data-oriented design

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.

An LGR Oddware episode looking at Sony's MDH-10 MD Data drive from 1995, which used MiniDisc for computer storage years before Hi-MD. The host tries out the drive with its original drivers and software.

Google's 2014 reel introducing Material Design, a visual language based on a paper-and-ink material metaphor and a system of motion. It is a short promotional video.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.

A short archival capture of the 2001 Flash website of 2Advanced Studios, an agency known for high-end Flash design. It is part of the Web Design Museum's collection of early web design.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A one-minute archive video of the 2Advanced Studios v2 website from 2001, a showcase of the elaborate futuristic Flash interfaces the agency was known for.

Matthaeus Krenn presents a concept for car touchscreen UI where the screen controls only one thing at a time, designed to suit driving. A tablet prototype accompanies the short demo.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

A 49-minute demo of Palantir Foundry by its chief architect. It walks through data integration, ML and AI workflows, analytics, and application building across the platform.

Stuff Made Here designs and builds an "unpickable" lock, then calls in a locksmith to see if it can be defeated. It covers the mechanical design effort and the attempt to pick it.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

Stuart Halloway introduces REBL, a graphical, interactive tool for browsing Clojure data, extracted from Datomic tools. The talk is from Clojure/conj 2018.

AvE tears down a high-end KitchenAid stand mixer, looking at its castings, large DC motor and gear train. He also picks apart some design trade-offs.

mitxela shows his KiCad plugin that rounds PCB tracks to give circuit boards organic, melted-looking layouts instead of rigid geometric ones.

Matthias Wandel shows how his pantorouter, a template router machine, works. The flexible machine cuts joints such as mortise and tenon and dovetails, and plans are available.

Microsoft's 2015 concept video imagining how ubiquitous computing, collaboration services and data analytics might change work 5-10 years later.

A Belgian bank-safety campaign video in which a supposed clairvoyant stuns people by revealing personal financial details, then shows he found them all online. It warns viewers to be careful about what they share and about online banking security.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.

An art project by Simon Weckert in which 99 smartphones pulled in a handcart create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps. A green street shows as red, which diverts cars to other routes.

A short video of five people carrying a live, running web server across the city by public transport to a new datacenter. It stayed powered and connected to the internet the whole way, so there was no downtime.

A short demonstration of radioteletype (RTTY), a digital communication mode used in amateur radio, showing what the signal sounds like.

Linus Tech Tips backs up their petabyte server to Google's unlimited G Suite Drive plan and runs into the daily upload cap. It shows how far the 'unlimited' offer can be pushed.

Tom7 (suckerpinch) builds and evaluates a series of absurd hard drives, including storage made from ping packets across the internet. The video accompanies his paper and mixes deep technical hacking with comedic storytelling.

AvE tears down the Juicero cold-press juicer, examining its heavily machined parts, electronics and the pricey juice packs. He pokes fun at the product and venture-funded culture along the way.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science builds and operates a simple mass spectrometer, using it to measure potassium isotopes in a salt substitute. He explains the design choices and the theory behind it.

A 1990 Lotus sales demo of Improv, a spreadsheet built for the NeXT computer that rethought the grid with named categories and multiple views. The uploader, who tested it at Price Waterhouse, presents it as an early, innovative vision of the spreadsheet.

Doug DeMuro reviews the Rivian electric delivery van built for Amazon, walking through its quirks, features and design innovations. It is a long, detailed tour of the vehicle inside and out.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

A short NASA Goddard visualization from the GEOS-5 model showing a year of atmospheric carbon dioxide moving around the globe. It shows plumes from sources, hemispheric differences and seasonal swings as plants grow and die back.