Thirty years ago, Rich Gold, a researcher at Xerox PARC wandered into engineer Scott Minneman’s office. He didn’t knock—office doors at PARC were hardly ever closed. “I’ve got a crazy new idea,” Minneman remembered Gold telling him. “Do you want to help me figure it out?”
But Gold was looking to go from casual and “one-off” to a steady presence at PARC for the arts, and in doing so to reap the benefits of bringing together disciplines with different values and working methods—often exploring the same thorny but exhilarating problems. How long should they work together? At the start, six months seemed like a reasonable amount of time to think up and execute a project. However, it took nearly that long to understand one another, learn how best to communicate, and forge a shared creative process.
Both groups used video as their means of documentation—and this gave them a common language. Lucy Suchman, then Principal Scientist and Manager of WPT at PARC and now Professor Emerita in Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University UK, remembered lively conversations about claims of realism in video and what it meant to tell stories about people’s everyday activities.
According to John Seely Brown, former Director of PARC and Chief Scientist at Xerox from 1992-2002, the spirit of Homo Ludens was central to PARC’s research culture and community of practice. “An ability to see something in a new way is key to art, but also key to breakthroughs in science,” said Brown in an interview. “If you can honor the white space between disciplines and learn to play with it, then suddenly art seems obvious.