A few years ago at OSCON, one of the tutorials demonstrated how to click a virtual light switch in Second Life and have a real desk lamp light up in the room. Looking back, it was rather trivial, but it was striking at the time to see software people taking an interest in the “real world.” And what better metaphor for the collision of virtual and real than a connection between Second Life and the Portland Convention Center?
In December 2012, our Radar team was meeting in Sebastopol and we were talking about trends in robotics, Maker DIY, Internet of Things, wearables, smart grid, industrial Internet, advanced manufacturing, frictionless supply chain, etc. We were trying to figure out where to put our focus among all of these trends when suddenly it was obvious (at least to Mike Loukides, who pointed it out): they are all more alike than different, and we could focus on all of them by looking at the relationships among them. The Solid program was conceived that day.
We called it Solid because most of the people we work with are software people and we wanted to draw attention to the non-virtuality of all this stuff. This isn’t the stuff of some abstract “cyber” domain; these were all trends that lived at the nexus of software and very real physical hardware. A big part of this story is that hardware is getting less hard, and more like software in its malleability, but there remains a sheer physicality to this stuff that makes it different. Negroponte told us to forget atoms and focus on bits, and we did for 20 years. But now, the pendulum is swinging back and atoms matter again — except now they are atoms layered with bits, and that makes this different.
Software and hardware have been essentially separate mediums wielded by the separate tribes of hackers/ coders/ programmers/ software engineers and capital E Engineers. Solid is about the beginning of something different, the collision of software and hardware into a new combined medium that will be wielded by people (or teams) that understand both, of bits and atoms uniting in the same intellectual space. What should we call it? Fluidware? That won’t be it, but I’d like eventually to come up with a term that conveys that a combination of software and less hard hardware is something distinct.
Naturally, this impacts more than just the stuff that we produce from this new medium. It influences organizational models; the things engineers, designers, and hackers need to know to do their jobs; and the business models you can deliver with bit-enabled collections of atoms.
With Solid, we envision an annual program of engagement that will span various media as well as multiple in-person events. We’re going to do Solid:Local events, which we started in Cambridge, MA, on February 6, and we’re going to anchor the program with the Solid Conference in San Francisco this year in May that is going to be very different from the other conferences we do.
First off, the Solid Conference will be at Ft. Mason, a venue we chose for its beautiful views, and because it can host the kinds of industrial-scale things we’d like to demonstrate there. We still have a lot to do to bring this program together, but our guiding principle is to give our audience a visceral feel for this world of combined hardware and software. We’re going for something that feels less like a conference, and more like a miniature World’s Fair Exposition with talks.
I believe that we are on the cusp of something as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution. In that time, a series of industrial expositions drew millions of people to London, Paris, Philadelphia and elsewhere to experience firsthand the industrialization of their world.
Here in my home office outside of Philadelphia, I’m about 15 miles from the location of the 1876 Exposition that we’re using for inspiration. If you entered Machinery Hall during that long summer with its 1400 horsepower Corliss engine powering belt-driven machinery throughout the vast hall, you couldn’t help but leave with an appreciation for how the world was changing. We won’t be building a Machinery Hall, certainly not at that scale, but we are building a program with as much show as tell. We want to viscerally demonstrate the principals that we see at work here.
We hope you can join us in San Francisco or at one of the many Solid:Locals we plan to put on. Share your stories about interesting intersections of hardware and software with us, too.