"Design came to Silicon Valley on the heels of engineering, and there were no reliable guides or even a clear sense of what it meant to "design" a variable attenuator or a helical-scan video recorder—much less of their relevance to the consumer market. Steinhilber reflected that "When I started out in the design field in New York most of our work was for the "white goods" industry (major appliances). When I moved to Ohio I had to learn the language of the machine-tool industry. But here was an infant field whose vocabulary was still in gestation. They were making it up as they went along." ... The first generation of practitioners approached this terra incognita on the basis of creativity, intuition, instinct, and taste, and they sought out inspiration from wherever they could find it: HP's Carl Clement traveled to MIT to experience "creative engineering"; Myron Stolaroff retreated to a cabin in the Sierra Nevada where he administered LSD to eight fellow Ampex engineers in an effort to unlock their latent creativity. At the Stanford Research Institute, computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart dabbled in the human potential movement and enrolled his unwitting staff in est seminars. ... With every new technological lurch the need for a more specialized set of professional skills became apparent, but also, paradoxically, for a wider vision."
Silicon Valley

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

Sources

Barry M. Katz,

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley