John Lilly traces his move from computer architecture to human-computer interaction, shaped by mentors at Sun and Stanford and Mitch Kapor's 1991 Software Design Manifesto. He argues software should serve people, not define them, and credits Steve Jobs and Apple for showing how design and context matter in technology.
Chapters
The thing that I read at Stanford, the thing that changed my life and all my career, when I came in to Stanford, I was really interested in the kind of stuff that John Hennessy was doing. I'll talk about computer architecture, about how to make computers go fast, fast, fast. And then I had a couple of mentors at internships that I was at at Sun, which is not kind of where you think about HCI coming from. But also here at Stanford and there was a guy, a guy in my dorm, his name is Sean White, who will be— I'll talk about through this piece, through the conversation today. And Sean kept telling me I should do this thing called HCI. Sean was one of Terry Winograd's first, very first grad students in design at a time when we were just trying to figure out what the difference between design was and human factors and usability. And Sean said, you've got to do this, you'll love it. And I was resistant, really resistant. I was like, no, no, I'm a computer architecture guy, I'm going to do multi-core instruction sets in silicon. And obviously I just really wasn't interested in HCI and then I read this piece by a guy named Mitch Kapor. And Mitch is the founder of Lotus. He started— he was one of the first people that really successfully commercialized the spreadsheet and he wrote this piece called the Software Design Manifesto. And what he said is that software needs architects just like buildings need architects. I think we think about this, I think it's obvious now, but it wasn't obvious in 1991. And it's interesting because I was just reading it today and what he said in 1991 is that the revolution hasn't succeeded because what started as this very human counterculture thing to give PCs to people, that was a revolutionary idea in the '80s. What he said is, well, shit, this has become the mainstream. Now computers are defining us instead of us defining computers. And what I read is, when I read this bold thing, he could have written this today. And he could have written about mobile instead of computers and phones instead of computers. And what he could have said is like the revolution hasn't yet succeeded because in spite of the amazing progress and the amazing work that we're doing with these things, we're still not fundamentally human in our interactions with technology. And again, that's a thread that's led all the way through my career and I think we're finally waking up to it. I think Steve coming back to Apple finally woke up the world about how important design, how important human factors is, more importantly, how important thinking about technology in context could be and how powerful it could be.
