked and painting now our

he cannot pick up the site husband useful because of the monorail and

transportation we now have these things on our site everybody that wants bad air

transportation land on your site must cabinet right Iggy foxes out

Commissioner tova cats design this whole

monorail see what household monorail and monorail station the Commissioner of

lands who doesn't exhaust you all for helping us with sidewalks these are my

sidewalks my bold earthquake tested and

alarming teleporting man he puts ebook

paper towel rolls on our site static patella to have it be a teleporting

station their cities he's getting to look like a real City try getting to

look like Judy Landers on the monorail calvada getting to Los Angeles cuz of

the help crowd is starting today less

crowded than it was when we were making our study models

then at the end we are gonna all duck down and put at our eye level to see what a person one inch tall would

would look at the building.

as Seymour I'm sure will echo when when you actually go into a school and start

working with the kids the first reaction is one of shock because the enormity of

the experience the amount of energy the amount of body learning that the kids

need to do completely dominates all the things that you wanted to do with

computers and the first thing you realize when you actually go into school

and do this stuff for real is that you better worry about curriculum far

outside the media that you're going to use because there's so many different

dimensions and this is a project in which most of the things that are

available on computers now are of almost no use the kids do a little bit of work

with Macintoshes in doing this but 99%

of it is this huge experience with doing

things with their hands and their bodies and crawling over the thing and so forth

so one of the objectives in this project

was to develop I don't want to say the word peach but develop every child as a

designer and it takes about three years

to get a curriculum like this self-sustaining so people who put try to

put curriculum in a school and measure it after the first year are making a big

mistake takes about three years to get something like this going and

self-sustaining now another thing we started about four years ago was to develop every child in the school as a

musician you may see some commonality

between those two ideas because music is

another one of these things that has lots of things interacting with itself

part of it is in the interest and what each individual thing is doing and part

of the interest is and how they interact we want the kids to be able to think about their world in those terms and so

we did each year we put on a musical

this year it was pirates of penzance and

this was the best one that we've ever ever had i have a few excerpts of it to

give you an idea the the oldest child in this is 11 the youngest child in it is 6

was completely voluntary the pool of children we had to work with for this

was about 150 children 120 of those 150

possible volunteered and appeared in the show they insisted i'm doing the entire

Pirates of Penzance line for line we

started off with one that was broken down they constantly wanted more we

wanted to go back they insisted in singing in four-part harmony where it was called for this is a perfect example

of something that the kids worked like dogs for four months on and put on a

fantastic show one of the best theatrical presentations I've ever been to hear some of excerpts

fishing

what I know what is it I met along and

revelry but I can talk site I'm now the

run home from a shadowy one such affairs are sorties and surprises I more wary ax

and when it opens Leslie what is meant

by common their progress has been made

it modern gunnery on the object another

in a nunnery in short one of smattering

of elemental strategy

hey

Oh

I'm telling a Terry story but it doesn't

although our darker rear sometimes involves the crime of stealing squealing

although my stripe we're always sorry to

me

haha

you may go Liberty our pirate rules protecting and kind of remembers our van

we do unless you are you x is as useful

things to be an orphan boy

oh happy days

oh happy day

oh happy

me I you haha

bball

so Joe Johnson said about thinking on

its hind legs well but one is amazed to

see it done at all and the trick in doing these kinds of things with kids is to get beyond that stage the only way

you can do it is by having something like music being a part of the child's

life all the way through their experience this is the first year in

which we all the children in it had been part of this enrichment now that's the

second way of dealing with complexity let me show you the third way and this

is because the computer some good and

here are we studying animals and we try and get the children to program not

robots but things that are much more biologically acceptable

now you might wonder where are the computers in this classroom well one of

the problems with these computers is that they're bulky so we took every

horizontal surfaces in the entire school out and replace them with tables that

have Macintoshes under them so there are hundreds of Macintoshes in the school

but they're all underneath the surfaces so the teachers don't want to move them

out of the classroom the teachers don't want to shove them around to the side they're just part of the normal working

environment of the school and they're on all the time no computer classrooms no

shoved against the wall

guys these are some animations we did a

few years ago and HyperCard just as an idea of what things might look like

eventually there's no intelligence behind these models hey guys i am going

for a swim in the scene

hey

if you're asking for every player has agent needs food and the whale come up

the way I also have some Asian food all right let me tell you why because when

the agent looks in his world what we're

seeing here is a they have seminars where they talk over different problem

solving strategies the teacher this particular teacher happens to like to

solve problems and she likes to discuss them with the kids then the kids have to

go off and figure it out for themselves it doesn't look at himself it looks at

the world beyond him so that's why it

only looks at those players who have food but it doesn't count himself but if

he asked for every player in the universe it would include himself and

this is kind of important for you to think about because when he when they

have to start giving birth to eat to themselves so they won't die off they

have to be able to count everything in the universe why Dean Cain

50 count how many there are like if

there was only one left in was himself competative journalist and then he left

bar and then he got true protein what's

my friend it was a whale who lived to know Jay just off the Pacific coast it

is the time of year when the whales migrate down to Mexico to me and to give

birth to their babies who were conceived the year before I do that you don't want

emotion thank you okay go to the top

works with those two on and I move away

now here's a more complicated one these these models use the Minsky and Papert

Society of mind architecture applied in

a language for children that was developed in part here at the Media Lab by Mike Travers one of the graduate

students here's a more complicated one the clownfish in the lower left is just

going about its business feeding one of the things that they do is to find a

favorite see an enemy and acclimate to it that's what it's doing now they spend

a little more time in the monks to poison of the enemy and gradually get

immune to it so that they can use it as a place to hide when some predator comes

a lot the shark right now is quite a distance away and it doesn't notice the

clownfish and the clownfish doesn't notice it

here's some more acclamation closer into the tentacles this time

now this lucky clownfish is been doing

it often enough so it is actually acclimated to the anenih me so when the

shark sees it and starts pursuing its

able to run back to the enemy and the shark can only get so close to the enemy

report backs off but of course it wants

to come back again

so computers are media to think with as

Seymour said so eloquently a long time ago in Nicholas's book 20 years ago he

said he dedicated it to the first machine who can appreciate the gesture

and I think he meant not the gesture like this but the gesture of having a

book dedicated to it he also said in the

preface of it that it was all beginnings in no end well I think that's the perfect definition of a research lab a

my answer to the question of what is the

next computer revolution it's the one in

which happens in the context of the

whole person and in the whole person's world that it's not just something that

we apply in isolation to solve small problems but it's one that like media

surrounds us as we've tried to do with the children thank you very much and

happy 5th birthday ok

you