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>> Debra Carnegie: Thanks for coming. My name is Debra Carnegie and I'm
pleased to welcome Barry Katz to the Microsoft Research speaker series.
Barry is the professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford and professor of
industrial design and interaction design at California College of the Arts.
He's here to discuss his book, Make It New, in which he looks at the role of
design in Silicon Valley by interviewing notable design leaders like Steve
Jobs, Don Norman and Douglas Engelbart. Barry is a professor at Stanford and
the Interaction Design School at California College of the Arts. He's also a
fellow at IDEO. He has authored six books including Change By Design and
NONOBJECT. Please join me in giving him a warm welcome.
[Applause]
>> Barry Katz: Thank you, Debra, for introducing me and thank you all for
coming to listen to me. I'm really deleted to be here. I'm calming down. I
had one of those white knuckle flights from San Jose with great turbulence
and I thought I was calming down, and then I got into the taxi and I made the
mistake of telling the driver that I was a little bit pressed for time. So I
had another white knuckle experience, but I think I'll be okay. I decided -this is a brand new talk. That's the first thing I would like to say. So
you are an experimental subject audience and I hope you enjoy it and I hope
that we all learn something from the experience. I'm tired of talking to
undergraduates because they have become somewhat predictable. But when I
talk to grownups, especially people whose technical competence is vastly
beyond mine, I tend to come out a bit with a profound learning experience, so
please, afterwards, throw any kinds of questions at me that you like. Just
be prepared for me to throw them right back as you. I decided to call this,
without suggesting that I have the literary stature of Charles Dickens, A
Tale of Two Cities, and that is because in my research into the history of
Silicon Valley design, I covered almost accidentally that nothing in Silicon
Valley starts in Silicon Valley. You know the phrase. Many of you are
engineers not invented here. So a big piece of the story, interestingly
enough, actually starts at the University of Washington in Seattle so we'll
do a little logo thing. Also, I got to tell you, I'm obsessed with maps and
logos. So I hope you don't get sick of that. And the story is this: In
summer 1951, a recent graduate of the brand new industrial design program at
the University of Washington, and at that time there were very few such
programs in existence, a guy named Carl Clement climbed into his 1938 Chevy
and drove down to visit an old college roommate who was working for a
250-person instrumentation company in Palo Alto that some of you may have
heard of. They still sort of exist, called Hewlett-Packard. And he
interviewed for a job. I'm giving a way the first page of the book, so
anybody who has read the first page already will have heard this. He
interviewed for a job with an applied physicist named Ralph Lee who had come
from the radiation lab at MIT and a lot of wartime experience and presented
his portfolio because every industrial design student knows that to be fully
well-dressed, you carry your portfolio with you at all times. And Lee looked
through the airbrushed drawings of hub caps and desk lamps and things like
that and paused and looked at him and said industrial design? What's that
mean? You couldn't cut it as an engineer? But gave him a job anyway. And
he equipped him with a box of No. 2 pencils, a four-legged stool, and on
August 1st, 1951, Hewlett-Packard hired the first design professional to work
in what would become Silicon Valley. So that's your piece of the story in
Washington. Let me back up a little bit and give you a bit of context behind
that story. There's a kind of conventional view of how Silicon Valley
happened and I assume that most of you spent some part of your professional
lives down there; is that correct? Tech, okay. The conventional view, which
is not wrong, is something like this. In the '60s, the microprocessor
industry blossomed and it fed the personal computer industry because you need
something to put your processors in and that engendered the software industry
and then it's the Internet and it's anybody's speculation where it's going
next. This view I think is not incorrect. It's just kind of simplistic.
And by the way, those two red-dotted lines are two earthquake faults so it's
kind of a fragile area also. My own view is a little bit more complicated.
Actually much more complicated and it's a much uglier slide and apologize for
that. Like everybody else, I see Silicon Valley as an ecosystem, an
ecosystem of innovation that has been uniquely powerful in the world. So
we've got the Intels up to the Apples and the Googles and everything in
between, the technology companies. A couple major research universities, one
of which pays a chunk of my salary. 40 to 50 percent of the venture capital
that is invested in the United States in any given economic quarter is
invested in Silicon Valley. There are more IP patent and copyright attorneys
in my little town of Palo Alto per capita than any other city in the United
States, which is bad news. And I became interested in one piece of the
ecosystem that has received -- this may surprise you but I will stick to this
claim -- almost no attention whatsoever. And that is the role of design in
incubating what has become the most powerful economic engine I think in the
world. And I think even up here, you're probably willing to agree with that.
So I began to examine this question. I was partly intrigued by the kind of
speculative exercise that I did one day. And that was to imagine myself
going back to about 1980 when design seems to have achieved some kind of
visibility there. And asked myself if you had inquired of any informed
person, what are the design centers of the world, I think there would have
been a pretty easy consensus. It would have been Milan for furniture, Paris
for fashion, London for product design, New York for graphics, LA for
whatever they do down there, and probably Tokyo for electronics, consumer
electronics, Sony. And that's about it. And if you had said and the
San Francisco Bay Area, I believe you would have been met with a blank stare.
Was just not on the map as a significant focal point of professional design
activity. And if we fast-forward up to today, I make an argument in the
book, which is I think open to discussion, that there are more design
professionals working in the valley right now, in the Bay Area generally,
than anywhere else in the world. So how did that happen in a relatively
short period of time? And that provoked my interest in this topic and it led
to writing Make It New, The History of Silicon Valley Design, which is
available from the young ladies at the table in the back for 29.95,
discounted by Microsoft, and thank you for that. So let me tell you a little
bit. I think that's my only animation so don't worry. It's not going to
guess worse than that. Let me tell you a little bit about where this
unfolded. When I began working on this project, I assumed that about 1980,
the point at which technical ideas began to spill out of research and
development environments, laboratories, into the consumer market was about
the point that design begins to show up marked by the three giants, the three
giant consultancies, IDEO, we're full disclosure. I am also affiliated, our
friendly rivals, Frog Design and Lunar Design all formed in the very early
1980s. And now three of the largest and probably most influential design
consultancies in the world. So I assume that the starting point was about
there but being a good historian, which is what I am -- historian, that is,
not necessarily a good one. You get to judge. I began to scratch a little
bit. And as I scratched, a found a little bit of design activity, a few
consultancies operating, a few corporate design individuals functioning in
other companies in the '70s and I scratched a little bit more and I found a
few more in the '60s and I kept scratching until I got back to August 1st,
1951 which shocked and amazed me. So it is a story that has been developing
and incubating for quite some time. The two original players,
Hewlett-Packard and are you all familiar with AMPEX? In a technical
audience, people may or may not be familiar with AMPEX. Nobody else is. At
the time of its implosion, late 1970s, AMPEX controlled something like
95 percent of the global market in magnetic recording and then subsequently
video and then data recording. And then it went over the cliff for a lot of
reasons. So they were pretty much the only game in town in terms of design.
I think I have a pointer, don't I? Yes. The fellow in the red is the
University of Washington ID graduate. His name was Carl Clement. And so far
as I can tell, he was the first person to be employed in a design capacity by
any company in what was not yet Silicon Valley. It was still lima bean
fields and strawberry fields and apricot orchards. That, by the way, is
Mr. Packard, who really was eight feet tall and I like to say that's Hewlett
who is also standing up, but that's not quite true. So Clement drives down
from the University of Washington, half an hour's drive from here. Lands
himself a job. Nobody quite knew what to call him. They tried production
engineer and various other things, but he was insistent that he was an
industrial designer. And his great campaign was to try to persuade engineers
in a tech company what that actually meant. Usually confronting people who
said I don't get it. It's already designed. What are you going to do?
Paint daisies on it or something? So he began in a sort of inauspicious way.
His first job was to redesign the graphics on the cardboard boxes in which
Hewlett-Packard shipped its products. And if it ended there, there would be
no story. But that, as I say, very inauspicious beginning is where things
began. Watt's Current was the internal newsletter published for HP employees
in its first decades. Clement was an ambitious guy and proceeded to make his
case for the value of design all the while attempting to define it. In the
next stage of his activity, moving beyond graphics on cardboard boxes, in
other words just branding, was to propose that design can serve a function in
crafting a design language. It can help to give a corporate identity, not
just in the visual decoration of boxes, but in the products themselves. This
is a slide that was produced by a good friend of mine named Chuck House who
is a senior engineer at HP for many, many years. In 1959, Hewlett-Packard's
catalog had 373 devices packed into 65 different types of enclosures. So
they were riveted sheet metal boxes and they were mahogany cases and some of
them were in no enclosures at all because nobody really cared about that.
And Clement and his design group, which now had exploded, it had grown by
600 percent, so there were six of them, proposed that if we create a common
visual language across the products themselves, it will serve an important
function, a kind of branding Hewlett-Packard's products. And this was at a
point when HP was emerging as somebody -- HP used to be cool and for
engineers of a certain generation who remember these things, they just loved
the products themselves. So that was the next stage of design. We are going
to talk about creating a design language that will establish a visual
consistency. So looking across an engineering room, you would be able to
pick out the HP products by their distinctive visual form. Okay. That's
good too, but that was not the end of it. The third stage happened when
Clement's successor, a man by the name of Alan Inhelder, and I should say, I
was very fortunate in my timing because half a dozen of the key people that I
gained access to have left the planet, including Mr. Inhelder just a few
weeks ago. Inhelder assumed the leadership role in the emerging corporate
design office at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto at about the time that HP was
dividing itself into four divisions. Microwaves, counters, and so on. And
he embedded himself in an electrical engineering group within their microwave
division and he attempted to make the case that design can move you to the
third stage, not graphics on boxes and not even the shape of the products,
but design can actually help improve the functionality of a technical
instrument. And this was a tough sell to mechanical engineers who were kind
of well, maybe, and electrical engineers were, um, you're irritating me, get
out of here. So he performed a little exercise. He took one of HP's -actually HP's single best-selling product of that period, the model 608 VHF
signal generator, which is the kind of stuff that Hewlett-Packard was
selling, and overlaid the facing plate of it. He fabricated a cardboard
mockup, a foam mockup, and overlaid on it strips of colored masking tape in
order to indicate to the EEs and the MEs that the configuration of the
controls on this device were completely arbitrary, made no sense at all, and
with a little bit of forethought, it could be reorganized to make the
operation of the product faster, cleaner, safer, more efficient. In other
words, you could have not just a better looking but a better product itself.
That's what he proposed. If you were to array frequency modulation and
attenuation from the control to the display in what industrial designers were
being taught is a related function and control link analysis, it would be a
better machine. And there was after his presentation a moment of silence and
then the EEs were on their feet applauding, which had never happened before.
So design became established. It took about ten years for these guys to
begin to make a credible case to a highly technical engineering community
that design was something other than merely decorating boxes. A signal -- a
particularly important inflection point in this story came in 1972, 1973.
And I spot a few people with gray hair here, so how many of you remember the
HP 35 -- okay. Usually, when I talk about this to engineers they start to
cry. I mean, they just -- the beloved HP 35. In 1972, William Hewlett
conceived the idea and it appears to have been his personal initiative to
replace the desktop calculator that Hewlett-Packard was selling and selling
very successfully, so this was a big risk, with a pocket-sized calculator
that could slip into the breast pocket of an engineer and be taken out into a
field by a surveyor, perhaps by a surgeon, perhaps by a pilot. But somebody
out into the field. And to make this possible, he stipulated the dimensions
of the enclosure first. And that seems like a very small thing. What's the
big deal? But it actually indicated a complete reversal of Hewlett-Packard's
procedures up to that point. Yeah, please.
>>:
[Indiscernible] or that was the 65?
>> Barry Katz:
>>:
Shirts.
>> Barry Katz:
>>:
One of his?
His shirts?
One of the machines, he gave them his shirt and said --
>> Barry Katz: Get it into my pocket, will you? Yeah, yeah. I have heard
that also. Typically the mechanical and the electrical components were
figured out by the engineering staff then handed over to the design group
with the instructions, put it in a box. Hewlett gave the -- he inverted this
instruction system. And he said, instead of the engineering coming first and
then the design being essentially a packaging job, I want you to figure out,
I want you, the engineers, to figure out how to stuff all the -- how to
create the mechanical and electronic guts of a product that is going to be
four and a half by two and a half inches. In other words, the form came
first. It was a little bit elaborate in making that rather simple point.
This is a drawing from HP's corporate archives. I negotiated with their
lawyers for two years to get that and they gave it up kind of reluctantly but
I just absolutely love it because to get at it, they conducted studies of
color, they conducted material studies, they experimented in the placement of
buttons. I asked the chief of corporate design, this fellow, Alan Inhelder,
at the end of his varied 28-year career at Hewlett-Packard, what was the
undertaking that he was most proud of. And he said it was probably the study
buttons and knobs that they did for the HP 35. So it is bringing industrial
design up to a level that it had not seen in the consumer products industries
that were hiring designer in Ohio and in New York and in London at about that
time. There were -- I'd like to think of this as sort of triumph and
tragedy. Once HP got this idea that we can create small portable
electronics, we're masters of miniaturization now. They began to think, as
did Intel and a few other companies, what else can we do with our prodigious
technical talents? So Intel produced a watch called the Microma. Anybody
have one ever? Ugliest watch ever made. My apologies if you love it but
I'll stand my ground. And Hewlett-Packard created their -- it's -- this is
not the Apple iWatch. Okay? It was one of the least functional calculator
watches ever imagined. It had to be operated by a little stylus that pulled
out of the side of the band which immediately got lost and it was just a
complete disaster as a product. So what they had learned was they were
really good at the technical side of things but when you start moving in the
direction of consumer products -- and this is mostly for technical people,
but it's moving in the direction of consumer products, you're getting into
the realm of jewelry. And Hewlett-Packard and Intel and companies like that
knew nothing about jewelry. Gordon Moore of Intel who had personally
sponsored the Intel Microma watch called it his $18 million wristwatch
because that's how much money they lost on it in their first year. So that
told the tech companies of the valley, stay the hell away from the consumer
market. It's quicksand. Stick with stuff that you know. This within a
year, by the way, it became the basis of 40 percent of HP's profits in one
year. This is just the one slide that I'll show you of the counterpart
company, AMPEX, formed in the late 1940s. And growing to great prominence in
the next couple of decades. And it's intended to indicate a kind of a nice
story about design. This is a guy named Harold Lindsey who was chief
engineer for AMPEX and was famous for being the consummate engineer with
taste. Nothing passed through his scrutiny -- passed through his office that
did not experience the scrutiny of this absolute perfectionist. But there's
a difference between an engineer with taste and a professional designer. And
what we are seeing here over about a ten-year period is the evolution of the
perfectionist engineer to the trained designer. That's a guy named Frank
Walsh who formed the core of the industrial design group at Apple. And he's
got next to him the cutout figure, the anthropometric figure is named Elmer
Average, one of the tools that industrial designers are starting to use in
order to figure out the dimensions of the human body and make sure that the
product doesn't just look good, which Harold Lindsey is doing with his
magnetic recording machine, but it actually functions in the most efficient
possible way. But by and large, this is what we are talking about for the
first couple of decades, maybe the first three decades of design in Silicon
Valley. Highly technical products being made more accessible, safer, more
convenient. And yes, a little bit more attractive as well. The only foray
into the consumer market that I am aware of, there are probably a few others
but the only significant one came in 1972 when the highly colorful AMPEX
engineer Nolan Bushnell peeled off and created what was for all intents and
purposes the first electronic gaming company. You all know about Atari, some
fragment of which still exists. In 1972, Atari released pawn, the utterly
mindless but absolutely hypnotic -- first it's not a computer game. There's
no code in it at all, but the first video game, what's now I don't know how
many tens of billion dollars a year the video game industry is. And the kind
of interesting detail there is how many game designers do you think Nolan
Bushnell hired in 1972? And the answer to give you a hint is exactly zero.
Why? Because there was no such thing. How many aeronautical engineers did
the Wright Brothers hire? There was no such thing. Ten years later, he
couldn't hire game designers fast enough. And that's kind of the story of
not designers creating new product categories but new product categories
creating new fields of design. But as I say, until well into the '80s, this
is almost the only example of a Silicon Valley company venturing into the
territory of consumer products. If you would ask most people what California
design meant, it meant sunset magazines archived in a two-car home, and maybe
Grateful Dead poster. But beyond that, as I say, the Bay Area was not on
anybody's design map. Here's where things begin to change in the most
dramatic way. And this is what I mean when I say that the technologies
engendered the design practice, not the other way around. This is of course
SRI International, which in the olden days used to be called the Stanford
Research Institute and I suspect that everybody in this audience recognizes
the guy on the right who is Douglas Engelbart who scolded me once when I
first interviewed him as the inventor of the mouse. Everybody is talking
about the invention and it's like focusing on the steering wheel. We're
talking about something much, much bigger than that. What I discovered was
that when Douglas Engelbart was still forming the Augmentation Research Lab
at Stanford Research Instrument he had befriended the chief designer of the
Herman Miller furniture company which remains today, the preeminent of the
design-driven office equipment and office furniture companies, a guy named
Robert Probst. So you are seeing here in another photograph that I was able
to dig up the inventor of the workstation and the inventor of the cubicle for
which, by the way, he apologized at the end of his life. But at the time he
was trying to imagine a work environment that would be suitable for the new
information economies that were just around the corner. We're still
struggling with that with breaking out of the dreary forest of tilt-ups and
Cubicle Land in the valley now. So you have two really key figures forming a
very, very close bond at a strategic moment in the history, not just of
computing but as it turns out also design. Engelbart is shown here working
with a guy named Jack Kelly who is Robert Probst's deputy. He was sent down
from Grand Rapids from Herman Miller to help him work out the design language
and the design functionality of the computing system with which Engelbart
imagined we can begin to create the parameters for collaboration among
distributed groups. Today we call it e-mail and Google doing and everything
else that you know about than anybody else in the world probably. The system
that Engelbart had built consisted of computer monitor with the rather
unusual feature at the time of a porthole window in it, a display. Most
people could not care less what was going on inside a computer. Why would
you want to look at it on a screen? And then a couple of devices, a
five-fingered cord set so called and this thing called an XY position
indicator that would control a little spot of light on the screen and allow
things to be moved around. And by the time he got it up and running, he was
ready for the famous 1968 West Coast computer conference, the so-called
mother of all demos, in which he demonstrated the first online networked
computing system to an audience of about 3,000 computer scientists which was
probably about a hundred percent of the all the computer scientists in the
world at the time. And it kind of changed the world subsequently. In the
immediate aftermath of the famous 1968 presentation by Engelbart of an online
system for remote collaboration among white color intellectual workers, there
was a kind of a disbursal, little bit of a mutiny from Engelbart's lab to a
brand new research lab funded by Xerox corporation to the union of about a
hundred million dollars on a bucolic hillside in Palo Alto. Xerox, the Palo
Alto research center, which for reasons that you probably know, soon became
informally known as the Palo Apple research center. That's an unfortunate
story. PARC had in its early years, from the early 1970s, at one point an
estimate 58 of the 100 leading computer scientist in the world all under one
roof. Their mandate -- this is pretty well known, was to invent the office
of the future. Although not too many people new exactly what that meant.
And that proved to be an extraordinary opportunity because it was such
ill-defined territory. So they brought a bunch of the technologies that had
been developed by Douglas Engelbart's team at Stanford research institute and
began working now in collaboration with designers, a very small number, like
one, on what a desktop computing system might look like. Here's -- I just
love both of these drawings. This is done by a guy named Larry Tesler who
became one of the I think chief scientists at Apple shortly after this
episode. And here he is trying to figure out the next evolution of these
awkward input devices that Douglas Engelbart had actually built. This is
again that five fingered key set in which by pressing the first key, you get
an A, the second a B. In various combinations, you can get all 31 alpha
numeric figures out of it. And I just really like the way he started with
very literal descriptions and then he moved over to language borrowed from
the publishing industry, cut, copy, and paste, which is what that will turn
into. And then for this other input device, the XY position indicator, and I
can start calling that the mouse now, okay, his idea there was three buttons,
dot, dash, and when you get really frustrated, damn it, the panic button.
And if you're curious how he came up with this stuff, I did indeed interview
a very large number of people for the book, although it is not a book of
interviews but they were among my sources, and what would typically happen
would be I would be sitting in a cafe in Palo Alto with, in this case, Larry
Tesler, and say, okay, well, this has been very interesting. My last
question, what's in your garage? Oh, well, boxes. Well, what's in the
boxes? Oh, papers. What kinds of papers? And then it's four weeks freezing
in Larry Tesler's garage going through the papers that he brought with him
from Xerox PARC to Apple. And I was able do that just dozens and dozens of
times. Xerox PARC scientists hired an industrial designer. He happens to be
the same guy that HP hired in the early '50s to come up with concept drawings
and ultimately prototype models of what this desktop computing system that
they had set about to build might look like. This is one page out of the
designers' notebooks and some of the designs were just hysterical, something
that likes like an intravenous feeding cart on wheels. And you know, the
thought that we might be walking around with our computes on trays like this,
kind of scary. But he settled on this idea of a detached keyboard which in
his terminology was garageable inside a base so that it wouldn't take up so
much space on the desk. And then handed it over and the Xerox PARC
scientists and engineering teams got to work on building it out into the
famous Alto. So if you had walked into Xerox PARC in 1973, you would have
seen what to everybody in this room is a banal familiar site, everybody in
the place is sitting there with a computer on his or her desktop operated by
a mouse and this other unfamiliar thing which has fallen out of history,
connected to a laser printer which PARC had invented, tethered to one another
by an Ethernet cable with pull-down menus, a mixture of text graphics and
data on the same screen, on a screen that was intended to replicate an eight
and a half by 11 pieces of paper. And then only thing about that is that was
the only place in the world where you would have seen that. And it is now a
ubiquitous feature of every work environment, every academic environment in
the world. Their idea this is going to be a computer system that you
shouldn't have to be a computer scientist to be able to use. So they pulled
all these faculty brats from Stanford over to play with the new Alto system
and figuring if a kid could do it, then anybody can. And that proved in fact
to be correct. Now, the only problem was not with what was going on at PARC.
It was with what was going on at Xerox corporate headquarters in the East
Coast which had the idea that computers should be talking to filing cabinets
and wastebaskets and not to other computers. So they essentially killed the
project in what has gone down in history as one of the single worst business
decisions ever made. So that's Xerox. Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. And I have
to apologize because here comes the second animated slide, but I just
couldn't resist. One group led by Charles Simonyi -- excuse me, led by Larry
Tesler will migrate over to form the basis of the Lisa development team at
Apple. Another group will leave Xerox in frustration with a computer
graphics system and found Adobe, [indiscernible] Warren. 3Com, the
networking system is another one of the companies to follow from Xerox
corporate's horrible decision to kill this project. Electronic arts will be
incubated by some of the same people. What else have we got? Grid systems,
which develops the first laptop computer, and last but not least, Charles
Simonyi migrates up north and brings the BRAVO text editing system to Redmond
and creates the basis of Microsoft Office. So I went to a 40th birthday
party for Xerox PARC and found myself in the presence of six billionaires
that came out of that research environment and then the last thing -- Xerox
doesn't quite disappear. That is an egregious misstatement. But it's going
to shrink dramatically. Now, what design has got to do with all of this,
this is where that period where I assumed at one point this whole story
started around the time that Apple began to produce products, quote/unquote,
for the rest of us. This is the Apple one, probably some of you recognize
it. The computer is not the box. The computer is the board. And this is
Woz's original one and he just put it in a plywood box for convenience.
Apple, of course, founded by two guys who were described by the first venture
capitalists they spoke to as refugees from the human race. A company founded
on April Fool's Day named after a piece of fruit. It was one of half a dozen
computer startups that were beginning to show up on the landscape of the Bay
Area in those years. And honestly, it could have been almost any of them
that had succeeded. But Jobs, in his famous visit to PARC in 1979, saw the
future of desktop computing, saw that Xerox was not going capitalize on it
and brought some of the leading ideas over to Apple. But it was not going to
look like this. This is human brew computing club stuff. This is the Apple
II. The successor to the one that you just saw that I personally think is
the single-most important computer in the history of Silicon Valley. At
least from a design point of view. And it's for the following reason. This
came from an interview with Jobs himself. So by this time, Jobs is walking
up and down University Avenue in Palo Alto knocking on the doors of these 1and 2- and 3-person design consultancies, whatever that meant. Looking for
something who could package a computer in a sealed case. It was -- that was
the brief. It was not anything more sophisticated than that. And he finally
came upon a guy named Jerry Maddock whom I tracked down myself and had a
lovely, lovely initial long-distance phone call as he was carrying a load of
two-by-fours through a Home Depot in Burlington, Vermont since he wants
nothing to do with Silicon Valley ever again. So why is this such an
important computer? Well, jobs had the idea of selling a computer in a
sealed case. Big deal. Actually, it is a very big deal. Behind that was
the speculative idea. It was a gamble that for every hardware enthusiast who
wanted to solder together a board, assemble a computer out of chips, build
his own, for every hardware enthusiast, there were a thousand software people
who just wanted to take it out of the package, plug it in, stick a monitor on
top of it, and get to work. And he was right. And so his decision was we're
going the sell it in a sealed box. And you're not going to have to worry
about it getting inside and fooling around with things. That's somebody
else's business. You get to work and start seeing what a computer can do.
Not how you can build a computer. And it proved to be an enormously
successful gamble, but what happened is once they made a decision to sell a
computer in a sealed case, it opened all the questions of design. What
should that case look like? How approachable should it be? What kind of a
statement should it make? How should it integrate into a home environment, a
work environment, an academic environment, all of the questions in other
words about design per se. So I expected that Steve Jobs represented the
beginning of serious design in Silicon Valley. What I discovered was that
it's not correct. He represents the midpoint in the story. But he's kind of
the pivot on which everything turns. So I honestly have great respect for
him in that regard. He was the person I think before anybody else who put
design in the driver's seat. Gave it a central position in what would become
a major company. Once Apple gets going with its successes and its failures,
both of which are legion and significant, Jobs is back at work looking for
designers who can help turn a highly technical artifact into consumer-facing
product. And he's back on University Avenue knocking on doors. He finds
these six guys who had just graduated from Stanford's product design program,
operating out of a one-room studio above Kitty O'Hare's Dress Shop in Palo
Alto. Comes in and says, I have seen the future at Xerox PARC, can you guys
design a mouse? The Xerox PARC house was a $400 scientific instrument that
had to be taken apart at the end of each day, each component cleaned, and
then reassembled the next day so -- reassembled so it could be used by the
engineers the next day. And Jobs said $400 is not an option. Dismantling
and reassembling is not an option. I want you to create a $20 appliance that
can be used on your jeans. Can you guys do that? And these, you know,
Stanford guys who had been taught, oh, we can do anything, they said, can
we -- of course we can. So they signed a deal. Jobs left. They looked at
each other and said, does anybody know what a mouse is? This is a true
story. And it kind of captures what is really I think just so significant
about this moment in the history of Silicon Valley design but design
generally. And that is typically, what an industrial designer was asked to
do in the East Coast in the consumer production industry, you take this
year's toaster is -- looks like this, so turn it into next year's toaster
which is going to look like this. And if next year's toaster looks like
that, then the year after it's going to look like this again. In other
words, it's improving frequently just by styling existing products. And what
was beginning to happen here was designers were being asked to give form not
to new products but to whole new product categories. What does a mouse look
like? What does a modem look like? How should a digital answering machine
operate? What should be the character of a product that allows you to
download MP3 files from the Internet and play them back through your car
radio while you're stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge? How do you explain
that to your parents? So a very, very exciting moment in the early history
of Silicon Valley design and there was no roadmap for them. I will give you
just two final examples of how this will begin to engender what is now I
think the most highly developed design community in the world. One of the
members, one of the prominent members of the Xerox PARC diaspora was a guy
named John Ellenby. Ellenby led a very famous presentation in Boca Raton of
the Xerox Alto to Xerox executives in which they were attempting to make the
case that Xerox should move forward with this research prototype and turn it
into a commercial product. And it was kind of a disaster. What happened is
a totally sexist story. But it's unfortunately true. A lot of the
executives who of course not only had never used a computer, they wouldn't be
caught dead having a computer on their desks because computers are for
secretaries. This thing with a keyboard, keyboards are for typewriters.
Typewriters are for secretaries. And a fair number of them had apparently
married trophy secretaries and when they went to this Boca Raton
presentation, they had almost no interest in the Xerox Alto computer but
their young wives who frequently had risen up through the ranks, like Carly,
from being secretaries loved it. You mean, you can take a block of text and
move it around and I don't have to retype your damn document from scratch?
But it didn't work. So Ellenby was in charge of this and he left in disgust
a year later to found Grid Systems. And the story behind Grid is while he
was still with Xerox, he found himself in discussion with an administrator in
the executive office building of the Carter White House. And he was trying
to make the argument that Xerox, we can build you guys a desktop computing
system. And the official said to him I'm not interested because the
president does not pay me to sit at my desk. He pays me to go out in the
field and solve problems wherever they are. So if you can build me a
computer that will fit in my briefcase, come back and talk. And Ellenby's
response was, we can build you a computer that will fit in half your
briefcase and the other half you can put your lunch and a Wall Street
Journal. And he left Xerox, founded Grid Systems, and got to work on what
would become the world's first laptop computer. The design part of the story
is that he did a very innovative thing, almost unheard of, which is instead
of having the engineers and the scientists in his group develop the guts of
it and then hand it off, he put an industrial designer in place around the
same table as all of the key figures in the technical parts of development.
This was an industrial designer from Britain named Bill Moggridge who then
migrates to the U.S. and becomes the vanguard of what will be a meeting of
European design and American engineering. So we've got some of Moggridge's
drawings on the left. And what Ellenby said was he always suspected -Moggridge would give him a half dozen drawings and a few phone models and
such and said, you guys deal with it. You figure out what you want, but
there was always one that seemed to be executed with a little more precision
or an extra dash of color that the designers secretly favored. So there is
one of Moggridge's first drawings and there is a 3D prototype and there it is
as a technical drawing. And what will happen is the world's first laptop
computer, the Grid Compass, 1979. Moggridge then went off to found -- to
join with two other companies to found what will become IDEO and his latest
position was director of the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian's design museum.
Unfortunately Bill died about two years ago. So that is where IDEO will
enter the picture. Second major company to enter the design picture, which
is still among the most prominent consultancies in the world based in Silicon
Valley, Frog Design. Steve Jobs, in the aftermath of the somewhat actually
indifferent success of the Macintosh, said we've kind of proven the concept
here, even if it wasn't a huge business success, and what we're ready for now
is to bring a world-class designer into the story to give us -- to unite all
of Apple's product categories of which there were now seven, with world
class, which meant quote/unquote European design. And he staged a
historically very, very significant design competition which was called Snow
White where the 7 product categories and then a big dwarf somewhere or a
little dwarf. Here are the two finalists. One was a group called BAB in
London which produced in that black anthracite gray, a very angular edgy
forms and the other came from a German group, Esslinger Design which became
Frog Design. Frog is Federal Republic of Germany which produced the softer
off-white forms. So we've got the black swan versus Snow White. This is
what will win out as a design language. This is just prototype. And they
will become the core designers for Apple for much of the rest of the decade
of the 1980s. So there are lots of stories there. But let me sum it all up
with a quick graphic and again, I'm crazy about maps so I apologize from
this. What you see in the valley is the formation of a design community.
Out of a set of engineering and science requirements which begin at SRI in
this case, in the case of desktop computing, that's I guess we could say the
world's first input device. Just looks like a two-by-four with a handle on
it. SRI is a pure science facility. Migrates to a corporate research lab
where an industrial designer is for the first time asked to come in and give
the thing form. And then migrates once again but this time to the consumer
market, at which point design has a profound value to add. When you're no
longer creating a product -- when it's no longer engineers creating a product
for the use of other engineers, but now creating a project that will be used
by middle school kids or by a mom and pop bakery to run a small business or
whatever. And what is remarkable about the design story in Silicon Valley
from my perspective, two things. First, the story can be told in the
circumference of an easy bicycle ride. This is all happening within probably
a 25 mile circumference. And the second is desktop computing is only one
piece of it. It's probably the most prominent example, but I talk also about
surgical robotics and any number of other things in which you've got
something like the same trajectory from a technical artifact evolving toward
a consumer market or a general use market through the intervention of
designers. This is intended to indicate how it's really going to be Steve
Jobs at Apple begin that begins to engage these small left-wing left coast
consultancies that will grow and grow and grow. IBM does about 50 projects
for Apple in its early years. Frog Design is the in-house design group.
Lunar, which was just bought by McKenzie as a kind of an emblem of the rising
fortunes of design did another four dozen or so Apple products, and also
contributed to Apple their first design director. A guy named Bob Bruner who
worked there as he quipped to me, he was there between jobs. He arrived just
after Jobs had been fired and left just before he came back. And these
arrows, I'm not a graphic designer, so I know this is sort of ugly. This is
not supposed to indicate that then they all went to the beach, but rather
each of the major consultancies began to calve off smaller ones which
continues to this day. So I literally cannot count the number of small and
mid-size consultancies that populate the region. This is my pen ultimate
slide in case you are getting nervous. And it's how things look to me today.
We still have the three founding consultancies of the recent period. And I
haven't attempted to show you all the other consultancies, but the logos of
major companies that have all begun to incorporate design into their
operations in something other than a trivial way. The week that Larry Page
became CEO of Google, he announced what's called project Kennedy which is
previously this has been a company he said that's been driven by market,
analytics and engineering. In the future it will be different by design. A
radical statement from Larry Page. We've got Tesla making probably the most
important innovation in automotive technology in a hundred years. Putting a
designer, his name is Franz Von Holtzhausen, around the same table from the
beginning of development to the end with the aeronautical engineers at Tesla,
with the guys that do drive trains and the 17 inch interactive display on the
control panel. Giving design a place that it has not occupied in the
automotive industry, interestingly enough. And so on and so on and so forth.
Lots of other little stories here. We're starting to see China arriving in
the valley and understanding that design plays a very -- potentially very,
very major role in it. 80 designers working at Uber. 60 designers working
at Pinterest. Another 60 at Airbnb. I have no idea what they're doing, by
the way, but they're there. Last slide. Soleio Cuervo, that's a Columbian
name, one of the half a dozen founding guys at a little company, little
startup called the Facebook, which some of you may have heard of, originated
as a way to help Harvard undergraduates get laid. Migrated over to a
second-floor walkup office in Palo Alto. Then as Facebook is rising and HP
is shrinking, moved into an old HP manufacturing building and most recently
into the sprawling campus of Sun Microsystems which it instantly outgrew
also. So the very early -- and I should say Facebook made a rather dramatic
step about two years ago of buying an entire one hundred person design firm.
And they've now got something like 4 hundred designers, interaction
designers, graphic designers, UX designers, you name it, working under that
roof. In the very early days, Soleio Cuervo was staring at the poorly drawn
arbitrarily colored 16 by 16 pixel rendering of an upward pointing thumb and
not liking it at all. So he redrew it. It will become the most identifiable
the most widely recognized icon in the world. The Facebook like button is
clicked 50,000 times a second. And Facebook is now, as you know, the second
largest country in the world. China is still a little bit bigger, but it has
just over taken India. So that is where the story pretty much wraps up.
From very inauspicious beginnings, a recent graduate from the ID program at
the University of Washington migrating down and almost on a whim applying for
a job at HP, an instrument company. 70 years later, I am pretty sure that
Silicon Valley now represents the global epicenter of professional design
practice and we have no idea where it's going to go next, but you probably
have some ideas on that subject. So I will stop talking and invite your
questions. Thank you very much.
[Applause]
>> Barry Katz:
And there's one.
So please.
>>: On the Snow White Frog Design slide, so there's white on the bottom,
black on the top. The black design reminds me completely of Nova, Lenovo IBM
Design. Is that a coincidence?
>> Barry Katz:
>>:
There we are.
Looks like Lenovo laptop, IBM laptop.
>> Barry Katz: I don't know the story of Lenovo design. I didn't say
anything about IBM, which was actually an important player also. There are
lots of stories in the book and if you have a chance to read it, you'll get a
little bit of insight into IBM's role in this whole thing. But I actually
don't know whether Lenovo, the designers of Lenovo formally incorporated any
of these. I rather doubt it because this was never even published. So not
only was that never produced, this was a set of concept mockups that were
brought down to Apple's headquarters in 1984, I think. '84, '85, something
like that. And they had a beauty contest. And the one thing I do remember
is when the Frog team showed up and the BAB team showed up, there was a line
of black Porsches in the parking lot, each with a numbered license plate.
Jobs was No. 1, No. 2 for Woz and such and when they saw those German cars,
they kind of knew already where it was going to go. But actually, since this
was never produced or published, I think prior to my book, honestly, I doubt
that there's a direct link.
>>: Related to that, to me, it looked like it may have been formed the next
industrial slide which maybe there could have been ->> Barry Katz: That would be very, very likely.
at my jokes. I really like that.
Yeah.
I saw you laughing
[Laughter]
>>:
Also I'm wearing a calculator watch.
>> Barry Katz:
>>:
Oh.
So I'm super excited.
>> Barry Katz:
Thank for the great talk.
Thank you.
>>: I have a -- it's kind of more of a comment or a question. As a designer
who's working on a new product, HoloLens, which hasn't been -- there's a new
category of interaction and product and as someone who is interested in
biotech, I find myself in a situation where I'm not sitting at the same table
as more technically aware people. And also, if I am sitting at the same
table, there's -- maybe there's like a heaviness in the room that there's -it's hard to communicate because the words, the language is different or
there's maybe not trust among the technical people.
>> Barry Katz:
And there's a hierarchy, right?
>>:
Exactly.
>> Barry Katz:
Not to mention other hierarchies.
You mentioned them.
I know what you mean.
>>: I was going to ask a question halfway in between your slides about Bill
Moggridge and how he had the chance to sit at the same table and how that
happened but also what we can do moving forward just as a society, as a
company, as -- I don't know, create a different kind of culture to kind of
push design to have a seat at the table but without this kind of heaviness.
>> Barry Katz: Yeah. Yeah. It's a very, very good question. It's not
resolved in Silicon Valley yet. It's a long time forming. Yeah, the
question was basically I described how in some of these key episodes, what
distinguished certain companies was putting designers at the table alongside
the most technical of the technical people. Alongside the engineering teams,
marketing teams. Typically -- and I'm interpreting your question a little
bit. Typically, the role of designers was like a link in a chain previously.
So engineering would hand off something to a design group. They would put it
in a box, hand it off to marketing who would figure out how to sell it. And
moving from a link in a chain to like a hub of a wheel is the image I
sometimes like to use. It was a slow process and it was painful. And the
question was we're still somewhat stuck in that predicament of the designer
trying to gain credibility among the heavies in the room as you would say,
engineering groups and what might we do about that. The first thing I would
say, it was a long struggle to make that happen. When Bill Moggridge sat
down with the Grid computer people who were mechanical and electrical
engineers and a couple of computer scientists, he was in totally over his
head and he knew it from day one. I spoke to the chief of design, of
corporate design at IBM. Do you know the Ran AC computer? Random access
memory. The first magnetic disk thing. So this is its designer who oversaw
that subsequently up to the 360. And I asked him, well, how much did you
actually understand about computers? And he said, not a damn thing. So
clearly his credible was going to be very, very low. He could work on the
kick plates and a door that opens and has affordances and things like that.
But I think if I could sort of move way forward, the advantage that we now
have is that design has established a kind of a credibility that it's never
had before. I often have fun with designers because they have been trained
to believe that nobody likes us, nobody understands, nobody appreciates the
value that we add. It's not true anymore. So when you have a company like
Apple, which is the most valuable corporate property in the world, putting an
art school trained industrial designer at the Helm of the companies, Johnny
Ive, everybody is going to take notice. That can't be ignored. So everybody
looks at Apple to see what Apple is going to do next and they try to imitate
it and they fail because Apple breaks every rule and gets away with it. I
sometimes joke, Tim Cook announced last year that he's gay and I was
expecting every corporate exec in the world is going to -- I'm gay too, I'm
gay too -- to see what it did for their bottom line. But no. So I think,
you know, the most important thing is I guess two things. One is design has
established a level of correct and you can point to concrete examples.
Airbnb is run by two industrial design guys from RISD, the Rhode Island
School of Design. It's a $20 billion company now. Whatever you think of it
and whatever you think of what it's done to housing prices in San Francisco.
John Mata went from being president of RISD to becoming the first design
partner at Kleiner Perkins, the most powerful and for some the most
controversial of the venture capital firms. So we are recognizing that
design is something other than giving a product a cosmetic veneer, but it's,
as Jobs once said, it's not just how it looks and how it feels but it's how
it works and designers are the ones who are frequently going to have the
greatest access to the people who will ultimately be using the product. And
then the second thing I would say, because I said there were two points. You
mentioned, biotech. So I'm always intrigued by the fact Silicon Valley is
famous for its electronics industry, for software, for computing. It's also
got the largest concentration of biotech firms in the world. And we are
beginning to see a very significant convergence in fields such as
bioinformatics and lots else. I think that we are going to see biotechnology
as an industry making a turn toward the consumer market in something like the
way computer science made a turn toward the consumer market and I personal,
as the ultimate Silicon Valley busy body, I have been bugging the leadership
of all of the design consultancies that they should start putting a
geneticist on their staff or a molecular biologist or a protein chemist
because if you look back to the earliest personal computers from the 1980s,
they were horrible. You know, the mouse that IDEO did for Apple, horrible.
I mean, it's an iconic product but the guys that designed it are embarrassed
by it. In other words, designers were caught with their pants down
collectively by a new phenomenon. And I'm imagining, what if we were out in
front, which is where I would like you to be, waiting for the next wave to
hit and already thinking about these things? So I think that's the argument
you can make to those heavy people in the room. Yeah.
>>: I was just curious, it sounds like you did a ton of research for the
book. What's something that surprised you the most in that process?
>> Barry Katz: Yeah. It was six years of very intensive research. So I
love to tell stories, as you might have noticed. But this was a major
scholarly undertaking for me, even though I tried to write it in a way that
would be interesting and accessible and engaging for the people I'm writing
about and not just for other history geeks like me. The single biggest
surprise was when I began research on this and I actually recently read over
the proposal that I sent to MIT press and the proposal I sent and the book
that I subsequently look bear almost no relation to one another. So the
single biggest surprise is the story did not begin with Steve Jobs. It's
been incubating since 1950. And if you really wanted to stretch it, the
origins of Silicon Valley design are at Bolt, Beranek and Newman or Arch Mac,
the architecture machine group at MIT, or any number of other places that are
far from California itself. So probably the single biggest surprise was that
the Jobs putting design in a position of strategic responsibility comes
midpoint in the story and is the pivot rather than the springboard.
>>:
One last question.
>>: You referred [indiscernible] the first laptop.
life of zero?
>> Barry Katz:
>>:
Didn't it have a battery
Approximately, yeah.
Exactly, I think.
>> Barry Katz: Yeah. I didn't say it was the most successful product in the
world, although it did go into space and it went into combat and it went into
surgical environments. But you almost never want to be the first one out the
gate. Can we get that last question or is there ->>: Oh, yeah. I was just going to ask, you allude to this, but design
consultancies are being acquired left and right.
>> Barry Katz:
>>:
Oh, God, yeah.
What do you think that's indicative of?
>> Barry Katz: I'll give you a really short answer to that and that is I
think I was discussing this -- I don't know your name, but my friend in the
back. We were reminiscing back to the days when e-mail first showed up. And
I'm sorry, what's your name?
>>:
SW.
>> Barry Katz: Okay. So we remember when you checked your e-mail twice a
day. In the morning and then when you went to bed. And it was a pretty
crappy experience. You dial it up and BZZZZZ these horrible noises. So we
were able to put up with a crappy experience twice. But we now check our
e-mail about 150 times a day according to Google, which is every 5.6 minutes.
And nobody's going to put up with a crappy experience that's so intimately
integrated into the rhythm of your everyday life. So this is one kind of
almost symbolic explanation of as technologies are migrating from very
technical environments into the most intimate recesses of human experience, I
mean, we're just looking for the next orifice to stick something into, you
can feel it. The importance of design is going up and up and up and up. And
so, yeah, McKenzie has acquired Lunar. We've got leadership, designers in
leadership positions. Mata goes to work for Kleiner and within one year, 4
of the other major BC firms have also added design partners. So again, they
should stop complaining. They've arrived.
>> Debra Carnegie:
>> Barry Katz: Thank you.
Thanks so much, Barry.