Embark

It’s often difficult to coordinate across multiple apps to achieve a larger goal. For example, when planning a trip, separate apps can be used to book travel, plan routes, or see weather forecasts, but they don’t share broader context about the whole trip. Seemingly simple questions like “what will the weather forecast be for all the places I’m going on this trip?” are surprisingly hard to answer.

To solve these problems, we explored an alternate way to organize software: dynamic documents where users can write down a travel plan and then gradually enrich it with interactive features. Embark is a research prototype which enables this workflow by adding three features to text outlines: mentions of structured data like places and dates, rich views like maps and calendars, and spreadsheet-like formulas to compute things like weather forecasts and routes. Together, these features allow many travel planning tasks to happen directly within the outline document.