November 2003

Xerox PARC: Collaboration at the Intersection of Art and Science
An interview with John Seely Brown

By Linda Naiman

One of the most enjoyable aspects of being co-author of Orchestrating Collaboration at Work, was interviewing some of the leading researchers and pioneers in the world of art in business. My phone interview with John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox, was a breathless rapid-fire stream of consciousness exchange that at times seemed like an unpunctuated beat poem. Much of the interview was cut for the book (due to space limitations) so I offer you an expanded--and punctuated-- version here.

First some background on what the Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence (PAIR) Program was all about, as described by John Seely Brown.

The PAIR program invites artists who use new media into PARC and pairs them with researchers who often use the same media, though often in different contexts. The output of these pairings is both interesting art and new scientific innovations. The artists revitalize the atmosphere by bringing in new ideas, new ways of thinking, new modes of seeing and new contexts for doing. This is radically different from most corporate support of the arts, where there is little intersection between the disciplines. It takes a bit of faith on both sides, and a belief that both science and art can use a little shaking up, to engage in such a partnership.

In his open letter to a young researcher (Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb91) he describes the kind of spirit they expect in the research room at Xerox PARC:

At PARC, we attempt to pose and answer basic questions that can lead to fundamental breakthroughs. Our competitive advantage depends on our ability to invent radically new approaches to computing and its uses, and then bring these rapidly to market.

If you come to work here, there will be no plotted path. The problems you work on will be the ones you help invent. When you embark on a project, you will have to be prepared to go in directions you couldn’t have predicted at the outset. You will be challenged to take risks and give up cherished methods or beliefs in order to find new approaches. You will encounter periods of deep uncertainty and frustration when it will seem that your efforts are leading nowhere.

That’s why following your instinct is so important. Only by having deep intuitions, being able to trust them, and knowing how to run with them will you be able to keep your bearings and guide yourself through uncharted territory. The ability to do research that gets to the root is what separates merely good researchers from world-class ones. The former are reacting to a predictable future; the latter are enacting on a qualitatively new one.

This call to adventure has attracted the best talent in the world, and as John Seely Brown pointed out to me in our interview, his letter speaks to artists almost more than to researchers:

JSB: It takes courage to open up a new frontier, to do what people think is crazy, and to push the boundaries of a genre; be it in art, or research. You need both passion and courage, because when you go out on an edge, you really don’t know if you’re just being crazy, (because everybody else around you thinks that you’re just insane). I mean that figuratively not literally. In fact almost every major breakthrough we’ve done at PARC initially seemed absurd. Almost everybody was against it, including even at times myself .

LN: So as director of PARC, you had to create a context for this kind of courage and passion to take shape.

JSB: If you’re really going after what I call radical research -- radical in the original Greek meaning of the word ‘to go to the root of an issue’-- and follow the problem to its root. You must be willing to bend your lenses accordingly, (your conceptual lenses) and your belief structures, as you follow this problem into virgin territory. There you must be willing to re-frame the emerging issues in ways that may seem pathological, bizarre, or crazy according to the wisdom of the day.

When you are pushing the boundary, what do you have to count on? Well, on one hand, (and this differs a little bit from the artist) you have to be deeply grounded in the issues of the day; you have to be a shrewd reader of the world. In that sense, you have to have marinated in a more nuanced way in what’s going on around you. Then you have to construct your own vision of what could make a difference — and you fall back on something that might be called taste; your own personal aesthetic, because you don’t have any guideposts. There are few guideposts when you are pushing the boundaries—this is the very grist out of which the avante-garde is born.

Continued ...
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