Who is JCR Licklider?
Before UX, there was a man named Lick
Since at least the 1960s, though we could arguably go back farther than that, a loose association of governments, private companies, research labs, engineers, computer scientists, and designers have played a role in the conception, evolution, and adoption of the technologies that would pave the way for the revolutionary, somewhat controversial, and oft-misunderstood software design methodology known as User Experience Design or UX.
A really good place to start trying to understand how it all comes together is with the Xerox Corporation. (The laser printer company, yes). Without the work of a group of horn-rimmed eyeglass and skinny black tie wearing researchers at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s the interfaces and interactions that comprise most of the hardware and software of computers today, and set up computers for the emergence of the UX discipline, would probably not exist.
In turn, the work at Xerox PARC would not have happened without a lot of memorandums from curious thinkers and DARPA money from the Sputnik-I obsessed US government.
One of the really important memos about computers that was a big influence on the research conducted at Xerox PARC was written in 1960 by a man named JCR Licklider, former head of one of the main wings of DARPA (though when he was there they were loaded and it was known as ARPA). The title of his memo is “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” and it is up there in terms of generating thought around how computers could work as collaborators in the amplification of human intelligence and why that would be a good thing. “Man-Computer Symbiosis” touches on everything from AI to HCI to computer networks and the Internet.
Lick was the guy on the 11,000 foot ladder.
Without his memo, packet switching wouldn’t exist which is the technology behind the Internet, and while that is wildly important, it’s not even the central idea of the thing.
According to his Wikipedia page, Licklider was also known as “Lick.” So, hilariously, that’s what we’ll call him, too.
Lick completed a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics in the 1940s at the University of Rochester before working on the SAGE project at MIT which was basically the US government’s first crack at a unified radar system, and it was notoriously bad and expensive, but also groundbreaking. Lick’s time with SAGE led to an involved interest in computers for the rest of his life and career. As much a psychologist as a computer scientist, his interest in computers included a dedication to understanding and improving the interfaces humans used to interact with them.
During the era of batch processing and the IBM supercomputer, which coincided with most of Lick’s career, computer chips and coding languages did not exist and computers were huge vacuum tubes stored in bunkers with very little memory. (This is a pretty good description of SAGE’s computers.) And the output of these massive computational devices mattered a lot more than their inputs. This meant that for people like Lick the emerging problem of making communication between humans and computers intuitive was starting to take shape and become important.
Blastophaga grossorun
Lick compares the potential collaboration between man and computer to the symbiotic relationship that the fig tree has with the Blastophaga grossorun, a wasp that both feeds off fig trees and fertilizes them. Admittedly, this is a bizarre metaphor to use when talking about computers (or people for that matter), but to imagine that humans and computers might have an interdependent and symbiotic relationship is a pretty important thought.
“The hope is that, in not too many years,” he writes in the introduction of the memo, “human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”
Even if it doesn’t feel particularly futuristic to us who live it, in the very technology saturated year of 2024, I think it is safe to say that humans and computers enjoy this kind of “partnership” already. We use our computers to do so much more than process data for us, and computers are far from our overlords. We use computers to do countless simple things that improve our lives, and we do it without a lot of thought or fuss.
We like computers.
That last part is key. Computers do things for us, and its easy to make that happen. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use them.
So how did we get here?
The short answer is DARPA money. Lick gave out millions of DARPA money to make computers both happier and more productive, but that’s another story.
The other, perhaps more thoughtful, answer is that we overcame the problem of human-computer communication. Or, I should say we started to solve that problem, and we did it well enough in certain instances that people started to believe that computers could change the world.
And then they did.
Lick outlines the problem of human-computer communication himself in “Input and Output Equipment,” the last section of his memo.
In his opinion, this is the part of the whole human-computer partnership that is least evolved, but he does see one bright spot.
“By and large, in generally available computers, however, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter.”
Allow me to translate his mid-century diction: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
He wasn’t wrong then, and he’s not wrong today. Simple inputs in both a digital and hardware sense that people understand and are familiar with are the bread and butter of frontend web development and UX Design and more generally speaking machines or computers themselves.
Yes, we made computers smaller and faster. But, more importantly we made computers easier to use, and we did that by making them easier to communicate with.
When we talk about handheld computers, which is what our cell phones are, what we’re also talking about is the revolutionary power of personal computing which was enabled by the invention of integrated circuits and silicon chips but also more human-centric things such as the GUIs, coding languages, keyboards, and lots, lots of other things that were invented to make interacting with computers easier for humans.
Computers are different from us. Learning how to overcome those differences by learning how to communicate with them by inventing technology (or just not messing with technology that works) that allows us to interact with them in simple human centered ways is just as important as the advancement of the technology, the binary and chips and so on, of the computer itself.
Lick’s generation knew this, and they put a lot of research and resources towards making communication with computers work. UX is a direct descendent of that work.
Along the way, I’m not totally sure if humans made computers more human (or more humane for that matter), but we have definitely started to forge a relationship with computers that is based on communication.
And a relationship based on communication is never a bad thing.