ORGANIZATION
Xerox PARC
The Palo Alto Research Center where, between 1970 and the mid-1980s, most of what became modern personal computing was invented — and where Suchman did the ethnographic work that reframed human-machine interaction.
Xerox PARC — the Palo Alto Research Center — was the corporate research laboratory where, across roughly fifteen extraordinary years, most of the foundational technologies of modern personal computing were invented: the graphical user interface, the mouse, object-oriented programming, Ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG document editing. It was also the lab that hired Lucy Suchman as an anthropologist in 1979, a cross-disciplinary move that produced some of the most consequential research on human-machine interaction of the twentieth century. Suchman's ethnographic studies of actual users struggling with actual machines revealed a gap between engineering assumptions and human practice that reshaped how the field thought about its work.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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,