RED (Research in Experimental Documents) is a new group at Xerox PARC. Its charter is to explore new document types and genres within new emerging media. It does this by combining art, design, science and engineering to build real working prototype documents. It both researches design and designs documents within a research context. Whenever possible it uses PARC as a testbed.

Nobody wants a drill. They want the hole that it produces. Nobody really wants a printer. They are big and expensive. But they do want documents. They need the printer to produce the documents. Actually, there are researchers at PARC who would claim that people don't even want documents. They want the knowledge that documents contain or create.

RED is not so much about the media but the documents which are a cross product of the media, the genre and the tools used by document designers. To be about these documents is of course to also be about the media, the genres and the tools, but also to be about the knowledge in the documents. There is no such thing as an abstract document. Documents are about something.

At this point somebody usually notes that either they or their husband really does just like a good drill.

Here is a story: Nobody wants a gun, they want a speeding bullet. Nobody really wants a speeding bullet, they want a bullet hole. Nobody really wants a bullet hole, they want a dead deer. Nobody really wants a dead deer, they want a good meal. Nobody really wants a good meal, they want that wonderful feeling after eating a good meal.

Except that some people just want a good gun.

To study new documents in new genre within new media is to study the workscape of the future itself.

A "medium" is something that we can easily modulate so as to produce communication, documents, pleasure, art, etc. TV, movies, printed paper, sky writing, telephones, radios are all media. Some media, such as printing, produce documents which are somewhat stable over time. A book and a memo are both documents. Most media are capable of producing a wide range of documents. What is very interesting is that these documents tend to "clump" around certain types. On TV, for instance, there are comedies, dramas, commercials, news shows, talk shows and the like. Within two seconds you can tell what clump a given document (or TV show) is within. These clumps are more formally called "genres".

When a new media emerges, say the world wide web, the first thing that shows up are genres from other media. But very quickly new genres emerge that are unique to that media. Ten years ago there was no such thing as a homepage. Today it is a major genre with several sub-genres.

As soon as new genres emerge within a new media that media begins to change and alter in response to that genre. The world wide web changed its protocols because of what homepage designers wanted - what actually seemed to be obvious once the genre emerged. It begins to be difficult to separate the media and the genres it supports.

RED uses a technique called "speculative design" to try and see into the future and guess about yet to emerge genres. While this in and of itself creates interesting results, it also puts positive pressure on emerging media within Xerox and PARC helping them to develop more rapidly and more favorably.

We call this modified peace sign the Great Document Circle and it is deeply embedded within RED's thinking.

At the bottom of the circle are Tools which slide between the media and the tools needed to modulate that media. Both a printer and Microsoft Word are tools used to create printed documents.

On the left side of the circle is something we call Design Knowledge. Design Knowledge is the knowledge of not only how to use the tools, but the knowledge and desire to create specific documents. When you write an email note you both know how to use Eudora and know what you want to write and to what end. This knowledge can be both amateur (you just taking a snap shot of your kid) or professional (a paid photographer with special knowledge of photographic tools and photographic genres).

On the right side of the circle are Documents and Genre. While documents are usually within a genre, a genre is a thing itself (in the sense that in English a catagory can be a thing). There is both Elvis singing Blue Suede Shoes and the genre of Rock and Roll. (What can I say, when you divide the world into only three pie slices, each slice is bound to be big.)

The humans who hold the Design Knowledge (and recently some machines) constantly are consumming documents and parsing the genres. This is where a great deal of their design knowledge comes from. Needless to say it also comes from the world at large (there really should be two headed arrows entering from the "world" into each pie slice), but a good rocker knows his/her rock songs. When new genres emerge it is often within the context of existing genres.

Humans with the Design Knowledge then use their knowledge to manipulate the tools to create new documents which then feed back into their Design Knowledge.

In a world with mature media this Great Document Circle is rather slow. A novel written a hundred years ago reads pretty much like a novel written yesterday (not quite actually, but not too far off). In a world with rapidly changing media this Great Document Circle moves extremely fast. Like the boy who chased the tiger around the tree it is not clear which sector a java enhanced web page with streaming video advertising a new automobile emerged from.

Xerox, and PARC in particular, are experts at creating new tools and new media. They after all created the copier, the graphical computer and the laser printer. RED looks to the top of the circle trying to leverage the amazing work going on at the bottom of the circle. We do this through iterative cycles of new document and genre creation.

We live in a world of stuff. There are probably close to 10,000 individually invented and sold items in the average room. And this is true for every room. What is interesting is that 95% or more of these millions and millions of items were created by four professional classes: artists, scientists, designers and engineers. Each profession is different: each has their own philosophy, methodology, history, tools, techniques, conferences, dress styles. Some get along OK, others have respectful distrust of the other. Some have active disdain. In RED, we believe that only by bridging all four professional creative classes can we construct a new world that we want to live in.

To give an example, many people outside the creative classes make little distinction between artists and designers, yet if you go to an art college you will find that these two groups do not sit at the same lunch table. Artists feel designers have sold out. Designers feel that artists are too elitist. What is the difference between art and design? An artist paints a painting, looks at it and says: "this expresses my soul, this is me, these are my inner thougts revealed." A designer paints a painting, and then, turns it around to his/her customer and says "do you like it? No, I'll change it." We would be amazed if Pablo Picasso did user testing on his paintings; we are pissed off when a designer doesn't.

In a like manner there is a deep division between scientists and engineers. Scientists in particular love to indicate how they are not engineers. Scientists, in theory anyway, look for the truth of the universe, for the immortal, for the fundemental. We would be amazed if Albert Einstein asked his neighbor if she liked his Theory of Relativity and that he would change it to suit. For an engineer, that is his or her job: to make sure that what they build suits.

There are close affinities between art and science. Both look at the future, the avante garde, the cutting edge. Both look for the "truth". We call this search "inward". Likewise there are close affinities between design and engineering. They are really two end of a long continuum. Both talk about their customers and their users. We call this perspective "outward".

Artists and designers seek, through aesthetics and other such principles, to move peoples minds. Of course to do so they need to move molecules. Scientists and engineers seek to move molecules. They usually have some simple model of the minds they want to move by so doing.

Here is an unfortunate cross-product. Scientists don't get along too well with designers. They think of designers as very close to marketing and they think of marketing as essentially lying. Scientists seek truth.

Here is a fortunate cross-product. Without art, design quickly asymptotes to commodity hamburgers.

RED does not seek to create a single creative profession. Rather it seeks, through actively creating documents, to find bridge methods, bridge people and bridge languages to span these four creative professions.

Between design and art there is a domain we call "Speculative Design". Between science and engineering there is a domain we call "Speculative Engineering". In both of these domains the user and the customer of the designer/engineer do not yet exist. They must be "created" in a variety of ways - that is - a future customer and user is speculated. This brings design very close to art and brings engineering very close to science. RED works within these interesting domains and develops methodologies for so doing. This is the design-centric view of the world. Each of the four creative professions has such a diagram. The most important feature, or at least the least understood outside the class itself, is the important distinction between user and customer. A designer rarely designs something without a customer. The customer is the person who stands over his or her shoulder and says "good, good, bad, good" and gives the final check-off. The user is usually somebody very different. The user is the person who actually uses the spoon to eat soup, or uses the program to do some work, or actually looks at the poster to decide if they should go to a concert.

Scientists, when they look at computer-human interfaces, often talk about the "user" but I have never heard them talk about the customer.

While most of RED agrees that there are these different document spaces, there is some disagreement about my language here, so I will take full responsibility.

A wet space is one where you can touch, smell and directly talk with other people. Meetings are wet spaces. Certain kinds of documents are constructed and consumed in wet spaces. Notes and white board scrawlings are constructed in wet spaces. PowerPoint presentations are consumed. It is our opinion that without some wet spaces humans cannot maintain a project. We are pack mammals afterall.

A dry space is one where you close the door, turn off the email, shut off the phone and concentrate. You often construct your PowerPoint slides in a dry space. You read books in a dry space. You enter flow in a dry space. It seems that ownership of ideas occurs in a dry space. When I think of a new idea in the shower (a surprisingly dry space) that idea becomes "mine".

Damp spaces are spaces in which you are physically alone but in contact with others through various mediated forms. When I talk with my mother on the phone that is a damp space. When I video conference with another person that is a damp space. An email conversation could be considered a very dry damp space. A confessional could be thought of as a very wet damp space.

Electronic and digital technology has vastly increased the world of damp spaces to the point where they seem to dominate our human interactions. Damp spaces are not just augmented dry spaces or poorly executed wet ones. They have properties, charms and advantages unique to themselves. Sometimes damp spaces are the best spaces.

Documents flow from one kind of space to another. We hear a Powerpoint presentation in a wet space that was made in a dry space. We take notes in the wet space and type them up in a dry space. We put them out on email (damp space) and have a phone conversation about them (damp space). We present the notes at the next meeting (wet space) and fax them to a friend in Brazil (dryish damp) and so on.

It is a very interesting ecology.