How to Invent the Future

Alan Kay famously said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” But how do we go about inventing a future that isn’t a simple linear extrapolation of the present?

Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC did exactly that over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s. They invented and prototyped the key concepts of the Personal Computing Era. Concepts that were then realized in commercial products over the subsequent two decades.

So, how was PARC so successful at “inventing the future”? Can that success be duplicated or perhaps applied at a smaller scale? I think it can. To see how, I decided to try to sketch out what happened at Xerox PARC as a pattern language.