Dr. Dobb's Special Report December 2000
The year 2000 marks Xerox PARC's 30th birthday, which makes it one of the oldest corporate research labs around. As a child prodigy, PARC became famous for developing the first usable computer system encompassing a mouse, graphical user interface, windows and icons, object-oriented code, networking via Ethernet, WYSIWYG text and graphic editing, laser printing, a page description language that would become PostScript, and possibly the first screen saver. These inventions and developments, which formed the Alto and later Star Computer, have transformed our world and in many ways defined what we have on our desktops today (albeit with a huge increase in speed). From a corporate perspective, PARC has had a large hand in transforming Xerox from an analog copier company into a digital document giant with over half of its $20 billion of revenue from highly computerized products.
The Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, is not the only research center within Xerox. There are sibling centers in Rochester; Toronto; Los Angeles; Cambridge, England; and Grenoble, France. What sets PARC apart from other corporate research centers is the uniqueness of its charter and the breadth of the methodologies with which it explores that charter. In its most succinct form, PARC researches "the workscape of the future." There are many reasons to engage in such an activity, from creating economic advantages for Xerox to helping form a better society. But most of all, it is because the best way to understand the present is to study (and invent) multiple futures.
We believe that, fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), there will be work in the future. But we also know that work will be different than it is today, and the landscape of work (what we call the "workscape") could be very different indeed.
PARC is a long, white, maze-like, three-story building perched on a hilltop overlooking the frenzy of Silicon Valley that has grown up around it. Green and ivory jasmine plants drip down from terraces and, on warm days, you find researchers sitting on the decks eating lunch, drinking coffee and talking, inventing, thinking. Inside, ensconced in their individual, highly networked, and computerized offices and labs, the 250 scientists and engineers who make up PARC dive deeply into the myriad fields of study that comprise its diverse and far-reaching research program.
It is core to the PARC philosophy that it requires a wide range of disciplines and perspectives to fully understand -- and make a difference in -- a domain as complex as the workscape. Hence, there are physicists, laser scientists, mechanical engineers, physical scientists, chemists, computer scientists, system designers, interface designers, security experts, mathematicians, hardware designers, economists, collaborative researchers, image recognition scientists, graphic designers, linguists, database scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and even artists (as part of the PARC Artist-In-Residence program). What is truly amazing is that there are few individual projects at PARC that do not also encompass multiple disciplines. But PARC is not just multidisciplinary -- it is cross-disciplinary. Unlike most universities, where each department tends to be separate from, and even competing with, other departments, PARC researchers work together, eat lunch together, design together, think together, study together, invent together, and, just as importantly, argue together. The compelling reason is simple: Few problems in today's world can either be understood or solved from a single vantage point. Even something as seemingly commonplace as the Internet is actually a deep interplay between hardware, systems software, workplace applications, group dynamics, aesthetics, design, and economics. The hard part, of course, is finding the common language in which to speak.
Visitors to PARC often ask: How many years out is the research going on in the labs -- 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? At the same time, because PARC is situated in a locale where years are measured in units called "time to IPO," the second most common question is: When will this be in the market? A year? A month? Next week?
The short answer is that PARC attempts to create things of lasting value. Some, such as new print technologies, often take a decade to come to fruition. Others, like new ways of displaying data using 3D graphics, are spun out almost as soon as they are invented. In that sense, PARC can move both slower and faster than the company, which must worry about both quarterly reports and a slowly changing customer base. But both long- and short-term projects are informed by the same deep, multidisciplinary, scientific, and intellectual thinking that permeates PARC from offices to lunch rooms. The inventor's basement brushes up against the academic experimenter. The result, sometimes called the "Ivory Basement," also presses in real time on the corporation, giving it direction, energy, ideas, and perspective.
So who are the researchers who inhabit PARC? They hail from 30 countries and more than half have Ph.Ds. But is there a sort of PARC Sapien genotype? Well, of course not, since their most distinguishing characteristic is their great diversity. But if there were, he or she could be defined sort of like this: The PARC Sapien would have a strong sense of philosophy, both old and new. I have heard researchers argue in the hallway whether Plato or Aristotle provides a better model for thinking about documents; and I have also heard debates about programming languages, operating systems, and design methodologies. PARC Sapiens agree that there are fundamental underlying principles to the world (which is why they write papers, and why these papers are as important as the artifacts they make), but what these principles specifically are...well, that's up for debate.
The PARC Sapien engages in a kind of visionary thinking and inventing for a world that doesn't yet exist but that might come into being partly because of the inventions themselves. Speculative design and engineering must draw heavily from science and art since the usual methodologies of user testing and customer engagement don't work in a world where users and customers haven't appeared yet.
But the PARC Sapien does more than simply envision new things and ideas -- he or she puts them into practice and builds real working models. They are hands-on people used to machine tools and programming environments. They are also, very often, the first users of their own experiments.
At the same time, PARC Sapiens are grounded in today's business practices. They are part and parcel of the Internet revolution and comfortable working with startups and even spinning out some of their own. PARC works closely with Xerox in moving new generations of ideas and products into the corporate pipeline and is actively engaged in licensing its large patent portfolio. The PARC Sapien has taken seriously the idea that there are many paths to the sea for a good idea whose time has come.
Lastly, and most importantly, the PARC Sapien has firm roots in an intellectual tradition based on the belief that only by studying and understanding the real world, from molecules to systems of people (or as the PARC motto goes: "From Atoms to Culture"), can lasting value be created. It is a scientific and a humanistic tradition, both of which are combined and intertwined at PARC.
Walking through the complex labyrinth of PARC (first-time visitors often get lost), you would pass hundreds of offices and laboratories. In each one, there is a different story; in each one, there is a different new idea fermenting. Here are some of the things you might see:
For a 30-year-old, PARC is still going strong even as it now lives in the world it helped create. Happy Birthday PARC!
DDJ