Along with the corporate overhaul by Noyes and his associates, husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames also worked closely with IBM to re-imagine the company for the 20th century. While Elliot Noyes was an industrial designer who focused on corporate design and branding, the Eameses were renowned for their contributions to furniture design, architecture, and multimedia productions.

Both the Eameses and Noyes shared a commitment to modernist design principles, including functionality, simplicity, and human-centered design. They believed in creating designs that were not only aesthetically pleasing but also practical and user-friendly.

The Eames Office/IBM Partnership

The Office of Charles and Ray Eames is among the most important firms in the history of design. Their 40-year career spanned architecture, furniture, exhibition design, film, graphics, books, toys, art and more.

Charles Eames was initially thrust into prominence by architect/designer/curator Eliot Noyes in 1940 when Charles and fellow Cranbrook Academy of Art faculty member Eero Saarinen won the 1940 MoMA Competition for Organic Design in Home Furnishings using the molded plywood manufacturing processes that the Eameses later perfected. It is for this furniture and the processes invented to manufacture it that the Eameses are perhaps most famous.

Although The Eameses designed some of the most successful furniture pieces of all time for Herman Miller and continued to innovate in this area throughout their career, their aperture opened significantly in the early 1950s. At this time, Charles and Ray began to explore communications theory and the power of film and multimedia exhibitions to transmit ideas, concepts and emotions.

During the time The Eames Office was cultivating their interest in communications, data processing and computing were still essentially new phenomena; largely the domain of governments and large corporations. Indeed, the implications of this technology were only beginning to enter popular culture. IBM was the dominant force in early computing in America, a subject that was at best misunderstood, if not somewhat feared by the general public.

1960s Vari-Vue “3D” Lenticular Postcard featuring the IBM 1440.

There was a clear opportunity for IBM to shape public opinion around computing technology in 1956 when newly installed CEO Thomas Watson Jr. hired Eliot Noyes to develop the company’s first corporatewide design initiative. It is impossible to overstate the impact of this comprehensive design program on modern corporate branding practice. Indeed, it is the benchmark by which all others might be judged.

Industrial Design Magazine, 1957.

In March 1957, Industrial Design Magazine noted: “Not long ago, in February, 1956, architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes was asked by IBM to become Consultant Director of Design, and since his appointment he has led the company into an ambitious and unusual program to coordinate and upgrade design across the board, across every aspect of the company’s vast operations. This extends from the IBM trademark, through packaging, graphics, exhibitions, interiors and interior furnishings, such as the new Paul Rand drapery, to the business machines themselves and the buildings of the company.”

IBM Carbon Paper Packaging, 1950s, Paul Rand.

Noyes, in turn, hired a cadre of design luminaries including Paul Rand, George Nelson, Edgar Kaufmann, Eero Saarinen and The Eames Office to help not only remake IBM’s image, but to root the technology juggernaut in the fertile soil of Design and influence America’s perception of the societal value of computing technology.

The Eames Office, at the request of Eliot Noyes, produced an animated film for IBM, The Information Machine: Creative Man and the Data Processor, shown at the Noyes-designed IBM pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. This, and many subsequent works, appear prophetic as we tumble headlong into a new AI computing paradigm.

Over the next 20 years, The Eames Office created dozens of exhibitions, films, books and experiences for IBM, most of which positioned computers as a natural extension of human reasoning and a tool with unparalleled potential to improve our world.

Some of this work, like the IBM pavilion for the 1964 NY World’s Fair, was seen by millions of people. Yet, surprisingly, much of the work produced under this partnership remains largely obscure.

Which is precisely why collecting it was so much fun!

The Collection

The collection consists of several hundred artifacts from the 1950s–1970s, all of which the author acquired in the first decade of the new millenium. Originally exhibited at the LUNAR offices in Palo Alto in Spring 2011, much of the collection is now archived at the Computer History Museum. It includes ephemera from small and large-scale exhibitions, including Mathematica: A World of Numbers…and Beyond and the landmark IBM pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows.

Exhibition invitation designed by Laura Martini and the author, punched at the Computer History Museum, 2011.

In the collection are all manner of Eames Office, Paul Rand and IBM staff designed ephemera including original brochures and annual reports, press kits and photographs, slides and postcards, packaging, magazine articles, and even a Cartier-produced trophy from the 1964/5 New York World’s Fair.

IBM Fair Brochure, 1964, Paul Rand.

Charles and Ray Eames pioneered a deeply human approach to design which, although evident in all of their work, was particularly powerful in their IBM projects. Their clear communication of technology’s role in society, through myriad IBM-sponsored exhibitions, short films and books, became the reference for a new form of corporate design and citizenship. Their work presents a finely integrated model that is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago.

Summary

These artifacts trace the massive impact the IBM design program had on American public perception of mathematics, science and computing technology. Critical examination and documentation of this largely overlooked partnership between Eliot Noyes, Paul Rand, George Nelson, Eero Saarinen, Edgar Kaufmann and The Eames Office is a vehicle for remembering not only the historical precedents that link design and technology, but also a potent case study detailing how the human centered design process can be used to fundamentally shift attitudes and the human experience.

Main Image: The IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

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William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) is not a household name today, but he left his fingerprints on several strands of modern scientific thinking. In his 1874 Principles of Science, a copy of which can be found in the Computer History Museum collections, he sought to formulate precisely the idea of the scientific method; he feared that scientists “speak familiarly of Scientific Method, but they could not readily describe what they mean by that expression.”^[1] He is also sometimes remembered as a founding figure of modern economics, celebrated for his efforts to introduce greater mathematization into political economy, as the subject was known in his time. And despite the seeming abstractness of many of his interests, he is also responsible for the construction of a striking physical artifact, his so-called Logical Machine or Logical Piano.

Jevons’s Logical Machine, as illustrated in his Principles of Science, from the CHM collection, https://ia800309.us.archive.org/8/items/principlesofsci00jevo/principlesofsci00jevo.pdf.

Illustrated here in the frontispiece to Principles of Science, and held today in the History of Science Museum in Oxford, the machine represented to Jevons “a conspicuous proof of the generality and power” of his logical method.^[2] As a box with a keyboard that mechanically spits out solutions to problems input by a user, the Logical Piano readily evokes an embryonic idea of the digital computer when viewed with modern eyes. But perhaps what links this device most profoundly with today’s computers is, ironically, the fact that it was not about computing.

Computers as we know them descend from machines dreamt up and built for the sake of literal—which is to say, rather, numerical—computation. Indeed the name “electronic computer” was first a way of distinguishing a machine from the usual kind of computer: a clerical worker, frequently female, who performed tedious and complex calculations in the service of some large, bureaucratically organized scientific project. The first electronic computers did not so much replace these workers as modify and rearrange the work they were hired to perform. All of this collective human and machine labor aimed at executing complicated calculations with ever greater accuracy and efficiency.

Jevons’s famous contemporaries Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace belong to this calculating tradition too. Their work around the Difference Engine and Analytic Engine aimed to delegate the work of computation to steam-powered mechanisms. Babbage, like the military engineers behind ENIAC a century later, suspected that the costly and time-consuming labor of large-scale calculation could be circumvented by a well-designed machine.

Once some of these large electronic calculating machines were up and running, engineers and programmers begin to envision other functions for them. The makers of computers recognized their potential applications to data processing, while other researchers envisioned a pure theory of computing largely detached from numerical calculation. The machines’ functions multiplied until the word “computer” came to denote a technology that today most people use for reasons utterly unrelated to computation.

Jevons was not particularly interested in massive numerical computation, but he found Babbage’s project inspiring because he believed it had larger implications concerning the nature of intelligence. According to Jevons, by articulating a plan for the Analytical Engine, Babbage had already “shown that material machinery is capable, in theory at least, of rivalling the labours of the most practised mathematicians in all branches of their science.”^[3] Meanwhile, George Boole had recently publicized an algebraic system of logic that translated syllogisms, the traditional matter of formal logic, into systems of equations. A syllogism is a form of reasoning that consists of two premises involving three terms and a conclusion following from them. The classic example is “If all Greeks are humans, and all humans are mortal, then all Greeks are mortal.” If this sort of logical deduction could be conducted by means of equations as Boole had demonstrated, and equations could be solved mechanically as Babbage had shown, then couldn’t a machine be built to perform logical reasoning?

Jevons soon designed just such a machine, and hired a clockmaker (whom he did not credit by name) to build it according to his plans. Their working relationship was not frictionless: Jevons struggled to trust this hired craftsman, deeming it “necessary for me to go there almost every day to see that he is getting on right. I find it necessary to have each step of the work done separately in order that I may see whether I have planned every thing rightly.”^[4] His lack of confidence in the artisan who actually built the Piano bears an unfortunate resemblance to the way early programmers would conceive of instructions for inanimate machines as needing to “contain everything necessary to cause the machine to perform the required calculations and every contingency must be foreseen.”^[5]

It seems the first machine they produced was not satisfactory, but collaborative difficulties notwithstanding, by the next year Jevons was highly optimistic about their progress on yet another new machine “in appearance like a large accordion or a very small piano, & has 21 keys exactly like white piano keys.”^[6]

The finished Logic Piano with its detachable cover removed to reveal some of the mechanism. Inv 18230, © History of Science Museum, University of Oxford. http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/themes/mhs-2017-responsive/imu-media.php?irn=49854.

Jevons’s logical piano keys. Inv 18230, © History of Science Museum, University of Oxford. http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/themes/mhs-2017-responsive/imu-media.php?irn=25129.

Jevons’s piano was built to reason from premises describing classes of objects: statements like “All As are Bs” or “Anything that is A and B is either C or D but not both.” A user could enter input of this kind on the keyboard, and a concealed system of rods and pulleys would cause a panel to display only those combinations of the classes A, B, C, and D not ruled out by the premises. He reported to the Royal Society:

By merely reading down the premises or data of an argument on a key board representing the terms, conjunctions, copula, and stops of a sentence, the machine is caused to make such a comparison of those premises that it becomes capable of returning any answer which may be logically deduced from them. … The actual process of logical deduction is thus reduced to a purely mechanical form.^[7]

There is certainly room to object that this highly specific type of problem solving is too artificial to represent deduction in a meaningful way. Not all of Jevons’s contemporaries were convinced that his machine automated anything particularly difficult or worthwhile, and we can hear echoes of those Victorian debates in discussions of AI and machine learning today. Disagreements about whether a machine can reason are never just debates about what the machine can do; they are about what it means for human beings to reason in the first place.

These are big questions, and they confront us today in such disorienting new forms that, wherever we stand on twenty-first-century AI, we are unlikely now to see Jevons’s piano as a harbinger of the singularity. But historical distance is useful: the glaring differences between our technology and that of the Victorians only makes the rhetorical echoes more striking. We are not the first to be floored by the logical prowess of our devices (nor the first to fret that undetected flaws in their construction might render them unreliable). Nearly a century before people began to suspect that the digital computer was destined for higher logical functions than mere computing, Jevons looked to Babbage’s engines and argued that a machine could do more than calculate by steam: that his Logic Piano would not just compute, but reason.

Endnotes

1.) W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), vii. See the History of Science Museum’s entry for the Logic Machine at https://www.hsm.ox.ac.uk/collections-online#/item/hsm-catalogue-6547.

2.) Ibid., 107.

3.) William Stanley Jevons, “On the mechanical performance of logical inference,” Philosophical Transactions 160 (1870): 497–518, at 498.

4.) W. S. Jevons to Herbert Jevons, 25 September 1867, in William Stanley Jevons, Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons, ed. R. D. Collison Black, 7 vols. (London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1972—1981), vol. III, 157–9, at 157.

5.) Maurice V. Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill, The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, with Special Reference to the EDSAC and the Use of a Library Of Subroutines (Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley Press Inc., 1951), 1.

6.) W. S. Jevons to Herbert Jevons, 23 June 1868 in Jevons, Papers and Correspondence, vol. III, 185.

7.) Jevons, “On the mechanical performance of logical inference,” 500.

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We once roamed the halls and hurried off to classes with bulky backpacks, and now we reside within our rooms and lead monotonous lives. With many high school seniors missing out on staple activities such as football games and prom, and with many juniors struggling to take part in standardized testing and participate in extracurriculars, it’s no secret that our lives—much like the rest of the world—have been impacted in ways we never imagined.

Given the duration and complexity of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than human minds have been necessary to develop clinical treatments, track, and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Consequently, the world has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) for help. As high schoolers interested in AI, we decided to research ways AI and technology have been utilized to help the world fight and move past the pandemic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that symptoms of COVID-19 can appear in an individual two to fourteen days after being in contact with the virus. The list of symptoms seems to keep running down the page, with fevers/chills, coughs, shortness of breath, and diarrhea, to name a few. With time and research, it was concluded that an individual can test positive for COVID-19 antibodies without ever showing signs such as high fevers and persistent coughs; individuals who do not exhibit those symptoms of COVID-19 but have the disease are categorized as asymptomatic. Those who are asymptomatic can spread the virus without knowing, infecting more and more people.

We were interested to find that researchers at MIT have found a way to differentiate healthy and asymptomatic individuals by detecting the differences in their coughs. Using forced-cough recordings, researchers developed and trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to detect differences between the coughs based on the vocal cord strength and lung respiratory performance. They discovered that although people who are asymptomatic do not display symptoms, their coughs are different from healthy patients, and these differences can be detected by artificial intelligence programs. The model was able to detect 98.5 percent of asymptomatic coughs accurately. New algorithms such as this one shine a light on AI’s wide variety of uses and opens up the doors to new discoveries and treatments.

Although most of us are experiencing a pandemic for the first time, history has a way of repeating itself. With the Spanish Flu in 1918, the Asian Flu in 1957, the ongoing AIDS pandemic and epidemic since 1981, and the Ebola virus from 2014-16, the world has seen its fair share of diseases and pandemics, all of which have affected our way of living. People fighting earlier pandemics didn’t have the benefit of AI to speed up research, or the development of treatment and control solutions, but for our generation, technology has been key to gaining control over the virus. Our lives have changed in unimaginable ways, and knowing that we may never get these few years of our lives back seems frightening in the moment. Shifting to the bigger picture helps us understand that technology’s role in this pandemic is helping things like vaccine development and patient diagnosis progress at a much faster rate.

While protecting healthcare workers, the most effective way for us to move past the pandemic is through a clinical vaccine. Creating vaccines often takes years or even decades. It’s no easy task developing a vaccine. 

In contrast, the COVID-19 vaccine was developed in roughly less than a year with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine granted emergency use authorization by the FDA on December 11th, 2020. Seven days later, Moderna received the same FDA approval for their version of the COVID-19 vaccine, and others have followed.

Our research found that machine-learning systems powered by AI have played a vital role in developing our current vaccine solutions. For any virus, there are thousands of different aspects the immune system reacts with. Therefore, there are thousands of varying vaccine solutions. AI and machine-learning tools can predict which specific parts of a virus are more likely to evoke an immune response causing us to feel sick. In doing so, vaccine production is sped up as scientists can utilize these tools and focus on the few specific parts of the virus known to make us sick.

Without doubt, we are excited to receive our doses of the vaccine. Regardless of when we are permitted to do so, vaccines serve as long-term solutions. In the meantime, we found that contact tracing apps have become increasingly efficient with the help of machine learning. Algorithms can automate alerts and notifications of exposures to COVID and analyze the immense amount of data each phone receives at any given time. Such processes are traditionally quite labor-intensive and slow but these algorithms have accelerated the process, which is critical during a pandemic.

Companies such as Apple and Google have developed contact tracing apps that work through our phones’ Bluetooth to scan for other nearby phones with the app. When two phones connect, they switch identification codes, and your phone begins to record how long you spend near another person based on factors such as how far away your two devices are and how strong the signal received is. If you were to test positive for COVID, your local health department asks you if you would like to notify others you may have exposed. If you agree, your phone will send an anonymous notification to other devices that came within six feet of yours for longer than fifteen minutes. When notified of your exposure to COVID, the app will give you instructions on the next steps to take, including being tested and isolating for fourteen days.

From global response funds to the United Nations’ support of multilateralism, we are no longer just individual countries fighting this pandemic. Countries all over the globe are facing similar problems and hardships with lack of resources in hospitals and numbers of deaths increasing; despite this, social media and technology has filled a void, which now enables people to feel more informed of the pandemic and connected to their loved ones. In fact, this pandemic has introduced an “infodemic” that has brought together tech titans worldwide to better educate our society in understanding the pandemic and how it can be stopped. New trials and projects are being piloted so that new concepts can be taught to different countries; back in February of 2021 in Madhya Pradesh, India, drones were flown over the bustling city to release a chemical agent that was anticipated to slow down the virus. Other hospitals in Wuhan, China, and Kerala, India, are shifting to robot-driven care to minimize healthcare professionals’ risk.

Witnessing the power and potential of technology to help address the current pandemic has made us more hopeful for the future. While we may not know the answer to questions such as if masks will need to be worn regularly throughout our lifetimes, or if we will always need to stand six feet behind strangers in the grocery store, or as teenagers if we will ever get to link arms and gossip with friends again, global crises of all kinds call for more innovation and collaboration worldwide. With technology by our sides, our generation has the power to continue to innovate, collaborate, and change our world for the better.

About the Authors

Anwesha Mishra and Sohie Pal are alumnae of the Museum’s Teen Internship and Teen Engagement Council programs. They collaborated through online Zoom meetings and shared Google docs to write this blog.

Sources

Coles, Terri. “Contact Tracing Apps Use ML to Curb COVID-19 Outbreaks.” ITPro Today, July 10, 2020. https://www.itprotoday.com/machine-learning/contact-tracing-apps-use-ml-curb-covid-19-outbreaks.

FDA. “FDA Takes Additional Action in Fight Against COVID-19 By Issuing Emergency Use Authorization for Second COVID-19 Vaccine.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA, December 18, 2020. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-additional-action-fight-against-covid-19-issuing-emergency-use-authorization-second-covid.

FDA. “FDA Takes Key Action in Fight Against COVID-19 By Issuing Emergency Use Authorization for First COVID-19 Vaccine.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA News Release , December 11, 2020. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-key-action-fight-against-covid-19-issuing-emergency-use-authorization-first-covid-19.

Ferguson, Cat. “Do Digital Contact Tracing Apps Work? Here’s What You Need to Know.” MIT Technology Review. MIT Technology Review, November 20, 2020. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/20/1012325/do-digital-contact-tracing-apps-work-heres-what-you-need-to-know/.

MIT News Office, Jennifer Chu. “Artificial Intelligence Model Detects Asymptomatic Covid-19 Infections through Cellphone-Recorded Coughs.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT News Office , October 29, 2020. https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection-1029.

Solis-Moreira, Jocelyn, and Yella Hewings-Martin. “COVID-19 Vaccine: How Was It Developed so Fast?” Medical News Today. MediLexicon International, November 15, 2020. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-did-we-develop-a-covid-19-vaccine-so-quickly#Rigorous-guidelines-for-clinical-trials.

Explore more CHM AI resources.

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“Should I post this? What should the caption be? Will this fit in with my feed?” These are just some of the many questions we, as teens, ponder constantly. Social media has always been a major part of our lives in connecting with our peers, favorite celebrities, and the world around us, especially during the pandemic.

But recently something has changed. 

There was a time we would go on Instagram for important life updates from our peers: Sonia’s trip to Sweden, Ryan’s new boyfriend, or Karie’s argument with her friend group because she didn’t comment on their photos. But we don’t see Jennifer’s picture-perfect smoothie bowl anymore. Instead, we see posts pleading for petition signatures and infographics educating us on topics we’ve never heard about. Led by the Black Lives Matter movement and other crises around the world, we witness the voices who have been facing injustices finally being heard, inspiring an outpouring of allies advocating for change.

For many of us, the Gen Z’ers—the ones who grew up with iPhones instead of phone books, searching through the internet instead of the library, and posting to Instagram instead of Myspace—this year is the first time we are able to vote in a federal election. And as we, the voters, are changing and growing, so is the very landscape of politics and the election itself. Campaign ads are running on YouTube and Facebook in addition to TV, and candidates are attempting to connect with us through sharing gaming stats or skincare routines rather than through hometown rallies.

We are a growing demographic that political candidates want to appeal to. We have more power than ever, and we recognize that. With so many of us rallying together and taking a stand on social media, we are proud to be a generation that speaks up for what we believe in and one that is aware of the systemic issues impacting all of those around us. It’s empowering to be a generation that is “woke,” and it is the new normal.

To some of us, the shift in social media—from selfies to educational graphics about the Black Lives Matter movement, Yemen, Lebanon, systemic racism, LGBTQ+ injustices, saving the USPS, Trump vs Biden, and so on—has been quite overwhelming. It isn’t that we don’t agree with the causes behind these posts and ongoing political activism but rather how fast this change has come and the sheer volume of posts. As peers have begun to post more and more, the pressure has increased, and it feels like we are obligated to post. Terms floating in the air, such as “performative activism,” “attention seeker,” and “trend-follower” have become more prevalent and toxic. New questions have started to arise too: “I don’t normally post, but if I don’t post this, will people think I am racist?” “I already donated money … Do I have to tell everyone I did?” “All my friends are posting this graphic … should I post it too?”

With recirculated posts on Instagram that we see over and over again, it’s hard to be exposed to new perspectives if we don’t go out of our way to find them. This is how an echo chamber—an environment where someone only encounters information that affirms their existing beliefs—is formed. Especially for teens like us, echo chambers are dangerous because they will be harder to break out of later in life. Although we learn how to find neutral and reliable sources of information in high school, we often forget to apply those skills when quickly scrolling through posts, especially when it’s harder to track the source of information. We often believe social media content to be true, even if it’s misleading or exaggerated. In a time when the political climate is especially polarized, information that circulates often presents a very biased perspective, which can hinder us from being accurately informed at the polls as first-time voters.

At first glance, social media seems like it can expose us to new ideas and help us expand our worldview, but social media’s algorithms only deliver more of the content that we like and already interact with. Even offline, confirmation bias—the tendency to look for information that only supports our opinions—makes it harder for us to be exposed to new perspectives. We often find ourselves looking for information where we already agree with the opinions on certain issues or political candidates instead of actively trying to understand the other side of the argument. It’s too easy to just click out of opposing articles and ignore the evidence presented.

Even the place where we live perpetuates our own echo chambers. Here in the Bay Area, we are often exposed to liberal perspectives, making many of our conservative peers in school feel like a minority. In other locations, residents may be predominantly conservative, making it hard to express opposing ideas there as well. Regardless of our political beliefs, it can be difficult to find information from reliable sources that helps us understand an issue through a variety of lenses.

Not only has social media impacted our ability to find new perspectives and expand our own, it has also heavily influenced the way we view and interact with political candidates. Only knowing a reality with the internet and the web, we’re accustomed to being bombarded with information on online platforms. We’ll scroll through thousands of posts and videos every day, and we’ll see not only ads related to our personal interests but also ads from campaigns. The key part of the ad is not so much its content, but where it’s located—on a platform many of us use all the time. It feels like candidates are trying to reach out to us, but they don’t always hit the mark.

One particular YouTube ad asked us to rate Trump, but none of the options gave a remotely negative review of Trump. We thought, “Why don’t we have another option? He’s not telling us what he’ll do for us as voters, so why should we care?” But there have definitely been much worse attempts to connect with us. Elizabeth Warren’s Instagram livestreaming was a bit cringey and her campaign TikToks felt out of place. We understand many politicians are generations older and are highly unlikely to regularly use Instagram or TikTok. We appreciate when campaigns acknowledge youth platforms because they actually care and want to connect with new voters, not just for political theater, which is sometimes how these attempts come across. We want to see honesty, including mistakes, and candid opinions from a candidate.

When candidates showcase their lives in a natural way, it feels much more genuine. For example, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) answered questions on Instagram about Congress, shared a day in the life of a representative, or tweeted her League of Legends ranking, many of us felt connected to her. It’s exciting to see someone who is relatable and understands the youth population, but it’s easier for AOC as a millennial herself whereas many of her colleagues are much older. We recognize that it’s not fair to expect older candidates to understand youth the same way. 

Still, it’s interesting to see the new ways that politicians have tried to reach us, like Biden’s campaign releasing yard signs in the popular video game Animal Crossing. A game where you can design your own island and catch animals with friends online, Animal Crossing was never a tool we expected a campaign to use. But given how our generation is growing more politically active than ever, it’s not far-fetched to involve video games in politics.

Although we are just a subsect of the youth population, we see youth everywhere across social media who care about anti-racism, the environment, and equitable human rights. We’re frustrated with the current systems in place and are hungry for change. We want to see that same passion, honesty, and care in candidates, especially when they use youth platforms. More importantly, we want to know who they are and what they stand for. 

As teens participating in politics at an unprecedented time, we have arguably been the most politically active generation ever. Even if we cannot vote, we strive to stay updated on the latest political news, watch the debates and conventions that have been streamed online, and discuss our opinions and beliefs with friends and family. We have shared on social media, marched at protests, spoken at city councils, and defied generational gaps and norms to champion political changes we believe in. We live in a society that looks down on us for growing up with incredible technology that has supposedly “made us lazy.” Some believe we shouldn’t have a say in political issues because we are “too young.” However, the fact is we live in a world where we have to deal with the consequences of actions that we did not have a say in, such as climate change, poverty, warfare, immigration, and even basic human rights for all. Now that our generation is being given a chance to vote, trust us when we say we will not take it for granted.

About the Authors

(Row by row from upper left in the image above) Zade Lobo, Diya Pathak, Merritt Vassallo, Lydia Lam, and Ramya Chitturi are five of CHM’s Teen Alumni, and previous members of the Museum’s Teen Internship and Teen Engagement Council programs. As tech-savvy and politically engaged Gen-Z’ers, they collaborated through online Zoom meetings and shared Google docs to reflect on the impact and influence of social media and technology for first-time voters. They look forward to voting in their first federal election soon!

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Nez is the Navajo woman who as a 13-year-old won an Apple iMac in 2000. The Silicon Valley tech-company giveaway became a front-page story that I wrote when it turned out that Myra had the computer named for its internet-readiness but had no way to connect it to the internet. Her home had no phone service and no running water.

The San Jose Mercury News coverage didn’t go unnoticed by the White House and President Bill Clinton added the Navajo Nation to his digital divide tour. He invited Myra to introduce him before a speech to thousands on the vast reservation—which she did.

I’ve been thinking about Myra again and the way she symbolized the digital divide 20 years ago as November’s presidential election approaches. She’ll always be associated with that presidential visit—the first to the Navajo Nation by a US president. Clinton was a once-impeached, second-term, president who had lied to the American people. When Myra introduced him, he was focused on his legacy, which he hoped would include expanding access to the internet for the poor and residents of remote areas.

This year we have a once-impeached president who often lies to the American people and who is singularly focused on his reelection. His legacy may well already be set with the death of more than 200,000 Americans and counting from COVID-19.

But with this election Donald Trump and Joe Biden each have an opportunity to add narrowing the digital divide to their legacies. Whoever wins in November will oversee an economy gasping for life. They will face staggering unemployment numbers and a nation relying on remote work and remote schooling to a significant extent—all of which could be helped by more equitable access to technology.

The next president will also lead a country with a digital divide that has narrowed only slightly since that day Clinton stood on an outdoor stage at the Boys & Girls Club of Shiprock, New Mexico, and said:

Is the digital divide really worth worrying about in 2020?

You might think that in a world ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and a country roiled by its confrontation with systemic racism and a renewed focus on the crisis of police violence against Black Americans, that the digital divide would be among the least of our worries.

But in many ways, the divide is just another symptom of the inequalities exposed by both COVID-19 and police misconduct and the protests against it. COVID, in fact, has underscored the difference between the technology haves and the technology have-nots. All schools are struggling, but those in affluent areas have been able to launch distance learning with a consumer base of tech-savvy digital natives.

Those in communities that are struggling financially have had to raid budgets and turn to philanthropy to get Chromebooks and hotspots to children whose parents and caregivers don’t have jobs that allow them to work from home. And they can’t afford not to work, sometimes multiple jobs.

And that’s another fault line. Low-income workers are disproportionately represented by people of color. They are service workers and members of the gig economy. They don’t have the luxury that well-paid knowledge workers have: the ability to go to work by plugging in their laptops in the spare bedroom.

And in part because of that, people of color—Blacks, Latinx, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—are getting sick at a far higher rate and dying in numbers far beyond what their proportion of the population would indicate.

Practically speaking, it’s unlikely the digital divide will be a topic of conversation, political advertisements, debating points, or sound bites as we approach November 3.

But honestly, with the 2020 election now just weeks away, we can’t afford to ignore the disparities in access to the technology tools of the 21st century. Progress by politicians and governments on the digital divide has been abysmal. Neither major candidate at the top of the ticket has laid out a clear plan to tackle it, though both have pledged to improve rural broadband.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has indicated he will restore net neutrality, one factor cited in driving up the cost of connectivity for households and a policy that President Donald Trump does not support. Biden has also drawn up plans that would be friendly to local governments that want to provide broadband services.

Presidential solutions to tech inequities remain fuzzy

Both candidates have promised to spend billions shoring up broadband access, particularly in rural areas, but analysts have characterized the plans as fuzzy and Congress has not supported Trump’s efforts so far.

Closing the divide will take more than the president and so as you head to the polls soon, consider the positions and policies of senators, Congress members, state legislators, school board members, mayors, commissioners, and council members.

There is plenty of work to do. Myra Nez, 34, who was introduced to the world as 13-year-old Myra Jodie, lives on the Navajo Reservation with her three kids, ages 7 to 12, not far from her childhood home where her mother still lives.

Nez and I hadn’t spoken since her high school graduation. I reached out to her for a sense of how things had changed on the Navajo Reservation since that day 20 years ago when Clinton spoke to the Navajo Nation.

“Our phone service is really crappy,” Nez said of the service at her mother’s home, provided by a satellite firm that stepped up about a year after Myra won her computer. “We still have Globalstar. That works when it wants to work. We don’t have internet with them anymore.”

The coronavirus has not been kind to the reservation, which at its peak had an infection rate worse than any state in the United States.

“The Navajo reservation was hit hard,” Nez said in September when we spoke. “I think they finally got it under control. Because there were no new cases as of this week, which is good.”

Medical experts pointed to the fact that 60 percent of the homes on the reservation have no running water as a contributing factor to the virus’ spread. It’s also common for extended families, spanning generations, to live together and the reservation has a history of poor health care, which Navajo Nation politicians attribute to the US government reneging on treaty obligations. And the stresses associated with poverty no doubt have played a role. The per capita annual income on the reservation is just under $11,000, about one-third of what it is across the United States.

Homes with phones have doubled on the Navajo reservation, but . . .

When Clinton spoke on the reservation, about 80 percent of the homes had no phone service. Today, according to the Navajo Times, the figure is probably closer to 40 percent. That compares to 3.3 percent of phoneless homes in the United States as a whole. The figure for internet penetration on the reservation is similar—40 percent says the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.

Nez recently moved her family to a rental home near the Navajo Nation capital of Window Rock, Arizona, to be closer to her job as a work management administrator at the utility authority. She said her family has internet access, but it’s hardly blazing fast.

“It’s been working. But, of course, with everyone being on the internet now, they’re slowing down the service,” she said. “There is lag time, disconnections. The improvement is there but it’s not like we’re living in the city, where we have the best internet.”

Still, it’s better than what passes for internet access in Steamboat, where the school district has taken to dispatching school buses with hot spots on board. Students who live without internet connections, and often beyond phone service, are encouraged to travel to the main roads where buses are parked. 

“It’s only during school hours, which would mean kids would have to have parents or grandparents take them to the bus stop and have them access these connection points,” Nez said. “In the fall, with the weather, once it gets muddy or snowy, who is going to take them to the highway? I don’t know how that is going to work.”

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated all kinds of simmering trends—the digital divide among them—and these fissures extend far beyond the Navajo Nation.

Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, working with the Boston Consulting Group, determined this summer that 15 to 16 million students do not have access to the necessary tech tools to attend school remotely. That’s about 30 percent of all students. Equipping those families with adequate devices and necessary broadband would cost as much as $12 billion in the first year of work to correct.

The digital divide is intertwined with a raft of inequities

And the thing is, it doesn’t take much digging to realize that not only is the digital divide worth worrying about in the time of COVID and racial divisions, it is inextricably linked to both those major challenges.

COVID, of course, has made the digital divide all the more obvious, particularly to those, myself included, who do not suffer from its inequity. It’s made it all the more obvious that the digital divide only exacerbates the inequalities that have been there all along.

It is not news that the world runs on technology. It’s how humans find jobs, buy goods, connect with each other, enjoy entertainment and understand the world—including the issues informing the coming election. And it is now how millions of children and young adults go to school.

Yet for a significantly large part of the US population, that reality doesn’t exist. That Common Sense Media study found that 9 million students have neither a digital device appropriate for learning nor an internet connection. Another 5 to 6 million have a device, but no broadband. And about 1 million have broadband, but no device.

And, no, the pain is not equally distributed by race and ethnicity. Common Sense Media and the Boston Consulting Group found that Black, Latinx, and Native American households are far more likely to be without broadband than White households. In fact, nationwide 35 percent of Native American homes, 30 percent of Black households, and 26 percent of Latinx homes lack internet access. For White households, the figure is 18 percent.

The key reason those without adequate internet access gave for not having the service was cost, with 34 percent of those with children telling the Census Bureau that finances were a factor. Despite the cost of broadband service, Common Sense Media concluded: “High-speed internet connection at home is not a luxury. It is as essential as electricity and running water to be fully engaged in American society and to ensure equal opportunity at desired educational, economic, health, public safety, and social outcomes.”

Perhaps what’s most amazing about Common Sense’s figures is that such numbers still exist. Am I the only one who thought the digital divide must be a solved problem by now? How long have we been talking about this? About as long as the commercial internet has been around.

Myra Nez sees progress from the past and a brighter future

And now it almost seems the digital divide has been frozen in time on the Navajo Reservation in early 2020. But Nez points out that things have changed.

“My youngest son has a tablet and a phone in his hand that he can access the internet through,” she says.

And looking ahead at the election, she’s heartened by the inclusion of Senator Kamala Harris on the ballot as the first woman of color to be the vice-presidential nominee of a major party. “I think that’s one of the biggest things that makes me hopeful that we’ll move forward,” she said.

I mentioned the columns I wrote about her winning the iMac and introducing Clinton to the Navajo Nation. They described her as an excellent student and a student athlete and a member of the school band. I ended the column I wrote the day she introduced Clinton with a future fantasy, inspired by the memory of a young Bill Clinton’s long-ago meeting President John F. Kennedy at the White House. I wrote:

“Who’s to say if the life of a politician is what’s right for Myra? It should be said, she looked awfully good standing behind that presidential seal.

She’ll be eligible to run in 2024.”

Myra Nez laughed at the memory.

“That’s probably not happening,” she said.

I still say we could do a lot worse.

COVER IMAGE: Photo by Gary Reyes for the (San Jose) Mercury News, April 17, 2000.

The post Hotspots and Have-Nots: Revisiting the Digital Divide appeared first on CHM.

But while technology might be the solution, it is not the answer. I wish it were. I’m a big believer in the power of technology to solve problems and make the world a better place. But I stop short of giving it magical powers—particularly the power to make everything OK.

Everything is not OK in the COVID-19 era and it won’t be OK for a long time. We are still in the heart of a deadly pandemic, one killing thousands a day while disrupting every aspect of life—including education.

Technology can go a long way toward providing the instruction our kids need to maintain their intellectual development and to become vital citizens. Online classes, livestream and videotaped lessons, e-textbooks, gamified learning tools, collaboration software, online curriculum and resources and teleconferencing can take the place of many of the traditional aspects of attending a brick-and-mortar school.

But technology can’t go all the way to reopening education for all. When considering the role of tech in enabling education in the midst of a pandemic, it’s best to keep four things in mind.

School Is Going to Be Different

First, whatever K–12 school looks like in 2020–21, it’s going to look very little like it did at the beginning of the 2019–20 year. Despite the urging of the Trump Administration and even the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all schools open full-time, a significant number of school districts announced they would not open school buildings to start the year.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom imposed rules that meant schools in 30-plus counties—home to 35.5 million residents—would not be allowed to open classrooms. Other districts have adopted hybrid models—inviting some students back while others learn from home or bringing in shifts of students for instruction on different days of the week and deploying remote learning on other days.

Never mind preliminary evidence that children younger than 10 are less likely than adults to contract the virus, spread the virus, become severely ill from, or die from the virus. Traditional schools are also filled with teachers, staff members and plenty of students who are 10 and older. And finally, even the encouraging study about children and the virus didn’t conclude that there is no transmission from younger kids.

That said, remote learning is bound to be a big part of how kids learn in the coming school year.

The Digital Divide Is Real

Second, the heavy reliance on digital learning means that poor children, including a disproportionate number of children of color, will be victims of a widening achievement gap. The digital divide is real—both when you look at who has the necessary hardware and software to learn and when you look at who has a strong at-home support system in terms of technology know-how.

A survey of 2,000 students by nonprofit Youth Truth found that  23 percent of African American students had limited or no access to a computer. For Latino students, the number was 20 percent. In comparison, 15 percent of Asian students and 7 percent of white students said they had limited or no access to computers.

In the tech capital of Silicon Valley, the numbers are also dire, according to the Mercury News of San Jose, CA. In San Jose, 95,000 residents don’t have broadband access, including 47 percent of Black families and 36 percent of Latino families, the San Jose Digital Inclusion Fund reported, citing a City of San Jose and Stanford University study. Furthermore, 14,000 of 36,000 students in San Jose do not have sufficient digital resources for education purposes, the San Jose Mayor’s Office reports.

Various efforts are underway to see to it that students have the technology they need to learn remotely. But again, it’s a patchwork approach, being carried out by well-meaning and underfunded governments and nonprofits. And frankly, history gives us no reason for optimism.

When did you first hear of the digital divide and efforts to bridge it? I first recall writing about the tech gap between the haves and the have-nots when Bill Clinton was president. And it turns out, the divide is deeper than just who has the hardware and software and who doesn’t. It also includes who has the know-how and mentors to put the hardware and software to use to foster online learning, as the Connected Learning Alliance convincingly demonstrated seven years ago. So, since the Clinton presidency (1992–2000) and even in the past seven years—how far have we gotten?

The point has been made many times that the pandemic is serving as an accelerator in many ways. Telehealth is taking off. E-commerce is growing at a pace that has propelled digital commerce ahead by a few, if not several, years. Unfortunately, it appears it is also accelerating the achievement gap, or certainly reversing progress that has been made.

Patchwork Plans Are Not Going to Cut It

Third, educational efforts this year are going to be a patchwork and are likely to vary widely in terms of quality, efficiency, and effectiveness. The US pandemic response has lacked a centralized strategy since the beginning, whether it’s testing, distribution of personal protective equipment, or requirements for social distancing and face covers.

Education, by design, is fragmented with local school districts responsible for their budgets and many key decisions. In 2011, there were more than 13,000 public school districts in the United States, the most recent figure available from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The CDC says schools should open, unless they shouldn’t

The guidance on the pandemic from state and federal officials have been confusing and contradictory.

“It is critically important for our public health to open schools this fall,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said in a statement announcing revised guidance from the government, according to CNN. “School closures have disrupted normal ways of life for children and parents, and they have had negative health consequences on our youth. CDC is prepared to work with K–12 schools to safely reopen while protecting the most vulnerable.”

Despite the plea for schools to open, the CDC’s new guidelines do say that schools should consider closing if COVID-19 continues to spread through the community in which the school is located. You’d be forgiven for thinking the CDC is saying schools should open, unless they should shut down.

We Need Humans

Fourth, technology can go a long way to enabling meaningful education for students this year, but it can’t go all the way. To do that, we need humans. No doubt most of us understood that on some level, before the world, including schools, shutdown in March. But we know it much better now.

“I think what parents realized was that the promise of online learning requires a lot more intervention than they thought,” says Muhammed Chaudhry, who led the Silicon Valley Education Foundation for 16 years. “Parents are realizing the value of teachers. Parents need to take control of their child’s education if you don’t want to experience learning loss.”

It’s not what parents want to hear after spending the last three months of the 2019–20 school year acting as homeschool teacher, while working a job (if they were lucky) and carrying on other family responsibilities under unprecedented conditions.

And let’s face it: Last spring’s online learning experiment in districts across the country does not inspire confidence. The rapid spread of the global pandemic created an abrupt end to in-school learning, which resulted in a school year that ended in semi-chaos. Teachers raced to roundup supplies to send home with kids to keep the learning going. They scrambled to learn new tech skills and revise lesson plans. They worked on scheduling and coordinating remote class time.

Parents had little time to prepare for their enhanced roles at home, which at least fostered some empathy for teachers—an empathy that is far from boundless.

“I forgave them for the spring,” Martin Rauchwerk, whose son attends high school in San Jose,  told the city’s Mercury News. “But I’m not going to forgive them for the fall.”

So where does all this leave us—and where does it leave the role of technology in education?

Unfortunately, I have not heard or read anything that gives me much hope for the fall semester, or even the upcoming school year. And maybe that’s where we should start.

Minimize the Damage

This school year is not going to be normal—not anything close. We should resign ourselves to the reality that students are not likely to get the education they need. The goal should be to stem or minimize the learning loss that K–12 students are almost certainly going to suffer. And we should think about doing that largely through online instruction for the foreseeable future.

Even schools planning in-school instruction and hybrid methods, should develop robust online programs. Unfortunately, there is no assurance that in-school plans won’t be interrupted by a COVID-19 outbreak.

Moreover, online instruction gives students and teachers the best way to deliver and receive education without getting sick. In fact, in key ways kids learn better by digital means, according to the World Economic Forum. That doesn’t, of course, ease the concerns of health experts who point out some students receive nutrition and mental health counseling through their schools. For them, remote learning comes with serious disadvantages.

For those students who rely on attending a brick-and-mortar school to stay physically or mentally healthy, Shardha Jogee, a University of Texas astronomy professor, has an innovative idea that makes a lot of sense. Writing in the New York Times, Jogee suggested school districts provide SCOLs, or safe centers for online learning.

SCOLs would be located in school buildings or in large venues, such as arenas, convention centers, theaters, and other buildings sitting unused due to the pandemic. Students would attend a SCOL to use a safe study space and laptop provided there. SCOLs could be staffed by college and graduate students who could provide guidance and help to supplement the online lectures given by the district’s professional teachers. Presumably, the college and graduate students would be less likely than older teachers to become extremely ill if infected with the coronavirus.

SCOLs would also be the place where students could go for subsidized or free meals and for counseling services among other things. In short, SCOLs could provide the human energy and guidance that Chaudhry talks about, the guidance students need to make online learning a success.

“Technology is going to play a big role,” Chaudhry says. “But again, it’s not a matter of, ‘Here is a tool. Go use it and you will learn.’ You have to have a package.”

Kids’ learning is not plug-and-play

That package includes human help and additional materials that make learning come alive. Chaudhry uses the example of an online lecture that teaches a student how an electric car or another sophisticated piece of technology works.

“You can give a lecture,” he says, considering a student’s perspective, “but you need to give me something at home, like a small motherboard that I can play with.”

No doubt, educating our children during the many months it will take to develop and distribute a reliable vaccine will require wide use of technology, but it will take innovation in other areas, too.

Chaudhry rattled off a number of ed tech companies, including some he works with or advises, including Horizon Education, Noon Academy, Wall Family Enterprises and its brands like Demco and Hatch. There are a long list of other companies and products that could play a role, including Zoom, Teams, Hangouts, Facebook, Schoology, Chromebooks, CK-12, Khan Academy, the Exposure Notification System, and many others.

“Do I need an institution anymore?” Chaudhry asks. “Or can I make my own classroom?”

He sees a world where a master teacher uses live video lectures to teach a hundred students in different locations at a time. The students break into smaller groups with other subject experts for more intense discussions. Teaching assistants use technology to monitor students’ progress and understanding, seeing where different individuals are struggling and excelling.

Why not have an Amazon-like system, or Amazon itself deliver lessons, supplemental tools and materials—or even lessons themselves?

This is no time to be timid with ideas or to fail to act for fear of failure.

Again, these innovative tools and ideas won’t assemble themselves into an answer to our pandemic education problem. Some of the challenges we face are age-old and only amplified by the spread of COVID-19.

But they do provide smart people with good hearts the building blocks they need to provide the best possible education for the greatest number of students in a time of unprecedented obstacles.

COVER IMAGE: Children using the proposed Dynabook (based on Alan Kay drawing), 1968. © Alan Kay. Learn more about Portable Computers.

The post Technology Is the Only Way to Open Schools in the Fall—But It’s Far from Perfect appeared first on CHM.

I had to laugh. It was one of those dark-humor-during-the-pandemic moments. I’ll be out of the office until who knows? Forever? Twitter just told its workers that they could work from home indefinitely.

Google says workers will be off-campus at least for the rest of the year. Facebook followed by saying its employees could also join the homebound workforce for good and that it stood to save a bundle in the process.

“We’re setting a date for Jan. 1 for when you either need to move back to where you were, or tell us where you are and we’ll basically adjust your salary to your location at that point,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, according to CNN.

Zuckerberg also said there would be “severe ramifications” for people who are not honest about where they are living and working and that the company would begin an aggressive effort to hire outside of Silicon Valley.

So, first let’s be clear about this new fascination with working from home among tech executives: This is not about COVID-19. This is about reducing payroll. The pandemic has just proven to executives that workers can remain productive no matter where they are working. 

And second: These proclamations do not mean the end of Silicon Valley or even the iconic series of tilt-up-studded Silicon Valley office parks, despite the predictable flurry of think pieces saying the Valley will no longer be a geographic center of innovation. 

Thinkers have been saying the Valley would disappear in a spasm of distributed workforces since at least the 1980s, when I moved here. Then, the move of chip manufacturing to Asia was the eye-opening event. Next came the dotcom bust, which took tens of thousand of jobs with it. Then and now rising housing prices and stubbornly low inventory were also reasons Silicon Valley workers were going to scatter across the country and around the world.

And today the pandemic. I don’t want to be placed in the category of those underestimating the severity of the outbreak of COVID-19. And I know there is much we don’t know about the course of the disease and our economy. But I do believe science will conquer the virus. There will be a vaccine. And when there is, we will return to a life approaching normal. Will we be changed? Of course. We will shop differently and educate our children differently. We will enjoy each other’s company more deeply. We will be more grateful for our good health.

Yes, we’ll work differently in the post-pandemic world

And we will work differently. For some of us that will mean working from home more often. It’s even likely that more people will work from home than did before the pandemic. But not everyone. Not even most people. Especially in Silicon Valley.

Early Intel and Apple PR guy Regis McKenna has often said that Silicon Valley is not a place, but a state of mind. Well, yes and no. It is a place and the place that it is, is vital to what Silicon Valley has become.

Why Silicon Valley is where it is has been a topic of discussion for decades. The consensus is that the narrow strip of land from San Jose to just south of San Francisco was the perfect stew for world-changing innovation. Reasons from the mundane—the world’s best weather—to the complex—ready venture capital, Stanford University, a relatively warm embrace of diversity and a Gold Rush mentality inherent in the California spirit—all played a role.

Cross-pollination and the spinoff of startups from legacy companies, starting with the Fairchildren and stretching to the PayPal mafia and beyond drove the momentum from semiconductor to personal computer to the internet to the harnessing of big data through artificial intelligence.

The Valley’s inhabitants recognize it as a physical place and memorialize its sacred temples—the HP Garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, the original Fairchild building across town at 844 E. Charleston, Shockley’s original lab around the corner and down the street from Fairchild. They are all acknowledged with plaques marking their place in history.

Innovation is about creativity and creativity is not the solo act it sometimes appears. Innovation, in particular, is a team sport. Think company all-hands, hackathons, kanban stand-ups, and scrums. You want to talk about “DNA?” Collaboration is in the DNA of Silicon Valley. 

Going back to the Fairchild Semiconductor days, engineers and entrepreneurs would trade ideas, techniques and resumes at places like Walker’s Wagon Wheel, located within a boozy stumble from Fairchild’s Mountain View headquarters. 

Silicon Valley Owes its Existence to Gathering in Physical Places

Valley historian Michael Malone wrote about the role of the Wagon Wheel and other drinking spots in spawning Fairchild spinoffs. 

“National (Semiconductor) was stealing Fairchild blind of its best employees. Every time one of the National (Semiconductor) defectors showed up at the favorite local watering holes, the Wagon Wheel, Chez Yvonne and Rickey’s, they’d be pelted by résumés from their old compatriots,” Malone wrote in his 1985 origin-story masterpiece, The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley.

Left: Original Wheel from Walker’s Wagon Wheel, ca. 1965. Image: Mark Richards/Collection of the Computer History Museum, 102662696. Right: Walker’s Wagon Wheel, ca. 1960. Image: Carolyn Caddes/Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

The same sort of thing happens today and not just on LinkedIn, but at trade shows, user groups, meetups—and yes watering holes.

While sometimes it seems the pandemic has been going on forever, most in Silicon Valley have been working from home for just over three months. Yes, it’s enough to get a flavor for what working from home is like, but it’s still not being sentenced to work from home forever. 

Formally creating a work-from-home culture, with no office to call your own, is different, by a lot, from being sent home to work until the air clears. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom has studied the effects of working from home on productivity and he is not convinced companies will continue to see the increase in productivity that they are reporting today. 

“We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) said in a university news release. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”

Bloom said that choice and in-office days are crucial to a successful work-at-home strategy. He studied a Chinese travel company called Ctrip, which allowed 1,000 of its workers to voluntarily work from home. The nine-month experiment did result in higher productivity and a reduction in people leaving the company.

But there is more to the story. First, only half the 1,000 workers offered the arrangement took the company up on it. Second, the at-home workers were required to work from the office one day a week. Third, when the experiment ended and workers were offered the chance to make the arrangement permanent, only half the 500 workers wanted to, despite the group’s average daily commute of one hour and 20 minutes. 

Humans are social beings. Workplaces help define us. Consider the typical Valley tech company (and many companies outside of the Valley) where lunch is catered and snacks and evening beers are shared regularly.

Consider the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. Alphabet’s Google campus in Mountain View has sports fields, gymnasiums, dry cleaning, hair stylists, dentists, sleep pods, and a variety of cafeterias that are (let’s face it) more like restaurants. 

For better or worse, the Silicon Valley workplace becomes an extension of home. And while it’s hard to imagine that a highly skilled engineer or data scientist would accept a job because of a sleep pod, the Valley’s giants definitely use their campuses as recruiting tools. 

And any conversation about evolving to even a majority work-at-home workforce, should acknowledge what’s going on, on the ground. Apple just opened its gleaming glass circular spaceship in Cupertino. The new headquarters was designed for 13,000 workers and cost $5 billion to build. 

“We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told the Cupertino City Council in 2011 when he announced the project. “Architecture students will come here to see this.”

For its part, Google is expanding its Mountain View campus and is starting work on a downtown San Jose complex that will rival a small city. Three years in the planning, Google’s San Jose campus will have six million square feet of office space (twice the space of the Empire State Building, the Wall Street Journal has noted), up to 500,000 square feet of hotel and retail space and up to 500 homes. The company has spent nearly half a billion dollars on the land alone, meant to accommodate 25,000 employees. 

Google Has No Plans to Go to An All-Remote Workforce

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told CNET that the company had no plans to go all remote.

“In all scenarios I expect us to need physical spaces to get people together, absolutely. We have a lot of growth planned ahead,” Pichai told CNET. “So even if there is some course correction, I don’t think our existing footprint is going to be the issue.”

And Facebook is not even two years past the opening of it’s Frank Gehry-designed addition to its Menlo Park headquarters. The sleek $300-million building, meant for 3,000 employees comes complete with “neighborhoods,” a town square, a main street and gardens. It is part of a $1 billion upgrade to the company’s headquarters.

“There is a sense of energy and connection in this building, and you see people collaborating,” John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president of global facilities and real estate, told the Mercury News in 2018. “That is the signal we want to send recruits. We want them to get a feel for how work is done here.”

The campus is all about human-to-human connection.

“You see lots of gathering places, little neighborhoods, sort of spontaneous nooks where people can get together without reserving a conference room,” Janelle Gale, Facebook’s vice president of human resources, told the Mercury News when the building opened. “You see walking paths where people do meetings. We want places that give you head-down quiet space, but also spaces where there is more energy that provides you connections to colleagues.”

Gathering with colleagues in nooks and walking side-by-side during spontaneous brainstorms are admittedly a little hard to imagine as we go through our lives wearing face masks in public and washing our hands until they are raw.

But there will come a treatment for COVID-19 and a vaccine. And there will come a time when Silicon Valley workers and workers elsewhere will be comfortable again talking in nooks and taking walks together. 

In fact, there will come a time when workers will need to be together to connect on a meaningful level—and they will return to the office to do it.

Cover Image: The PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), ca. 1970. © PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Incorporated).

Related

• Oral History of Regis McKenna, CHM
• Spinoff: Fairchild & the Family Tree of Silicon Valley
• Silicon Valley: Building on a Culture of Looking Forward

The post Silicon Valley’s Office Culture Will Survive COVID-19—Bet On It appeared first on CHM.

We can now add one more thing to the list: Homelessness.

The problem isn’t new, but it’s growing. And so is the attention the rest of the world is paying to the dramatic juxtaposition of some of the country’s most expensive neighborhoods and citizens who live in tents under overpasses or in vehicles out on the street.

Homelessness in the Valley has become a front-page story again in part because of the spread of COVID-19. One of the first major struggles for Bay Area health officials and politicians was the challenge of preventing the spread of the new coronavirus through a population of people who often live close together, suffer from pre-existing illnesses, and have fewer opportunities to practice basic hygiene than the housed population.

Santa Clara County, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, turned to putting the homeless up in hotels and convention halls. Meanwhile the state of California lined up 15,000 hotel and motel rooms to house the homeless.

Most days homelessness provides a steady backbeat to the frenetic chorus of technological innovation in the Valley. But then there are days like the one when the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story about a growing Silicon Valley trend.

Right. Silicon Valley on prominent display in the Wall Street Journal. What’s so different about that? But this story wasn’t about the latest unicorn or newest gig startup or biggest acquisition or soaring stock price. This was a story about people living in RVs parked on the streets of Silicon Valley.

The number living that way in the Valley has tripled since 2017, the story said. It opened with the scene on Continental Circle in Mountain View, CA, a few miles from the Computer History Museum (CHM), where RV’s started appearing “about four years ago. Now they line one side of the half-mile-long street in this Silicon Valley suburb.”

You can see them there using Google Earth, part of a world-changing platform that was developed about five miles from the motor home encampment.

My heart goes out to the housekeeper, who lives in an RV with her two kids, now that they can no longer afford their apartment in a city where the average one-bedroom rents for about $3,000 a month, according to Rent Jungle. And I feel for the others who have little choice but to live in broken-down campers. But I can’t help thinking, “haven’t I read this story before?” when I see such stories.

And, of course, I have. I’ve even written the story before.

Thirty years ago, I wrote my first major story about homelessness for the Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper. It was a story about how the city of San Jose and Santa Clara County were coming together to move a homeless community of 200 away from the banks of the Guadalupe River. They were trying something new: Assembling all the social services that could help together in one place, so that those being moved from the river weren’t only being shuttled from place to place, but were also being given a path to being housed.

I’d write 164 more stories about homelessness in Silicon Valley before leaving the Mercury News for a job at a valley startup. Somewhere, maybe around story 100 or so, I have to admit that I started to wonder whether there was any way to solve homelessness.

One of the 164 was a story about a protest march—2 ½ miles from the Santa Clara County Government Center to San Jose City Hall. The marchers were homeless advocates and those from organizations who help the homeless and the homeless themselves. I walked along with them in 2007 and wrote of the marchers:

“Such optimism and determination are inspiring—and heartbreaking. As I watched the crowd move out—the young, old, black, white, Asian, Latino, those in wheelchairs and those in strollers—I couldn’t help but wonder what keeps them going. How can someone commit to a problem so vast, so intractable, so hopeless? I can’t remember a time the homeless weren’t with us and I can’t imagine a time they won’t be.”

After my column appeared, one of the organizers excoriated me. How could I say homelessness would never be solved? How could I belittle the work he was doing and the faith the marchers held that the challenge could be overcome.

I explained that I just didn’t see a way. And I still don’t. But I’m thinking about homelessness and efforts to end it differently today. Today, I think improving the problem and making progress is enough. It’s a very un-Silicon Valley thought.

Peter Hero, the former CEO of what is now the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, once told me that it was difficult to persuade tech titans to donate to homeless initiatives. The results were hard to precisely measure, and the tech crowd needed to measure success by clear metrics.

The reasons for homelessness are many and varied. On an individual level, everything from addiction and mental illness to bad breaks and bad decisions figure in. On a societal level, there is a laundry list that has contributed to the Valley’s housing crisis, which contributes to homelessness.

There are zoning restrictions and neighborhood resistance to multifamily development or even more single-family development. There are high construction costs and the discontinuation of a state program that provided money for affordable housing.

And there is the simple matter of supply and demand. Between 2010 and 2018, the Bay Area’s population increased by 8.4 percent, driven in large part by the need for tech talent to fill new jobs, CNBC tells us. But the increase in the number of housing units hasn’t even cracked 5 percent in that time.

And, frankly, there are those tech workers themselves, of which I am one. Silicon Valley has stretches of its own beautiful scenery and is close to some of the most beautiful scenery in the world—the Pacific coast and the Sierra Nevada mountains. The weather is gorgeous. It’s a nice place to live, which keeps demand high.

But there is only so much developable land, which keeps supply low. And as companies like Google, Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Adobe, and others grow from two-person, garage startups to global corporations with tens of thousands of workers and major campuses, they need talent.

There is a bidding war for the best talent, particularly engineering and data science talent. People are paid handsomely, which allows them to buy homes, an exercise that also involves a bidding war. New talent coming in needs to be paid handsomely in order to be able to afford the homes that cost so much, in part because property values have been bid up by handsomely paid workers of an earlier era.

It’s a lot to overcome and address. But there are signs that powerful players are becoming more engaged. The Valley’s biggest corporate citizens—Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent), and Facebook (with other partners)—have pledged a total of $4 billion to support housing and build affordable homes in their own backyards.

Affordable housing advocates say the plans won’t do enough and it’s hard to imagine that those living in tents and RVs will have an easy time qualifying for loans and even rents in an area with staggering housing costs. One key will be to see whether big tech is simply checking a box or whether its efforts to ease the housing crunch will continue.

It’s likely that power players will have more eyes on their actions when it comes to homelessness and housing. Opinion polls have shown that homelessness is among Californians’ top concerns, outpacing traditional worries around the economy and traffic.

In a recent University of Southern California poll, a plurality of likely voters in California mentioned homelessness and housing as their top concern, ahead of climate change and immigration, according to a USC news release. In a Mercury News poll conducted with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, 89 percent of respondents said homelessness was an extremely or very serious problem, up 10 percentage points from a year earlier.

In fact, in a sign of how concerned communities are about homelessness, the Mercury News recently decided to dedicate one reporter, Marisa Kendall, to the issue full-time. 

Twitter announcement by the Mercury News’ recently dedicated reporter Marisa Kendall on covering homelessness full-time.

The significance of the move can hardly be overstated. The Mercury editorial staff, like those at many newspapers, has been more than decimated in recent years. The newspaper has shed dozens of specialty beats and so to add a new one is a loud statement.

And the news organization has taken the mission seriously, regularly running in-depth stories about the housing crisis and homelessness, including the story that accompanied the poll with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

Besides showing great concern about homelessness, the poll indicated that while Silicon Valley residents are anxious to help alleviate the problem, they are less enthusiastic when the solutions include providing homeless shelters and housing in their own neighborhoods.

Only 33 percent of respondents believed homeless citizens should be allowed to camp in public places like parks, the Mercury said, and a majority of those polled said they were against allowing the homeless to live in RVs along roadways or in parking lots.

Hardly good news for the RV residents along Continental Circle in Mountain View—or any of the thousands of other homeless residents of one of the nation’s wealthiest regions.

Cover Image: Andrei Stanescu / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Homelessness: The Problem that Even Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Solve appeared first on CHM.