Together, We'll Rule the World

“Solving today’s toughest problems takes more than a good idea. It also requires sharing ideas and thinking about solutions by interacting with people at all levels to understand the problems they have and how we can solve those problems with technology.”

-Susan Dumais,
Microsoft, Principal Researcher
Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group

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For those of you who have never heard the story of Stone Soup before, I recommend you check it out one of these days. Go ahead. Borrow it from a library. Read it in the bookstore. Have someone read it to you out loud. It doesn't matter how; just do it, and shamelessly at that, because the message of this story is one that people of all ages can appreciate.



To make a short story shorter, Stone Soup is an old European folk tale about three soldiers who stumble across a town looking for food and shelter during hard times. Meeting reluctance at every door, the cunning men decide to change plans, and reach the next cottage to ask only for a large kettle of water. They bring it to a boil, and as the curious townspeople look on, take a stone from a small velvet bag and toss it into the water. As the "soup" cooks, they comment loudly on how it is becoming a very wonderful stone soup -- but ah, it would be more wonderful with a bit of cabbage! An excited villager runs to get some cabbage. The soldiers toss it in and stir. Again, they comment loudly; the soup was coming along wonderfully, but a few potatoes would make it fit for a king! Another excited villager runs to fetch potatoes, and this continues for some time until finally, the soup is full of carrots, tomatoes, barley and more. The entire village celebrates until daybreak, when the soldiers go on their way as all of the villagers thank them for sharing such a "magical" recipe.

Whether or not you actually read that previous mouthful of a paragraph, the moral of the story is that little pieces can go a long way. When many people contribute to a single goal, even the most seemingly insignificant addition can play a part in forming a cohesive "stone soup."

How might this relate to design? Like creating a stone soup, the best products are often results of teamwork. An entire team of designers working on a single project can often suggest and implement a plethora of ideas that would take a single person weeks to even think of, if they manage to at all. From that initial pool of ideas can flow an ocean, as different people -- given the same tools to work with -- can form the many different connections required to propel innovation into the future.

On behalf of the late John Lennon (happy belated birthday!): "You may say I'm a dreamer.. but I'm not the only one."

Take Microsoft, for example.

Not Microsoft's software development, the company division behind your Windows PC and Word and Excel and Powerpoint.

Take Microsoft Research, the division behind futuristic ideas only dreamers will believe in -- futuristic ideas that our world has the technology to build from dreams into reality.

Behind every amazing new piece of technology, research, or progress that runs the gauntlet of development (and actually manages to come out alive) are hundreds of other, equally amazing ideas that get tossed aside in lieu of the first. What if they could all be put into development? Imagine that.

If you haven't yet seen this video, watch it right here, right now, and take a look at how Microsoft envisions our world in a mere nine years:



Now isn't that something to be proud of? Maybe our world full of dreamers should stop what they're doing and open up a restaurant instead.

The only item on the menu?

Stone Soup.