This is a communal environment. We want to create a form of computing which looks basically exactly like this picture. We call this “communal computing”. An essential part of that is being present in a physical space, working with physical materials, using physical tools. Because the real world is a shared environment that we can all agree upon. It’s ground truth. And there’s just so many things you can do with physical materials that you can’t do with pixels on a screen. You don’t have to code up a big simulation to manipulate these computational objects. The computational objects are just real things you can work with, with your hands.
— Bret Victor, Computational Public Space, Dynamicland, 2024