Xerox PARC

In the AI Story

PARC was established by Xerox in 1970 under the leadership of Jack Goldman and George Pake as a kind of corporate Manhattan Project for the future of office technology. Its charter was sweeping and its staffing extraordinary: the lab assembled many of the most ambitious computer scientists of the era, including Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, Bob Metcalfe, John Warnock, and dozens of others whose names fill the canon of computing history. The first major products — the Alto workstation, the Dorado, the Star information system — were technically superior to anything available commercially and prefigured nearly every aspect of the desktop computing experience that became standard a decade later.

The laboratory's culture was unusually cross-disciplinary for its era, which is what made Suchman's hiring possible. Management recognized that users struggled with PARC's machines despite their technical excellence, and that the engineering staff lacked the conceptual tools to understand why. Suchman arrived with a Berkeley background in anthropology and ethnomethodology, an unusual profile in a lab dominated by physicists and computer scientists. The cross-cultural encounter — between engineering assumptions about users and anthropological attention to actual practice — produced the empirical foundation for Plans and Situated Actions.

PARC became famous in the technology industry for a peculiar kind of commercial failure: Xerox, which owned these inventions, largely failed to turn them into market-dominating products. The Alto never became a commercial system; the Star was launched but commercially unsuccessful; the mouse and GUI reached consumers primarily through Apple's Lisa and Macintosh and then through Microsoft Windows. The strategic missteps have been chronicled extensively, most famously in Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander's Fumbling the Future (1988). But the intellectual legacy — the ideas, the framework, the methods — flowed into the industry through departing researchers and became the substrate on which modern computing was built.

PARC's legacy for Suchman's framework is specific. It was at PARC that she developed the ethnographic method applied to computational systems, articulated the insufficiency of the planning paradigm, and demonstrated the structural asymmetry of human-machine interaction. The photocopier help system that became her canonical case was a PARC artifact; the engineering culture she was responding to was PARC's. The lab's formative role in contemporary computing gives her critique particular weight — she was not an outsider to the field but an embedded observer who saw what the field's most sophisticated practitioners could not see about their own work.

Origin

PARC was founded in 1970 and grew rapidly through the 1970s as Xerox invested heavily in research on the assumption that the future of copying technology would be digital. Suchman joined in 1979 and remained until 2000, when she moved to Lancaster University in England.

The lab has continued to operate in various corporate configurations through subsequent decades, but its period of maximum intellectual productivity — the years during which Suchman's framework was developed — was the 1970s and 1980s.

Key Ideas

The canonical lab. PARC invented or prototyped much of modern personal computing: GUI, mouse, Ethernet, object orientation, laser printing, WYSIWYG.

The cross-disciplinary exception. Hiring an anthropologist in 1979 was unusual; the intellectual payoff — Suchman's framework — has outlasted most of PARC's commercial innovations.

The user gap. PARC machines were technically superior and user-unfriendly in ways the engineers could not explain. Suchman's research named the gap.

Commercial failure, intellectual success. Xerox failed to monetize most of PARC's innovations; the ideas shaped the industry anyway through diffusion to Apple, Microsoft, and others.

The situated-action lab. The empirical material for Plans and Situated Actions — including the photocopier studies — was developed in PARC's unusual institutional environment.