I've been thinking a lot about Joseph White's talk on his motivations for making the PICO-8 fantasy console. There's so much in the talk that resonates with what I've been thinking about for Constraint Systems: about how carefully selected constraints change the feel of working, making it feel more focused, and even cozy.
Since viewing the talk I've been thinking a lot about how he frames PICO-8 with the idea of a fantasy console and cartridges, and what I could do for framing Constraint Systems. I've toyed with the idea of making the Constraint Systems homepage into a simulation of a fantasy operating system with each experiment as an application. Part of the feeling I want to capture is going to the middle school computer lab in the mid 90s and trying out the strange collection of software the school had preloaded (even though the variety of the internet is great, there is something comforting and cozy in the idea of a finite number of programs to explore).
I had been thinking of the operating system metaphor as a fun, possibly attention-attracting, thing, that I should get around to sometime. After viewing White's talk, however, I think it's something I should prioritize. Framing Constraint Systems as a fantasy computer/operating system could (done well) communicate my vision of the project, and communicate it not in a long text somebody has to read, but as a general vibe. In the best case, they would "get" the project just by looking at the homepage. This is what "branding" is, I suppose, it just feels more tied to the core of the project here than I'm used to thinking of it.
Extensions of the idea:
- The simplest version is just presenting the Constraint System experiments as different apps on a fantasy operating system. I could also try and make them behave as apps. Possibly using iframes and a tiling window management system. A further step (that I've always wanted to do) would be to let you pipe the output of one application into another.
- Picking up on the middle school computer lab vibe, I wonder if Constraint Systems could someday be a physical computer lab, where computers limited to only CS software are available free for anyone to use, and I administer the lab and get to see what people make and can adjust or make new applications based on what people are doing with it. (I think this is at least a good idea for an installation or area at a hackerspace.)