"The Seven Pragmas of Innovation"

Rich Gold

RED, Xerox PARC

Abstract: "Once upon a time, in a land far away, there were a people who liked to make new things. In this land, there were people who spent their days inventing and creating new shirts, new shoes, new hats, new cars, new TV programs, new computer programs, new comic books, new toys, new video games, new furniture, new coffee flavors, new office supplies and new everything else. Though the museums were filled with more paintings than one could see in a lifetime, artists spent their lives making even more paintings. Musicians put out new albums once or twice a year. Scientists were given special awards whenever they created new theories of the universe. Even things people liked were always being 'new and improved': every year the land's entire supply of breakfast cereal was recreated. In this land, not only was it hard to make a living by not making new things, it was actually illegal to make something that had been made before. If 3.5% new things weren't made each year, economists declared a recession and the government was thrown out of office. No higher compliment could be paid to a mother than saying her child was creative, that is, the child liked to make new things. It was a wonderful and exciting place to live, and other than some rather unfortunate side effects of making and using that many new things, everybody was happy inventing, creating, and then consuming the results of all this innovation." - From an old fairy tale, source unknown.

Over the past several years Rich Gold has given a talk on innovation to a wide variety of audiences from a convention of youth museum curators, to design firms, to, most recently, the U.S. Coast Guard. The talk changes each time, but at the center are seven pragmas, or perhaps more accurately, seven graphical proverbs, that Rich has found to apply consistently in the four creative professions of art, science, design and engineering, though weighted differently in each field. In a small bow to conservation, Rich will give the version of his talk which the Coast Guard heard.

Biography: RICH GOLD is the manager at Xerox PARC of the Research in Experimental Documents group (RED) whose charter is to create new document genres for emerging media technologies. In the past Rich Gold has created new things as a composer, a painter, a novelist, a performance artist, a video game designer, a sound effects guy, a toy and doll designer, a computer interface designer, a virtual reality consultant, an ubiquitous computing researcher, a computer programmer, a systems engineer, a speech writer and as a corporate cartoonist.