For more than a decade, John Seely Brown headed up the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which produced a phenomenal volume of computer hardware and software innovations. Most recently Dr. Brown has been chief scientist at Xerox Corporation. Here he is interviewed by Peter Lawrence, chairman of Corporate Design Foundation.

Your background is math, physics and computer science, yet you list design as a personal interest in your bio. How do you define design?

Probably not the way that most graphic and industrial designers do. When they talk about design innovation, they're usually talking about a product. For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world.

Designers seem to be better at creating user-friendly cars than a user-friendly cyberworld. What seems to be the problem?

Right now we enter the cyberworld disembodied from the physical environment. We need to consider the interplay between virtual and physical systems. By comparison, look at today's cars, which use a massive amount of imbedded computing. When you go to a high-performance car, you don't think about asking what operating system it's running Linux or Windows? Yet the amount of computing power and networking going on inside is amazing. All that computational power is seamlessly coming to your aid when you need it. Its purpose is to keep you better connected to the physical world. ABS brakes and OnStar are two obvious examples.

What makes navigating the Internet so complex and disorienting?

Think of a web page or browser. No matter how well you design it, you jump, jump, jump. After about the seventh jump, you don't even know where you are. Everything is jump from this center of attention to that center of attention. Compare that to architecture. What do good architects do? How do they use the landscaping around a building to help direct visitors toward the main entrance? As you approach the building, you are provided with all kinds of subliminal cues that guide and orient you to where you need to go. Computer scientists would simply tell you where the main entrance is by posting a big sign saying "Main Entrance." They would give you explicit signals that you must consciously interpret.

Is anyone designing better guideposts on the Internet?

The hyperbolic tree browser created by Ramana Rao at Inxight (a spinout of PARC) begins to show how you can sculpture the "periphery," how you can honor peripheral vision along with the center, how the system can work to orient the user. You start thinking about context vs. content, especially through interactivity, and begin asking how you can move from focusing on user-centered design to user-centering design a subtle but powerful distinction.

So, a browser centering system allows users to understand the path they've been on and where they should head next?

Right, but let's take that further. Lately, I've been interested in film theory because good cinematographers and directors deeply understand how to shape the context to elicit the right interpretation of the "center." For example, changing the soundtrack of a film can often completely change the way you see that film. The soundtrack contextualizes and shapes your perception. In fact, the music may so condition viewers that they may not realize that things that they think they see aren't even there. In "Jurassic Park," sound plus a blurred "center" convince you that you saw something that you didn't see. The dinosaur looks like it has chomped the man. You hear the sound, see the partial closing of the jaws, but don't see the actual act. It's a masterful example of using context to shape your perception of content.

Are cinematic techniques being adapted for the computer?

Game designers are beginning to use cinematic techniques to condition your mind, condition the context and orient you so you can make sense of what's happening faster. And they are using such techniques to create a more emotional kind of experience.

It seems that creating an emotional experience lies at the heart of every type of design, whether computer games or architecture.

Yes. In the case of good architects, they understand how communities work, how the building wears through time, what makes it flexible. They not only contextualize the building on the outside, but in terms of how people are inside the building. They understand how a person wants to live; what makes them smile.

Could you talk about this concept in terms of the workplace?

The design of the physical workscape is critical, because it orients you. It contextualizes everything going on. It determines how much of the periphery is immediately available. It creates a sense of membership. The complication here is that people want to expand their awareness of their surroundings because it orients them, but as they move into more creative work, they also need their own space. They want expanded awareness, but also want isolation. I find online "instant messaging," which is quite different from email, interesting because it increases your awareness of what's happening and keeps you constantly connected to an expanded socially defined periphery.

You've called business process re-engineering a travesty. If the process and physical space were redesigned simultaneously, would it have made a difference?

Yes. Not only did the "re-engineers" not pay attention to the physical context, they didn't pay attention to the social context, and they didn't pay much attention to the informational context either which all have to be aligned appropriately. They also didn't think deeply about the difference between an empowering business process and a coercive one. How do you design a process that facilitates knowledge flow between communities of practice? How do you build empowering processes that facilitate negotiation in practice, rather than overly specifying everything that has to happen? What makes a process enabling versus coercive? How does an enabling process facilitate the growth of trust and social capital? These questions were never asked and are becoming more important as we venture into the knowledge age.

In the 1970s, you were among those who predicted the "paperless office." Do you still believe that?

We thought that was a great idea until we grew up. We've learned that paper offers many advantages over computers. A piece of paper never runs out of power. You never have to reboot a piece of paper. A piece of paper never turns blue and says, `Sorry: unrecoverable error.' Plus paper has infinitely better resolution than the world's best displays today.

Do you see new media replacing old? Will online documents replace hard-copy ones?

Creative use of new documents no longer involves direct challenges to old ones. These new forms appear to reinvigorate the old, extending their useful life. For example, online library catalogues providing abstracts, indexing and, in some cases, full texts for print journals, have reinforced these print journals rather than undermined them. Journals remain the best social filter for the flood of writing available on any topic and the best repositories of the development of ideas and attitudes. As yet, digital media do not compete in these realms. But electronic resources have made using print journals much easier.

The plethora of documents now online seems to make it harder to find what you really want.

Yes, the central issue here is for audiences to be able to recognize documents intended for them. Book designers faced that problem long ago. Realizing that books were not of universal interest but addressed to specific audiences, they developed strategies to help readers distinguish different kinds of books. As a result, books use far more than their titles to engage certain audiences, while telling others to pass by. We do, indeed, judge a book by its cover and from other visual cues. On the Internet, it is still hard to make even a reasonable guess at the intended audience. This difficulty may reflect an implicit assumption by many that documents have universal appeal or that content alone will marshal an audience. Yet if the overall form appears unclear, few will linger over the content, especially given the ease with which links allow people to pass by.

Your book "The Social Life of Information" claims that documents, on paper or online, do more than communicate information; they build social communities. Explain?

If you think of documents as a means of conveying ideas or information through time and space, you begin to see how they support relationships that are held together by common interests and shared communications. Centuries ago the letters circulating among the Fellows of the Royal Society in England formed the prototype for the scientific journals. More recently, photocopiers, faxes and other print reproduction media have allowed scholars as well as other groups albeit wind-surfers, exotic bird enthusiasts or DeLorean owners to form self-organized units. To a significant degree, these "communities" are held together by documents circulating among members, keeping each conscious of being a member and aware of what others are up to.

Isn't this how "fan-zines" came about?

Yes. The practice of producing "zines" began with fans of science fiction and fantasy and spread to followers of particular TV programs and rock groups. One estimate claims some 20,000 zines have been produced over the past couple of decades, and the genre is growing at about 20% per year. The key to forming a new group is starting a publication to help hold it together. Consequently, as publication costs come down, it's easier to form new groups, and break off into even more specialized splinter groups.

Information technology is helping to form smaller, more specialized communities, but it is also linking people in far-flung places, isn't it?

Political scientist Benedict Anderson used the term "imagined communities." By that he meant members who may never meet or even hear their fellow members, but in their minds share a communion with them through shared documents. Now on the Internet, ideas emerging on one side of the world can almost instantaneously be picked up and absorbed into the local context by communities on the other, so the imagined communities of today may circle the globe.