When Victor designs a software interface, he doesn’t do it to deliver functionality — he does it to advance an argument, in much the same way that 20th-century utopian architectural designs were never really intended as functional building plans. Victor’s UI demos are primarily manifestos on the sorry state of computer-assisted thought, framed with the same fire-eyed rhetoric of any Italian Futurist.

A talk entitled “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable” sounds like an interaction-design equivalent of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness; it’s actually a sober and rather technical demonstration of Victor’s various UI schemes for visualizing scientific models and engineering systems. And in the introduction to his “Kill Math” project — actually a quite benign, if broadly ambitious, attempt to reimagine mathematical notation in more intuitive and visual terms — Victor declares that “the power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.”

These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have. “We have these things called computers, and we’re basically just using them as really fast paper emulators,” he says. “With the invention of the printing press, we invented a form of knowledge work which meant sitting at a desk, staring at little tiny rectangles and moving your hand a little bit. It used to be those tiny rectangles were papers or books and you’re moving your hand with a pen.