Against Usefulness
This article explores the concept of 'Folk Computer,' an experimental physical computing system developed at Dynamicland. It highlights a shift away from traditional screen-based interfaces toward a collaborative, room-scale environment where physical objects act as programmable code.
Why it matters
It challenges the current paradigm of human-computer interaction, suggesting a future where programming is a physical, collaborative, and embodied experience.
Every useful company stands on rails that were once somebody’s stubbornly useless research. I invest in useful for a living. This essay is about the stage before useful, who works on it, and who pays for it, so that the next generation of useful companies has something to stand on. At Motive Force I back both stages. They need each other.
In June I stood in a warehouse in Brooklyn while a man handed me a piece of paper that was a running computer program.
A printout would have been a picture of a program. This was the program itself. He set it on the table and the system executed it. Then he connected a keyboard to the paper, typed a line of code, hit save, and the paper turned green. He unplugged the keyboard and the paper kept running, glowing on the table like it had always known how.
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