A Commitment to Complete the Work of Augmenting Human Intelligence
“Christina Engelbart outlined many of the fundamental principles of her Dad's work ... "harnessing the collective intellect of all the people working on important problems." Doug believed that by working in this reflective, continuous improvement way, and by co-evolving humans and technology, we can accelerate our ability as a human species to solve complex problems. "The problems we're facing as a species are complex and urgent," Christina said. "We need to speed up innovation — to accelerate our ability to work together to solve complex global problems.”
Celebrating the man who invented the mouse
“The mouse was merely a byproduct of Engelbart's larger vision, said his daughter, Christina Engelbart [...] "That was what the public recognizes as a great innovation that's really had a huge impact on everyone. But truly his greatest innovation of all was the vision and the strategic organizing principles that catapulted the innovation of his lab and that could catapult the work today if it was applied and harnessed in teams and organizations” Watch the Stanford News Report
Celebrating Doug Engelbart's Influence on Society & Computing
“I'll be attending the 40th anniversary celebration at Stanford University hosted by SRI on December 9th. Tweet or email me if you want to meet up. There are (at least) two events. One is the celebration itself. The second is the Program for the Future Summit and Workshop on Collective Intelligence at the Tech Museum of Innovation at San Jose (December 8-9).”
See the Event Website
The mouse turns 40: An interview with Paul Saffo on technology’s past and future
“He is known for the mouse. But he thinks that’s the least important of his inventions.... He didn’t set out to invent a mouse or a display for editing. His goal was to augment human intellect in the service of giving human beings tools that were the equal of the growing challenges humans were facing. ”
See also 40th Anniversary Event
Douglas C. Engelbart: The Mouse That Roared
“For better or worse, your computer and its connections to information and other people worldwide were the vision of Douglas C. Engelbart. It all started as he contemplated his impending marriage while driving to work back in 1951.... Despite his 82 years, Engelbart is still working on ways to make it easier to resolve complex issues and augment how mankind works.”
See also: TOC This Issue | More from Doris Kilbane
Designing Interactions
“A pioneer in interaction design tells the stories of designers who changed the way people use everyday things in the digital era, interviewing the founders of Google, the creator of The Sims, the inventors and developers of the mouse and the desktop, and many others.” See the online interactive version: designinginteractions.com featuring Doug Engelbart in Chapter 1: The Mouse and the Desktop, and Interview: Doug Engelbart on inventing the Mouse
Holistic Management: Managing What Matters for Company Success
“This book teaches us how to increase the company's greatest asset, the organization's intellectual capability, it's 'Collective IQ.' [...] Douglas Engelbart, the patron saint of the computer industry, advocates continuously increasing "collective IQ" to expand the company's "capability infrastructure." [...] offers a structure and direction of work that can increase collective IQ.”
See Also: Book Overview | TOC | Chapter Summary
Collective IQ & Human Augmentation - with Doug Engelbart
“In this podcast, learn how one man's lifelong passion to create a meaningful legacy of work that could benefit all mankind – the means by which we can harness our Collective Intelligence and Human Augmentation.”
Find it Here: Podcast | Description
Outside Innovation:
How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
“How dynamic businesses of every size can unleash innovation by inviting customers to co–design what they do and make." [...] "In Outside Innovation, bestselling author Seybold taps her close relationship with dozens of high–innovation companies to reveal the untold strategy behind the trendsetters and the next HUGE leap forward in customer strategy. Seybold shows that companies that are dominating their category and staying ahead of the pack are collaborating at every level of their business with their customers.”
Education, Information Technologies, and the Augmentation of Human Intellect
“Capturing a moment in which participatory culture offered a glimpse of ways in which creation, communication, reflection, and awareness might be part of the same complex web of activity, a kind of mindfulness that would gain purpose and direction from opportunities for creation and sharing. That mindfulness would not happen automatically. [...] But participatory culture within environments rich with integrated domains and structures encouraging reflection and mindfulness can set up all sorts of lovely feedback loops, reciprocalities, and serendipitous encounters.”
Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want
“As CEO of SRI International, Carlson consulted with hundreds of organizations on becoming more effective and profitable. He has distilled that experience into a thorough treatise on the innovation process. The book cites dozens of examples of innovative ideas brought to fruition by innovators from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. "Innovation is not about inventing clever gadgets or just “creativity.” It is the successful creation and delivery of a new or improved product or service that provides value for your customer and sustained profit for your organization." You'll find Doug Engelbart under Exponential Improvement, including Collective IQ and Networked Improvement Communities (NICs), on pages 114, 134, 169-179, 181-182, 189-190.
Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problem
“The first full-length book to bring dialogue mapping to a wider audience, Dialogue Mapping provides an exciting new conceptual framework that will change the way readers view projects and project management ... When an organization is confronting a wicked problem the familiar approaches don't work. [...] Dialogue mapping is a proven technique for building that shared understanding and commitment, as efficiently and effectively as possible.” In Engelbart parlance, dialog mapping is a proven practice for leveraging the collective IQ of your team in tackling complex, urgent challenges.
It's Moore's Law, but Another Had the Idea First
"Moore's Law" refers to Gordon Moore's observation in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, while the cost of computers is halved. However, "computer scientist Douglas C. Engelbart had made a similar observation in 1960, at the very dawn of the integrated-circuit era, and Mr. Moore had heard his lecture on the subject."
A man, a mouse, a mission
“"Point-and-click pioneer Doug Engelbart is still going full-tilt trying to figure out ways to solve complex problems facing the world... If the name Douglas C. Engelbart ever comes up on TV's Jeopardy game show, the question doubtless will have been: 'Who invented the computer mouse?' In fact, that's hardly Engelbart's only claim... Ask Engelbart, and he says his life's work is about an even more audacious goal: trying to figure out ways to help the human race solve its increasingly complex problems...”
KMi meets with Doug Engelbart's Pioneering Vision
“It became clear to all of us that these were prime examples of what Engelbart had long envisioned as Dynamic Knowledge Repositories, supporting the mediation and capture of dialogue, the collective updating by a distributed community of its knowledge, and the provision of advanced services that generate knowledge 'products' - flexible views onto the underlying knowledge repository.”
The Click Heard Round the World
“It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a "mouse." Doug Engelbart tells writer Ken Jordan what it felt like to launch the point-and-click revolution 15 years before the Mac.”
Global Knowledge Renaissance: Selected Papers from the World Library Summit 2002
Compiled and edited by National Library Board Singapore | Times Books International, 2003 | Papers cover the broad themes of knowledge augmentation, cultural entrepreneurship and knowledge governance, including Doug Engelbart's keynote "Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future"
See Preview Doug's Keynote | Doug's IDG Award
Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
“Tracing the fertile series of collaborations between arts and sciences throughout the twentieth century, Randall Packer and Ken Jordan present the often overlooked history behind multimedia―the interfaces, links, and interactivity we all take for granted today.”
Includes pioneers Licklider, Engelbart, Kay and more. See also [ WIRED Review | Table of Contents | Teacher's Guide ]
Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse
Developed by the Lemelson-MIT Program for Invention and Innovation, Inventing Modern America is designed to inspire a new generation of American scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs through the personal stories of these thirty-five American inventors - including the likes of Henry Ford, George Washington Carver, Buckminster Fuller, Dean Kamen, Doug Engelbart, Ray Kurzweil, and Steve Wozniak.” With Forward by Lester Thurow, Intro by James Burke
Find Doug pp. 162-167 | See also Book Event Panel Discussion & Press
Silicon Valley, Innovation, and the History of Modern Computing: A Conversation Among Doug Engelbart, Gordon Moore, and Regis McKenna
Paul Ceruzzi of the Smithsonian Institution moderated this stellar panel. "A stimulating conversation among three of the “founding fathers” of Silicon Valley produced different views on why Silicon Valley is so unique. [...] Doug Engelbart began the forum with a brief account of how he made the kind of commitment that
Mike Malone described. [...] He saw that increasingly the problems of the world were the result of a human inability to deal with complexity. [...] Engelbart’s vision is for self-enhancing, knowledge-based systems that can be used to accelerate learning, problem-solving, and the development of new ways of organizing information and people to solve complex and urgent problems.”
This Article also available in PDF format
Nexus Issue 2.2: TOC for this Issue | About STS Nexus
Inventors discuss their sources of inspiration
Featuring a panel discussion of five inventors whose dreams transformed computing, medicine and consumer products -- Douglas Englebart, Brian Hubert, Raymond Kurzweil, Robert Langer, and Steve Wozniak -- the event celebrates the publication of Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse (MIT Press). 'Invention in technology is a form of magic,' said Kurzweil, 'in seeing the leap from a dry formula to an impact on people's lives.' Engelbart recommended that next generation inventors nurture collectively their 'dreams about how much people can improve. The mouse was just a windshield wiper. There are urgent big problems that have to be dealt with collectively.'”
Watch the Panel Discussion | Browse Book Review
Technology and the Quality of Being Human
“San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation and Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society (CSTS) have jointly implemented an awards program recognizing technology that benefits humanity." ... A case in point, the Millennium Project of the United Nations University. "The protagonist at the Board meeting was Doug Engelbart, Turing Award winner and recipient of the National Medal of Technology... a passionate advocate for what he describes as the “need for technological and human systems to increase their rate of co-evolution” if we are to effectively address complex and urgent problems like those identified in the Millennium Project.”
See also
This Article in PDF format | TOC for this Issue (pdf) | About STS Nexus
Co-Evolving Social Systems with Escalating Technological Change
“How can individuals and organizations maintain a sense of control amidst the ever-accelerating pace of the information technology revolution?” According to panelist Doug Engelbart, "With escalating change in several systems, many forces will start to collide, politically, militarily, economically, and socially. [...] We need a strategy to deal with the changing scale brought on by the information technology revolution. [...] If we can make headway in dealing with complexity, which itself is a complex task, then we can use this progress to improve our ability to make progress. Thus we can bootstrap our way to an improved capability for dealing with complex, urgent problems. [...] and co-evolve with our technological systems to augment our collective IQ."
See also
TOC for this Issue | About STS Nexus
Computer visionary seeks to boost people's collective ability to confront complex problems coming at a faster pace
Douglas Engelbart has been “pursuing his vision of far more powerful systems that would help people collaborate more effectively to solve the big problems" -- many of which were complicated and speeded up by the technologies he helped launch. "That's the big, big thing that's so important: How do we increase the capability of people to deal collectively with urgent complex problems? That's been my pursuit all these years," he says.
The SCU Center for Science, Technology, and Society: Where Technology and Tradition Meet
“The new Center at SCU capitalizes on its Silicon Valley resources to provide a promising educational resource. [...] CSTS Advisory Board Member and recent National Medal of Technology recipient, Doug Engelbart, calls for a new technological and social architecture if we are to tap our "collective I.Q." and imaginations. He posits that realizing this potential will require changes in both our "tool" and "human" systems. [...] Engelbart argues that we are in the early stages of an "unfinished revolution," the full benefits of which can only be realized through the imaginative "co-evolution" of technical and human systems.
See Illustrations for this article | TOC for this Inaugural Edition | About STS Nexus
The Gods of Tech
“Enough about the kids and their L.P.O.'s—there's history behind those dot-com billions. In an unprecedted vivutual group portrait of the men who forged the computer age, the information revolution, and the Internet, CHRISTIAN WITKIN immontaliges, titans, dreamers, and pioneers, such as Bill Gates, Andrew gove, Steve Jobs, Jim Beners-Lee, Linux To walds, microchip inventor Jack Kilby, and Douglas Engelbart, the man who cheated the first computer mouse. ALAN DEUTSCHMAN traces the profiles on high tech's mount Rushmore”
Find photos in the PDF/Print version
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
“In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay.” The chapter on Doug is Chapter Nine: The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker. First published in 1985, the 2000 edition incorporates 1999 interviews with the principals.See listing at MIT Press.
Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing
“Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. ”
See also Book Review by Susan Barnes