Explorable Explanations vs Flowchart
エクスプローラブル・エクスプラネーション / フローチャート
Explorable Explanations comes from Reading on the Web and Flowchart from Diagrammatic Expression. One is technique and the other layout. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Explorable Explanations
The name Bret Victor gave, in a March 2011 essay of the same title, to writing that embeds a running model inside the prose. Numbers in the body text carry a dotted underline and can be dragged, and pulling one rewrites the rest of the sentence and the figure beside it at the same time. He described the result as a written argument whose assertions are backed by explorable computational models.
Flowchart
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The Gilbreths invented this process diagram for work analysis. Its grammar of shapes gives a diamond to every decision and a rectangle to every process, and by way of programming it became the common language for thinking in steps.
| Explorable Explanations | Flowchart | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2011– | 1921– |
| Family | Reading on the Web | Diagrammatic Expression |
| Kind | Technique | Layout |
| Cues | Numbers inside the running text sit on a dotted underline and turn blue when touched / Dragging one of those numbers rewrites the following sentence and the neighboring figure at once / Figures are not quarantined in a separate sandbox but sit continuous with the paragraphs around them / Untouched, the piece still reads, because the default values already make the figures meaningful | A grammar of shapes / The decision diamond / Arrows of flow / Start and end terminals |
| Best used for | Publishing an explanation built on a model, where readers should be able to change the assumptions themselves · Teaching material that has to show not just the conclusion but the conditions under which it flips | Getting a team to agree on a work procedure that branches · Surfacing branches and exceptions in a spec before implementation |
| Type | Set the prose like ordinary reading matter; mark only the live numbers, with an underline and a color, and never with a different typeface. | A question inside every diamond, a verb first sentence in rectangles |
| Composition | Hold the text to a single column of roughly 600px and place each figure beside or directly after the paragraph it belongs to, close enough that the handle and its effect share one field of view. | Main path down one column, branches right and always rejoining |
| Material | Limit the interaction to grabbing and dragging, with no input fields and no submit buttons, and always ship default values that already say something. | Each branch labeled with its answer, terminals only at both ends |
| Caution | If the content only shows up once the reader touches something, everyone who does not touch it gets a blank article. | Mixing diamonds and rectangles without respecting their meanings erases the line between decision and process, and readers guess. |