Alan Kay at TED (1984)

I forgot to say something about what

it's like in my tell executive Alan Kay

is a former illustrator and potential musician I was just listened this one

Joseph Alan Kay is a professional is a former illustrator and professional

musician he somehow is he bachelor's degrees in mathematics and molecular

biology while working his way to school as a systems programmer for the National

Center for Atmospheric Research and spending most of his time composing

music the local theatrical production I mean exactly

amazing Alan has been involved with the

desired development of the first personal computers from there very early

inception and after a short stint at Stanford artificial intelligence project

he was one of the founders of 0 up to Palo Alto Research Center where was

Hennessey learning research group and the original designer of a giant of

personal computers and the small talk programming system and those of you that

don't know this the small talk is really where this came from this this type of

screen the overlapping windows and he

really was I guess you could call mother fathers of the first modern personal

computer after decade at Xerox PARC he

left became chief scientist at Atari where he is now he is still an avid

first amateur magician the classical

pipe organ is a member of the International Society organ builders who to paraphrase dr. Johnson it does not

play tennis well but one is surprised to see him play at all

[Music]

[Music] thank you

[Music] why ago when I was proselytizing about

the personal computer which I must

confess you I had a slightly different image than these boxes that have been

sold today I made a serious error which

was to talk more about some concrete

examples of what a personal computer might do rather than to try and convey

the spirit of what I felt personal computing was about and let people make

up their own ideas and what we come to after about 15 years now is some

interesting but rather slavish adherence

to some fairly old ideas and so what I'd

like to do today to briefly go through some thought processes that a designer

of these systems might have and get you to try and fill in the blank the

personal computer is not personal is it isn't what you want it to do it's not

what Apple wants it to be it's not what Xerox wants you to do it isn't what you wanted to be Genet isn't your personal

computer I see so much from industry

talking about these the Intellivision as the new America kinds of things how are

they there's main audience this is middle America and I I thought how

interesting it would be

because you happen to do you spent middle America and there's certain

things you might write it might disturb you then wouldn't allow you to feel

comfortable anymore I think it restricting content in that

way is not a way to deal with a medium the medium is the thing that has

billions of degrees of freedom and to be shaped in ways that the inventors of the

medium didn't anticipate so there's that it's no better than a tool and community

computer is not a tool the program to run on at our schools because they

directed degrees experience I mean the computer is a container for the newest

kind of kinetic art art that needs to

time like music and ballet and so forth it's a little more abstract but it is

that kind of material we call it a meta

medium because it's content there's other media you can see when you looked

at Macintosh that what it was doing was simulating some of the aspects of paper

that's trying to do some of the big things about paper like readability and

remove some of the bad things about paper like difficult to erase and hard

to insert and so forth but if you do lots of other things I know you all all

realize that computers can simulate music they continue like graphics we've

seen lots of that the most important thing about computers film does not read

or hear simulate but the possibility that you might be able to tailor the

things that are on there to your own use that is a reflective notion Rason and

aspect of notion I'm gonna talk that's really the theme of my talk is that if I

had to sum up my main complaint about 20th century especially the time that we

live in now that it's almost in tow almost totally devoted to access to hit things

that get the glands going but which lesion was almost nothing to reflect on

even in the next minute let alone the next day I was on they says a

blue-ribbon panel that was convened by Disney to go down and evaluate F tot he

did in high style for three days or so and these people who actually from the

same kind of background as the people in this content had many opinions about

Epcot but there was one unanimous one and that was that none of the exhibits

that Escott had any follow-up so he's a suspension to a quite a wonderful

exhibit called lands where you could go through the standard Disney

[Music]

almost an almost totally devoted key

access to his hip things that get the glands going but which we she was almost

nothing to reflect on even in the next minute let alone the next day I was on

they says a blue-ribbon panel that was convened by Disney to go down and

evaluate F Scott he did in high style

for three days or so and these people who actually from the same kind of

Batman as the people in this conference had many opinions about Escott but there

was one unanimous one and that was that none of the exhibits at Ascot had any

follow-up so these are instance a quite

a wonderful exhibit called the land where you should go through the standard Disney

[Music]

well after you got off that ride there wasn't even a stencil on the wall telling you where to find out anything

more he wanted to learn something there wasn't a pamphlet it wasn't a bookstore

there wasn't a any graffiti done with

spray paint there was nothing and so they brought you up this place where

you're now interested like the Road Dogg and the commercial who heard the name of

the Bao and started juggling balls and

balancing tears and stuff and then they just drop you came up with something

like water or American beer or something

like that so I think that if we think

we're in the media business and if he

thinks that we're designers and we have to think of something different than the

computer as a box maybe using something different than the computers as a

vehicle

the interesting that though IBM hasn't worried about interaction in

geologic time in the auto community

starting around 1961 or so the whole

focus and interest of that community has been to develop the computer as a

symbiotic Asian an amplifier for human read this is not a new idea was not

invented by Apple was not invented by Xerox goes back long ways and it's

actually intellectual precursor of this is a wonderful article which is called

as we may think written by Vannevar Bush

in 1945 as we published in Atlantic Monthly and he's produced a number of

things including Drive photography but the major part of the article was

devoted to a machine he calls mimics which is thought of as a small desk

light thing with two or three screens on it and a way of pointing that

information and in here by using various optical storage techniques we do the

contents of a small town library five or

eight thousand volumes and the principal thing he did with this was to be able to

lay down your own information trails there were already built trails with the

idea is that you could lay down your own trails and these became new information

in that system that article was the inspiration for the ARPA funding in

interactive computing in 1961 that led to the first time sharing system that

led to the first computer graphics led to the first pointing devices the first

truly higher-level languages to artificial intelligence and all of those things came from that idea and in fact

in many ways the third of the sixties was much more adventurous than the

seventies or even the eighties back then the

good million dollars but the kinds of

things that we're done on them were not fettered by any theory of making them into a product they're done solely to

try and amplify some aspects of human reach so I thought what I would do is

since we're talking about the future is to give you four way to think about it

to help predict the future and the first one is when we started up jirachi

had jocks executives coming out of our ears the first couple of years being

very anxious saying what is the future going to be like what if a Japanese

gonna do what is gonna happen to us and everything else and I finally says

what's the best way to predict the future is to invent it it is not

something that's going to happen to us it's something we're gonna make happen that's what research teams are all about

we will have a vision of the future we will make a division vision if you can

as long as that doesn't violate too many of Newton's laws we can probably make it

work now there's a difference between a

clear vision and a good vision I think

the hardest thing to get is a good vision we heard about a clear one last

night about Kennedy's clear vision that we should put a man on the moon in

before the end of the of the decade I think to me that was a fairly terrible

vision and I'll tell you why because it set back safe travel 20 years and he

didn't say let's invent space travel said let basically let us show us the

Russians what we got out of that was everything except space that we did get lots of good technology we got even more

management techniques for managing 300 thousand people and twenty four billion

dollars the NASA people say themselves if that was the greatest single fallout

was learning how to do really large projects but what we couldn't get is

space travel and we don't have it today there's no travel to the moon

travel to Mars there's no travel to anywhere in space were going up in orbit

like he did in 1963 so an important idea

I think is when revision is formed it

has to have several characteristics one is it has to be a rather long range vision because it unfortunately it's a

very long time to get things done and out the door in our business this is the

second point it takes 10 years to get something out into commercial life from

a new idea in the laboratory the first personal computer actually wasn't the

the ENIAC it was done in 1963 and I just

went to the 20th anniversary of it a few months ago with John sponsored by NIH as

a machine called the wink took 10 years ago from that machine does a marvelous

little device $10,000 in 1963 was own

virtual memory its own display screen its own into a certain budget several

thousand of them were built it took ten years to go from that to the Xerox Alto

which is the first practical personal computer in 1973 first video game was

done in 1962 on the TV one called space war Andy Nolan Bushnell his first game

was called computer space and it came out in 1972 so you see the 10-year time

constants and in those 10 years are usually two or three very long very

bloody implementation efforts and it is almost unheard of for those 10 years to

take place in a single company almost always we find a disillusionment

cherry-picking people moving on and so forth and what happened at jerash Park is no

exception for 10 years that's the time constant I

couldn't afford to believe in long ago but I'm afraid it's really true third

thing is when you're dealing in media instead of tools we have to face up to

the kind of cycle that media John who over the last thousand years

four main parts to it is a hardware intensive phase where most of the

profits are made by margins on the hardware whose as to in publishing as it

has been in the computer business then

we as people learn to build Hardware the margins go down to zero because the

hardware is always the easiest thing to build have an industrial revolution you

can build paper like crazy and all of a sudden you go into a software stage

which completely changes everything around why because software is always been a

cottaging industry basically something

that unless there is a power structure in control almost anybody can make up

software for the medium and usually what happens is a really smart hardware

company will go into distribution in order to control that because no

software publishing house has ever been able to control all of its known authors

and stay in business you have to go in and distribute other people's things the

software part has a novelty phase and a value say what happened to atari last

year was a an abrupt switch from a novelty stage to a value phase for the

cartridges that they were making a substantial part of their income on it

happened about a year earlier than I thought it was going to happen can

happen abruptly as soon as the users have sophisticated all of a sudden it's

not a citizen band radio anymore that they want to sell us they don't know

it's cellular but they have realized that they this new gadget has only 40

channels and they can't call their friend across town even if he has one

it's not a real communication system all of a sudden want something real

and the citizens band radio goes in the back of the closet and wait for that

value agent piece of technology to come along now the most important phase I

think is the next one this is the one that is absolutely critical to thinking

about this new field that we're in and that is the service safe I think that's

actually the big revolution in my own thinking about personal computer which happens in 1968-69 really came about by

understanding that the computer was not a piece of hardware it was not effusive

software I thought I was being very adventurous back then in from bundling

the tea together designing the hardware and the software at the same time so I

finally realized what the computer is is a gadget that delivers service that's

what people want and want service from this is a service concept it's not a

hardware as a software concept service is a bundling of attributes to satisfy a

person for teach me the Japanese sell

their cars more like transportation services than they do but as p.m. did

for so many years as a menu ICICI that you could buy and having 300 horsepower

or 400 horsepower or a suite or Chrome or x2 tail fin

service and that service area is the one in which medium development is most

critical it's the one that tells you what to do my main bit about the way personal

computers have done over the last decade is that it has been very far away from

that idea since we're selling the hardware system on the live stage that

we're talking about now software is all over the place software delivers for service an

integrated concept that we see in Macintosh is wonderful I'm glad that Apple is doing that but we have to

realize that those ideas go back to 1972 and so what we must ask is where are the

things that we actually need to the 1980s now the final stage and this four

part thing is when a service becomes a way of life like this like a telephone

telephone a way of life is that gadget

that you only notice when it isn't there we immediately notice if they weren't

telephones in our hotel room we knew we know that if we didn't have one of these

things and I think that's the destiny of communications media to be pushed

towards being a way of life providing they fit in to all the crevices and

mundane ADIZ and amplification needs that people actually want now last we're

bringing to the fourth idea for predicting the future I think everybody

has realized by now that market analysis doesn't work very well it's not clear

that even worse over a two-year period and they absolutely has been disastrous over anything longer than a senior

experience the Xerox machine is a perfect ation point guess our writes in

his book about how they took the ID Xerox 914 to eidm he said we don't have

enough money to build factories for this why don't you build it and just give loyalty an IBM went to Arthur B little

in Cambridge and said should we and our Sydney little after an 18-month market

survey came back and said no nobody will pay a nickel a copyist to expense that

nobody copies like that is not enough copy volume that was many billions of

dollars ago des hours Brooks was called my years with Xerox the billions nobody

wanted and Jacqueline the two scientists

who asked just retired and he's writing the book I said Jackie should call it me

Roxanne the personal computer the billions they didn't want because again

we have this recognition problem you ought to give it to itself you may not

know this but these jobs worked for Atari and in fact the Apple one was

taken to Nolan Bushnell Lee who then president of Atari and was turned down

there's not being a valid concept this

is after Nolan had left Ampex because antics wouldn't believe in the idea of a

video game so all of these things led to

a saying that I made up with his point of view is worth 80 IQ points the reason

is that after Xerox turned down all the stuff that had been built apart

I met after a year if I'd met him the

next day I would have killed him but after a year I met the person who

made that decision and realized to my great surprise that he was not a dodo as

Ayakashi is just a perfectly reasonable rather intelligent who asked executives

who had no possible way of evaluating the decision that he had to make he made

the wrong one and that changed the face of computing in America but he himself

was a copier executive and he had no way

of telling whether what we were doing was just something interesting in the lab was something fundamental and I

believe that is the number one problem in doing something interesting with

technology the tendency is to cater to the marketing people to basically not

into the value systems that the really good technologies and bring about so

there's a real tendency towards building the trivial and leaving out the Olympian

gestures which I think are what we need many more of all right I guess the one

thing I should say about the de Buono IV I never like that when I read the Bono's

but because who wants to be in a hole even if it's a new one I think it's much

better to find a hill and climb up on it you can see a lot farther in a hole all

you see is dirt maybe you're dirt but it's still only dirt that's easy to a

good quote by Heinlein which says the strongest weapon you have is the one

between your ears providing that's loaded

I'm very close to being a Luddite and

reason I am is because the this is a technique crazy century we've finally

found out how to make technique work for us and there's led to enormous

technologies we've been talking about over the next days that has led in

musical conservatories to the faster

Chopin major third F has s leads been Val the phenomenon of piano players and

stuff it is basically an age that is extremely interested in the quantitative

and has extreme difficulties we're dealing with any value system and this

is disastrous so what I'd like to do is

just show you a couple of quick slides

and give you an idea what a vision was like back in the early 70s and then in

the few moments remaining get you to think about along with me about what

could this thing be so that is a place where you always start off we have to

start off with values saying what could this be don't worry about the technology

honestly if not us than the Japanese can

probably make a display out of this wooden floor if they wanted to it's not

really that difficult glorifying

technology is is is like deciding that

the layout of an ad is good but the message of it is bad and therefore it

stores it ads I don't think that's the way to think about it okay

if you could focus out a little bit that'll do

well this is just memory lane this is a

machine that I was the co.design arose in 1968 and it was not the first

personal computer as I mention it's always a second one as you see it had

all of the things that we have come to recognize have a high-resolution display

stream that had windows it had a tablet

for pointing and had a keyboard and this

machine ran a little hotter than the Macintosh it had almost 700 ICS in it so

you could we have a little perch on the top of it for heating our coffee pots

but the nonetheless if it ran a higher

level language that was almost an almost a pure object-oriented language so it

had all of the things that people are writing about now in Time magazine the

unfortunate thing about this was that it was a total disaster when we tried it

out on our users now users were people were supposed to be doctors and lawyers

and engineers professional people who needed to wield a tool on their own

behalf and in fact I discovered that I'd done a terrible job even with Windows

and all of these things in doing the human factors of interaction now that's

the first time I ever thought that the human factors of interaction was really

important now it's come sense to believe that it is the employee saying because

it's the only thing that user ever sees no other thing in the computer is

important and it led to the idea of the

Box not being very important to look at that system and you realize that there

are only a few square inches not cubic inches that are important that's the

face of the display string and almost everything else is superfluous so we

turn the slides off for one second

after working my wounds for a couple years over there cuz it's really painful

to put blood into something over a period of some years and haven't turned out to be a disaster and so I went on to

get other things for a while but thinking about it in 1958 I had also

seen the first flat panel display at the University of Illinois and I realized it

was not going to be too long before we could do away with all those cubic inches and start worrying about the

square inches account and also at Utah

Ivan Sutherland had done his head mounted display when he played to put on

like glasses and actually walk around in their display area so when I went to

Xerox with our lure of 10 10 year blank check funding these were the two

physical ideas for what a machine in the 1980 to be and of course why were we

thinking the 1980s because we had 10 years and so we just exploited the

hardware out and decided yes machines like the Dynabook are definitely

possible these are to form now I put that big green question mark here

because I don't believe that these are the only forms in fact I believe

something more like what niche means Oh Ponty talks about in the first lecture

maybe even more appropriate now the glass is one I think is going to work

out for a variety of reasons it is the

only thing in which you do not have to worry about how large you display is the

entire world and the glasses at Utah

measured where your head was looking so as you looked around the display would

change so you'd have something over here and something over here and used to walk

through the display we even did a thing where we made the speed of light 1 foot

per second those runs that things you were acting like a photon and the

display would collapse away from you using the relativistic transforms so you

could experience different physics specific experience what it was like to get close to a black hole without

getting not

now the problem was almost all displays is officially small that is where the

overlapping windows came in from it's not a feature it is a bug saying they

have it turned into a religion now really makes me worried a little bit because you realize about what you

really like to do is have everything spread out so you could see it the overlapping window saying was done

because you don't have that much room you still would like to be reminded what's on the street I don't see that is

the display that is suitable for thinking about now and should not be

doing that okay back to the slide

citizen machine we built in the 1973 eventually build about 2,000 of these

the pledge we took at Xerox very

different from the way we've done things before that we've never build a system there was not engineered for 100 users

so all of a sudden before I was totally bubblegum together and it barely works

for the designer here we decided we're going to have to set up a community hook

together with the network and work with it for several years so the screen there

was that tape because the DynaVox was that shape the dots are on and off

because we thought liquid crystal would be on an R now why would anybody in the

right mind use a video display that can do great GL modulation and just do on

arras docks especially when you saw what

mission kapaa need to do with saucepot you can get much higher subjective

resolution by using grayscale modulation

bitmap displays today are slavish adherence to something that was

originally done to simulate a liquid crystal display in fact I still have a

bleep marks on my back from Xerox management when they were doing the star

and I tried to talk him out of going with a bitmap but it was too late what

they understood was that bitmaps were good that was their their take on it and

he didn't want to think about what it meant for human being to sit in front of

a display the infamous now well we

didn't invent it Mouse was actually invented in 1965 at Fri why did we use

it well because we didn't have a good touch sensitive display

why are people using it now I don't know

there must be a reason but in fact for

immediacy and contact he is possible to

use it a touch-sensitive display much better in fact the Dynabook was designed so that you only displayed the keyboard

when you need it don't really want a keyboard for hardly anything except

certain times of Tyson and the rest of the stuff you want to be as close and immediate as possible original jiying

the books did have a stylus in it for doing high-resolution kinds of things so

what we have what we have here today are several technology that was therefore

expedient reasons back in 1972 when hardware is very expensive and for

purposes of simulating a flat screen display that have no relevance today and

it is no good saying that this is better than the IBM PC because those are

judgments have no place in art we don't care whether a Beethoven symphony is

better than a bronze seems to me what we care is is it good users or not and I

think that is the design ideal that we should need to grow it

so here's the first KT system this is John in 1972 this is the pictures of men

and this is a system that Stuart brand used that year I might mention here that

the Whole Earth Catalog was a tremendous influence on the Dynabook design because

the Dynabook was always thought to be a network system not a standalone system

that's another bug in the personal computer market a computer computer is a

communications device first second and third that is what it is for because you

communicate with yourself through it like he do his paper and you should be

able to communicate with other people and other resources critically important

so here's I thought you'd be interested in a pictures from 1972 the LTL had

about 30 or 40% more dots than the Apple Lisa and those dots were half the number

of dots we thought when necessary had 500,000 dots to camp we had thought to

the million necessary again the ability to do things that the human eye can read

and appreciate are incredibly important

in old pictures in the dating text and drive the pencil was one of our favorite

metaphors remember portability is not point-five herniation per block really

isn't the phrase I made up back then was something so portable you can carry

other things too

like two sacks of groceries the idea on a personal communications medium is you

don't want to ever give the person the opportunity for deciding to leave it

behind or you missed it you've missed

the service aspects of it and you've totally missed its possibilities for

becoming a way of life absolutely critical is one of the earliest window

things Windows as I think everybody knows that actually the back end of

telescopes that look into different information systems the ones with the

multiple panes they were designed by Larry Tesler who is now at at Apple and

they're used for browsing one of the earliest of the innovative text and

graphics editors where the token

astrak-- is being created they're just

going blurry more and more blurry and you can see that the painting system in this on the alto is integrated into the

document so that you didn't go out to some separate system but it was just one

of the many times of Paris so you can think of a paragraph as a window can't

you sort of a rectangular saying and some paragraphs can have pictures in

them some might want to have draft and then some might want to have animations in them some might want to have text in

them and the document is really the

system concept that unifies these this

is an interesting program so that was the first time that real time note

capture was done was done by a 15 year old child not I usually travel I didn't

wasn't planning on talking here I had the slides long because I'm working on a

a talk in a couple of months from now I usually travel with movies and

videotapes reason is is that as we Harrison said long ago he says the

picture may be worth a thousand words but if it moves

and it's no good talking about a kinetic art like I am and show you static

pictures but that's the best we can do today so this you could just play in and

it would capture the notes and one of the earliest programs is this is a

musical notation that we use for teaching children there is much easier

for them to use than the standard one and this system was its own synthesized

he didn't have to hook one on to it the system was simply fast enough to do

essentially what the synclavier does were 12 real-time parallel voices and

you could just walk and you could be define all of the time which by simply

drawing in on the screen this is a an

animation system that was originally designed by Eric Martin who is here has

done in 1974 and this is as modified by

a child to add feature to and this to

deal with about any objects that large in multiple claims in real time early

planning system showing a resource

allocation this is a non procedural

advantage system particularly like visicalc except we construct diagrams which automatic ones so the system for

instance does not know anything that electrical circuits as we visit cows you

may bind hearing drawings and tell one what they need so if you're used as a

calcio tell the resistors your your rulers on law but mother complications

visicalc if they have a deal with very complex apologies and so just the edge cooking a circuit gather will make run

and build a variety of simulates that way we worked without six or seven

hundred children done before 1976 by the way here's a set up in a classroom in

one of the terrazzo school worked with several hundred adults which is good you see the adults to a lot

denser than the and the kids I this is the tea scientist of Xerox Jack Goldman

now what do you say thank you talking of the technology doesn't help

you so much in fact he's out in a managed I'm is not as cool as last night

we're talking about EEG and I see the letters CPR test and coming to my little

she'll be doing something I'd rather have you all on exercycle Tom Lehrer

said that Brinkley and humbly discussing contrapuntal II okay that's enough

housewife that's great the kind of

questions that would be interesting for you as well as us I think would be he's

been getting reflective hips for three

four days and some of them presumably are still festering if the good ones are

and maybe raise questions that come out

of that process the things that you're puzzling about that you would like to

keep puzzling about and you wouldn't mind either both of us puzzling at with

you question right here

[Music] you don't like the expanded challenge

the reinforcement procedure bloody life

a problem that you solved and here's the solution congratulations and the screen

flashes on an off little music plays and then what

well I think the the question is does it

get you close to the Mississippi to remember that poor person that was to

move the big ball up the hill and then down again every day I think that is

that is a metaphor that's been used for a to title loop in the challenge but if

you think of the rewards for learning how to drive a car is not just the

gratification of getting to where you want to go but the challenge of

exploring I think it's a very dull person indeed that just uses their car

to go down to the grocery store they eventually get the idea that they can go

to places that they haven't thought of before and do it and I think that what

Stewart was referring to is something more like what I was saying in the

secondary the effective hit is this reward thing and the reflective thing is

the thing that may not happen in the first few seconds but that as the

emotions start to drain away they'll go very quickly if there isn't something to

hang on they're not hanging on is usually thinking more about it which is

illuminating the challenge a little bit further sure I think it's you can

imagine you know taking Stuart Sasson analogies and imagine me the horrors of

a video game designed to challenge you but you know they they say the Highland

Fling was invented by putting a Scotsman in front of a pay toilet

the typical conflict of interest there I

think that kind of a challenge is not a it's not a good idea how many people

have tried taking shooters one two or three if you're messing with keyboards

at all it's one of the quickest change

your life programs you can hang out with because they have some interesting

elements if not only knows immediately

if you're hitting the right key very

easily you begin and we easy to get into exercises but and notices how quickly

you hit feet and gives you a little chart that your left little finger is

still lagging behind the rest doesn't punish you for that in just indication

you know the charge they just call my fingers and it gives you more of the

keys for that finger it knows where

you're slow and in pick you up and my

job you can become a quick typist quick with these programs or circles and I

think so far taking shooters today let's

attack you on the butt no but as soon as

you turn off that program and put in anything else you're typing like a bastard and back patting you on the butt

maybe the question is whether you're the

successful program is challenging you without realizing it the experience of

learning to play tennis can be extremely painful or fairly rewarding and it often

has to do with how judgmental you are as you're going through the thing so the

talents may be something that you're simply looking forward to I thinking and I sort of run music into two classes

there's music that the more you understand about it the more mundane

and there's other musics that the more you understand about it the better

things that opens up it's like learning about the molecular biology of the cell

which is one of the most beautiful stories of all time the more people find

out about the more wonderful it is to experience this and it's that opening up

thing so I think that the media shouldn't be that we shouldn't be

sending the message that this or that is good but the message system that the

media could present is that there's more than one way and it gets better and

those these little ramp functions so I

think let people choose their own tabs and I think it's those little ramp functions that we as designers should be

trying to understand what they are we shouldn't be packaging religions so I

don't think a ramp function is religion it's excitement

[Music]

Marvin denna coxswain said you can get through your 40s without a plan but you

have to have a plan for 50 and I will be

53 in 10 years so I guess I should start

making a plan so I think the I see the

trick on all of this for I think design

is simply finding a way of reentering

yourself as though you hadn't done

anything before but all that stuff that you've learned is an arsenal that you

can bring to bear after you've gotten the next idea and going out the other

way it's really difficult because the tendency is to use those old ideas as

the form of the new design that's disaster you get trapped into a very

narrow genre so I think that's something that everybody who works creatively and

I think that's most people have to say is how to find those vintage music is

wonderful because you can't run out of it Truman said about Bach's music system or

you understand that the better it is you cannot you cannot die unhappy having

experienced by and that's surely one of the great experiences of the universe

that we live in one that has that kind of richness in it and I think everybody

has a love like that knows what I mean their personal laws that are the most

important things about humanity I think

and yes the hackers made space for

enough for planners [Music]

I'll be 55 and not the snail was getting

larger and larger with a burden of one's own tasks riding around a certain extent

success and this is this either success

or soon to be successful bunch it's

mostly all reward that and I think it's

one of the one of the peculiarities that we see with the personal computer realm

right now and maybe this is true of other aspects of Technology and entertainment is that people like us are

so enormous ly rewarded for being about a half inch in front of what everybody

else is doing that why ever would we be

interested in what's two or three feet in front of what everybody else is doing and so this successful bunch of people

may be more inclined to meteorite and

others who have more commentary or that

we're way out there out of sight not able to know about or come to gatherings

like this and will come through and make a hell of a tale and then you know do it

again I don't know the metaphor may break down but I am aware very much it's

only saying of how much what I have done gets in the way of what I want to do I

had a wonderful afternoon once was

Milton Friedman who I didn't expect to like as much as I did completely coming

in and I asked what was the effect of Nobel prizes not a very original

question on the Nobel Prize winners and he said well you know I wasn't going to

take it but they just given it what's his name the year before who was

a conservative economist and if I hadn't taken it it would have been in the same

salt to him and I didn't want to do that so I took the Nobel Prize and I said

well to get in your way he says I don't know yet but I can tell you generally

that people should change their professions a couple of times and

there's a couple of break points and they said the yours is probably coming

up question

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

well one of the things I was gonna say

this morning I left it out for time purposes is that there's an interesting progression drawn from source three or

four different sources one one is Piaget who points out that the three major

stages in his development for children

are a bodily conscious phase the hole is too big a visual phase and a symbolic

phase has finally gotten into around 12 each one of them has its own rules of

logic Bruner the psychologist at Harvard showed that those phases are not

sequential but are all going on at the same time and there's a dominant change

because you can switch people who are on the boundary from one to the other and

back again very easily had a large there was a

great mathematician french mathematician that ramp right after World War two did

a famous study called psychologic psychology of invention in the mathematical fields we took the hundred

people he thought were the greatest mathematicians on earth and interviewed

all of them this is when he was about 85 when he did this and of those 100 only

to claim to use mathematical symbology for doing this thing all of them used

visual and about 30 percent of them used muscular sensations Einstein particular

had kinesthetic sensations as he said of the muscular type and so one hand ways

of thinking about that is that creativity is a way of reaching back

maybe back to other evolutionary brains if you believe the three vain idea that

going back through the visual certainly through a loosened set of rules and back

all the way to body knowledge when we teach children how to program and logo

we can get them to draw new things like drawing circles which high schoolers

can't do in basic because their body knows how to draw a circle providing you

in the right coordinate system circles x squared plus y squared equals

R squared which is a bitch for anybody nobody remembers it and it's hard to

write the program but in logo which uses child centered coordinates you close

your eyes inertial coordinate that is

exactly what a circle is the differential equation of the circle is constant curvature just going a little

and turning a little the same than that and so kids body

you can teach five-year-olds a lot of mathematics ask that level you're not

teaching them differential calculus ask the level of mathematical symbols but

you can teach them calculus at the level of their body knowledge if you have a

language that can deal with that and that's why that's in logo it was put in

there specifically for that purpose and again you have these three ways you can

tell somebody you can show them and you can get them to do it I think we all

agree that getting them getting to do it involves you in a much more visceral

fashions like Stewart is saying was a big guy with the pulling the paper out

of the slot there that the I think that the way of approaching this is to try

and teach all three of these cognitive systems and to realize that the oldest

one is the is the one that at least understood and has the most varied

knowledge which is the muscular one it is the one that really deals with navigating around the world we can be

blind and we can still find their way around there's a whole set of body

knowledge and this is really where as benoit mandelbrot said yesterday one of

the one of the things that he did was with there was most critical is to bring

back the visual and I would say even bring back the body in mathematics that

is where all as euler was one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived

said science is what you use after you guess well and in fact he was a

notorious guesser because almost none of his spirit the proof that he supplied

for his feelings were valid but almost all of the theorems were true his PhD

theses for generations exaggerate students of finding the real proofs were

one of Euler's feeling when I don't know

how to answer a question which they don't know how to answer you I generally pointed something I just now pointed at

Alan but something else I would point out is the video disc Emin stration

that's a group on ahead of the talking he has the four faces that were maybe

not all of you heard the discussion after that where someone asked what was

that work done for and he said I thought everybody knew it was done for the top

of the American chain of command cabinet officers who would succeed each other in

the event of nuclear war and all this

because you can't have all the most people in one place it was him all at once the speaker the

house is somebody will be in charge and they don't want that so you know the

secretary of this match those two different locations underground but they

wanted to be able to communicate each other with each other in a way to preserve that nuance assuming that

nuance might be of the essence if somebody was saying mr. president I

don't think we should bomb them just yet you know not not not really want to sort

of get across as informations you can

indeed be though that then the president

turns is interrupted and looks that the person who's interrupting the acknowledges the interruption and here's

a mouth that's visual it's kinesthetic

it's a lot of things it's pretty important to communication that's been

important question

[Music]

[Music]

the secret to whatever success I've had is that by circumstance I've always

treated computer science as a hobby and so I've never you should see me when I

get at the console of an organ I go absolutely rigid was right and yeah I

don't want to fail at that and I've never cared about the computer science

stuff it's always been great fun it's the ideal unification of all the things

I've been interested in all my life and I think that the the question of

intuition is largely two things one it's just less letting them happen because

everybody has them the other one is throwing away almost all of them because

the a good project takes as long as a great wonder and after the I think the

trick is to pick pick and choose ones where the ideas will still be

interesting after you've done those horrible implementations to try them out

and no I don't I think that the I think

everybody a lot when when I was at Parc we had lots of heavy-duty thinkers there

and they really fell into four or five different classes there completely

different ways of looking at there are people there who were unbelievably brilliant so we just deal with

complexity directly Butler Lampson is

certainly one of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life he talked twice as fast as mine works twice

as fast he remembers twice as much in

just a remarkable remarkable person I'm exact almost exactly the opposite from

from that I like metaphor I like longer

problems like shorter ones so I I think

that I've always thought of our profession as being more like a theatrical repertory company where you

have 20 or 30 people who ultimately get together and do all of the things

there's some people behind the scenes you know obviously the small talk stuff

was not done by find the I thought of the original ideas but I'm

a starter not a finisher I had some fabulous finishers and a lot of the stuff that was done were were original

contribution Larry Tesler for instance who was one of the injectors of the park

culture at Apple is one of the best software designers I know and you could

not in a few words acknowledge his contribution to that or any other five

people so I think of these I don't think of these things there's so much a group

I don't think this is democracy there is no such thing as democracy when you're

doing design don't sit around and take a vote anymore than you do in the theater

but what you have is different contributions that eventually come down

to some kind of image I made the original Dynabook model solely to avoid

having meetings and what it was that we're trying to do and went out and got

a picture frame it was about the right size and I faked what the display would

look like and I just put it up on the wall and whenever anybody wanted to know

what we're doing I just pointed at it that whatever no just go for it

and I only hired people that absolutely went nuts when I would wave this thing

in front of a meeting they come up with stars in their eyes and we've invited him for the summer and because we didn't

have a strong definition of it except that this wasn't a computer this was a

channel an amplifier there's all these things and we knew how we were going to

preliminary deal with it but not ultimately see one of the thing about

paper fact we even tested out the dining bus to see you could hit a ball with it

one of the things about pay for all these wonderful things like paper airplanes you could do and we even

thought of an edible Dynabook there's one of the great ways of getting rid of

this technology if they just make it edible you could eat your IBM PC before

it got stale [Music]

yeah the that question I'll attempt up how do

you inspire instruct improve intuition if it's at all possible one way if you

don't have it is to hire it if you know doing something the person I use most in

this regard is character named Gregory Bateson who was a scientist sort of but

he had a intuition of an elephant I just

completely larger than the man and wrote largely from that intuition in the

interview I did with him once I asked how he did a paper this again comes to

the planning question he said I take a subject that I don't understand and why

it is that way and I wrestle with it and that wrestling is the paper

he always had a enormous respect

you know it comes up how do you inspire and struck improve intuition at all cost

but one way if you don't have it as a higher risk if you're you know doing

something the person I use most in this

regard is a character named Gregory Bateson who was a scientist sort of but

he had a the intuition of an elephant I just completely larger than the man and

wrote largely from that intuition and interview I did with him once I asked

how he did a paper this again comes to

the planning question he said I take a subject that I don't understand and why

it is that way and I wrestle with it and that wrestling is the paper

yaagh had a enormous respect