Predict not what you can create

We’re all familiar with some variant of the adage:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Our first blog post of each of the past three years has been about prediction. This year will be different.

What’s different this year is our move into a new office which will serve as both a showcase and a living lab. We share this new space with GenieLab, a non-profit with which we’ve worked closely over the years. Our artistic collaborations will be among the installations. But most importantly,

we’ll be able to demonstrate what it means to make a physical space searchable like the web.

Our workplace will be the workplace of the future, one which we create! To reinforce that point, we’re calling the office reelyActive Parc. Fitting because it is at the corner of rue Sherbrooke and avenue du Parc in Montréal, but even more so because of the legacy of another PARC: the Palo Alto Research Center.

If you’re not familiar with the story, in the 1970s and early 80s, Xerox PARC incubated many of the technologies we still associate with the modern digital workplace, including:

• the graphical user interface (GUI)
• bitmap graphics
• WYSIWYG text editing
• the laser printer
• Ethernet

as well as many more software innovations. Moreover, Alan Kay, a significant contributor to PARC’s innovations is credited with not only saying, but proving that:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

In 2017, we were fortunate to have an e-mail exchange with Kay sparking our blog post on creating the next computing industry. We kick off the new decade in our Park Avenue Research Centre with the ambition to do exactly that.