Climbing inside the machine

In Helsinki, there is a public playground where children learn how computers work. A six-metre tower you climb into as a data packet and slide out as output. A flowchart hopscotch where you jump through conditional statements. A binary abacus you move with your whole body.

Linda Liukas designed this playground. Some computational ideas translated into physical space beautifully. Others fell apart the moment they had to survive a four-year-old. This is a talk about the distance between an abstraction and a body, and the oldest question in computing: how do you make something complex feel simple, without making it simple?