Now try walking. What happens? Everything that you see pops into your field of vision unexpectedly. Your head must constantly swivel to see where things are coming from, and what lies ahead of, and around you. Otherwise you will trip, run into things, miss people passing you, and generally bumble. You have lost your peripheral vision. After a few hours you will feel exhausted and highly anxious from simply trying to keep up with your world.
Wearing cardboard tubes is much like living in the digital age. More information hits us each second during a walk in the woods than in an hour of web browsing, yet, after surfing the net, we're exhausted from "information overload" and constantly paying attention. This is because today's digital technology and delivery mechanisms tend to flatten and push all information to the center of our awareness. This bias effectively cuts out the periphery, which provides the context required to make sense of, and anticipate the world around us. Without it, we are lost and confused. This talk will address the necessity of understanding the power of balance between center and periphery in the digital age.
John Seely Brown is Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At Xerox, Dr. Brown has been deeply involved in the formation of corporate strategy and the company's positioning as The Document Company. He has expanded the role of corporate research to include: organizational learning, ethnographies of the workplace, complex adaptive systems and techniques for unfreezing the corporate mind. Personal research interests include digital culture, ubiquitous computing, user-centering design, organizational and individual learning. A major focus of his research has been in human learning and in the management of radical innovation. Dr. Brown is co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning, a non-profit institute for addressing problems of lifelong learning. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has published over 90 papers in scientific journals and received the Harvard Business Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents the Corporation." His book "Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation" is published by Harvard Business Review Books. Dr. Brown is executive producer for the award winning film "Art * Lunch * Internet * Dinner" which won a bronze medal at the Charleston International Film Festival in 1994.