With a PhD in theater and a focus on interactive narratives, Brenda Laurel landed in Silicon Valley at the perfect moment -- at a time when theorists and technologists were exploring new ways that our expanded computing power could link us and entertain us in ways we couldn't yet imagine. She worked as a software designer and researcher for Atari and Activision, and co-founded a telepresence company in 1990.
In 1994 she became a founding member of Paul Allen and David Liddle's Interval Research, a legendary Silicon Valley think tank studying the connection between tech and everyday life. Interval was meant to spin off profitable companies, and Laurel led one of the highest-profile spinoffs, Purple Moon, a software company devoted to making games and interactive communities for girls. In the end-of-the-'90s collapse of the CD-ROM market, Purple Moon was acquired by Mattel and killed. Laurel wrote about the experience in the monograph Utopian Entrepreneur, "a guide to doing socially positive work in the context of business."
[ A TED archive gem. ] At TED in 1998, Brenda Laurel asks: Why are all the top-selling videogames aimed at little boys? She spent two years researching the world of girls (and shares amazing interviews and photos) to create a game that girls would love.
[ TEXT OF THE ABOVE VIDEO ]
Back in 1992, I started working for a company called Interval Research, which was just then being founded by David Lidell and Paul Allen as a for-profit research enterprise in Silicon Valley.
I met with David to talk about what I might do in his company. I was just coming out of a failed virtual reality business and supporting my self by being on the speaking circuit and writing books after 20 years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people didn't think they could sell.
And David and I discovered that we had a question in common, that we really wanted the answer to, and that was, "Why hasn't anybody built any computer games for little girls?" Why is that? It can't just be a giant sexist conspiracy. These people aren't that smart. There's six billion dollars on the table. They would go for it if they could figure out how.
So, what is the deal here? And as we thought about our goals -- I should say that Interval is really a humanistic institution in the classical sense that humanism, at its best, finds a way to combine clear-eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people. The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life, that we can do good things, that there are things worth doing because they're good things to do and that clear-eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them.
So, contrary to popular belief, there is not a conflict of interest between empiricism and values. And Interval Research is kind of the living example of how that can be true. So David and I decided to go find out, through the best research we could muster, what it would take to get a little girl to put her hands on a computer. to achieve the level of comfort and ease with the technology that little boys have because they play video games.
We spent two and a half years conducting research; we spent another year and a half in advance development. Then we formed a spin-off company. And the research phase of the project at Interval, we partnered with a company called Cheskin Research, and these people, Davis Masten and Christopher Ireland, changed my mind entirely about what market research was, and what it could be. They taught me how to look and see, and they did not do the incredibly stupid thing of saying to a child, "Of all these things we already make you, which do you like best?" which gives you zero answer that's usable.
So, what we did for the first two and a half years was four things: We did an extensive review of the literature in related fields like cognitive psychology, spacial cognition, gender studies, play theory, sociology, primatology -- thank you Franz Duvall, wherever you are, I love you and I'd give anything to meet you.
After we had done that with a pretty large team of people and discovered what we thought the salient issues were with girls and boys and playing -- because, after all, that's really what this is about -- we moved to the second phase of our work, where we interviewed adult experts in academia, some of the people who'd produced the literature that we found relevant. and also we did focus groups with people who were on the ground with kids every day like playground supervisors, talked to them, confirmed some hypotheses, identified some serious questions about gender difference and play.
Then we did what I consider to be the heart of the work -- interviewed 1,100 children, boys and girls, ages seven to 12, all over the United States, except for Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin because we knew that their little families would have millions of computers in them and they wouldn't be a representative sample.
And at the end of those remarkable conversations with kids and their best friends across the United States, after two years, we pulled together some survey data from another 10,000 children drew up a set up of what we thought were the key findings of our research and spent another year transforming them into design heuristics, for designing computer-based products and in fact, any kind of products for little girls, ages eight to 12. And we spent that time designing interactive prototypes for computer software and testing them with little girls. In 1996, in November, we formed the company Purple Moon which was a spinoff of Interval Research, and our chief investors were Interval Research, Vulcan Northwest, Institutional Venture Partners and Allen and Company.
We launched a website on September 2nd, that has now served 25 million pages, and has 42,000 registered young girl users who spend an average of -- they visit an average of one and a half times a day, spend an average of 35 minutes a visit, and look at 50 pages a visit. So we feel that we've formed a successful online community with girls.
We launched two titles in October -- "Rockett's New School," which is the first of a series of products about a character called Rockett beginning her first day of school in eighth grade at a brand new place, with a blank slate, which allows girls to play with the question of "What will I be like when I'm older?" "What's it going to be like to be in high school or junior high school?" "Who are my friends?" to exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior, and which embeds in it values about noticing that we have lots of choices in our lives and the ways that we conduct ourselves.
The other title that we launched is called "Secret Paths in the Forest," that addresses the more fantasy-oriented, inner lives of girls These two titles both showed up in the top 50 entertainment titles in PC Data -- entertainment titles in PC Data, in December, right up there with "John Madden Football," which thrills me to death. So, we're real, and we've touched several hundreds of thousands of little girls. Now then, we've made half a billion impressions with marketing and PR for this brand, Purple Moon. 96 percent of them roughly, have been positive, four percent of them have been other. I want to talk about the other, because the politics of this enterprise, in a way, have been the most fascinating part of it, for me.
There are really two kinds of negative reviews that we've received. One kind of reviewer is a male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be, and won't show the product to little girls. The other kind of reviewer is a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be. And so it's funny to me that these interesting, odd bedfellows have one thing in common. They don't listen to little girls. They haven't looked at children and they're certainly not demonstrating any love for them. I'd like to play you some voices of little girls from the two and a half years of research that we did -- actually some of the voices are more recent. And these voices will be accompanied by photographs that they took for us of their lives , of the things that they value and care about. These are pictures the girls themselves never saw, but they gave to us This is the stuff those reviewers don't know about and aren't listening to and this is the kind of research I recommend to you, who want to do humanistic work.
Video: Girl 1: Yeah, my character is usually a tomboy Her's is more into boys.
Girl 2: Uh, yeah.
Girl 1: We have -- in the very beginning of the whole game always we do this We each have a piece of paper, we write down our name, our age, are we rich, very rich, not rich, poor, medium, wealthy, boyfriends, dogs, pets -- what else -- sisters, brothers, and all those.
Girl 2: Divorced -- parents divorced, maybe.
Girl 3: This is my pretend [unclear] one.
Girl 4: We make a school newspaper on the computer.
Girl 5: For a girl's game also usually they'll have really pretty scenery with clouds and flowers. Like, if you were a girl and you were really adventurous and a real big tomboy you would think that girls' games were kinda sissy.
Girl 6: I run track, I played soccer, I play basketball, and I love a lot of things to do. And sometimes I feel like I can't really enjoy myself unless it's like a vacation, like when I get Mondays and all those days off.
Girl 7: Well, sometimes there is a lot of stuff going on because I have music lessons and I'm on swim team and all this different stuff that I have to do, and sometimes it gets overwhelming. My friend Justine kinda took my friend Kelly, and now they're being mean to me.
Girl 8: Well, sometimes it gets annoying when you brothers and sisters, or brother or sister, when they copy you and you get your idea first and they take your idea and they do it themselves.
Girl 9: Because my older sister, she gets everything and, like when I ask my mom for something she'll say, "No," all the time. But she gives my sister everything.
Brenda Laurel: I want to show you, real quickly, just a minute of "Rockett's Tricky Decision," which went gold two days ago. Let's hope it's really stable. This is the second day in Rockett's life, and the reason I'm showing you this is I'm hoping that the scene that I'm going to show you will look familiar and sound familiar, now that you've listened to some girls' voices. And you can see how we've tried to incorporate the issues that matter to them in the game that we've created.
Video: Miko: Hey Rockett! C'mere!
Rockett: Hi Miko! What's going on?
Miko: Did you hear about Nakilia's big Halloween party this weekend? She asked me to make sure you knew about it. Nakilia invited Reuben too, but
Rockett: But what? Isn't he coming?
Miko: I don't think so. I mean, I heard his band is playing at another party the same night.
Rockett: Really? What other party?
Girl: Max's party is going to be so cool, Whitney. He's invited all the best people.
BL: I'm going to fast-forward to the decision point because I know I don't have a lot of time. After this awful event occurs, Rocket gets to decide how she feels about it.
Video: Rockett: Who'd want to show up at that party anyway? I could get invited to that party any day if I wanted to. Gee, I doubt I'll make Max's best people list.
BL: OK, so we're going to emotionally navigate, if we were playing the game that's what we'd do. If, at any time, during the game we want to learn more about the characters we can go into this hidden hallway, and I'll quickly just show you the interface. We can, for example, go find Miko's locker and get some more information about her. Oops, I turned the wrong way. But you get the general idea of the product.
I wanted to show you the ways, innocuous as they seem, in which we're incorporating what we've learned about girls -- their desires to experience greater emotional flexibility, and to play around with the social complexity of their lives I want to make the point that what we're giving girls, I think, through this effort, is a kind of validation, a sense of being seen. And a sense of the choices that are available in their lives. We love them. We see them. We're not trying to tell them who they ought to be. But, we're really, really happy about who they are. It turns out they're really great.
I want to close by showing you a videotape that's a version of a future game in the Rockett series that our graphic artists and design people put together, that we feel would please that four percent of reviewers. "Rockett 28"
Video: Rockett: It's like I'm just waking up, you know
Ray Anderson's company makes Flor, the line that made modular carpet tile sexy. But behind the fresh design is a decades-deep commitment to sustainable ways of doing business -- culminating in the Mission Zero plan.
Believe it or not, I come offering a solution to a very important part of this larger problem, with the requisite focus on climate. And the solution I offer is to the biggest culprit in this massive mistreatment of the earth by humankind, and the resulting decline of the biosphere. That culprit is business and industry. Which happens to be where I have spent the last 52 years since my graduation from Georgia Tech in 1956. As an industrial engineer, cum aspiring and then successful entrepreneur. After founding my company Interface from scratch in 1973, 36 years ago, to produce carpet tiles in America for the business and institution markets, and shepherding it through start-up and survival to prosperity and global dominance in its field, I read Paul Hawkins' book, The Ecology of Commerce, the summer of 1994. In his book Paul charges business and industry as, one, the major culprit in causing the decline of the biosphere, and, two, the only institution that is large enough and pervasive enough, and powerful enough, to really lead humankind out of this mess. And by the way he convicted me as a plunderer of the earth.
And I then challenged the people of Interface, my company, to lead our company and the entire industrial world to sustainability. Which we defined as eventually opperating our petroleum intensive company in such a way as to take from the earth only what can be renewed by the earth naturally and rapidly, not another fresh drop of oil, and to do no harm to the biosphere. Take nothing. Do no harm. I simply said, "If Hawkins is right and business and industry must lead, who will lead business and industry? Unless somebody leads, nobody will." It's axiomatic. Why not us? And thanks to the people of Interface, I have become a recovering plunderer.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I once told a Fortune Magazine writer that someday people like me would go to jail. And that became the headline of a Fortune article. They went on to describe me as America's greenest CEO. From plunderer to recovering plunderer, to America's greenest CEO, in five years. That frankly was a pretty sad commentary on American CEOs in 1999. Asked later in the Canadian documentary, The Corporation, what I meant by the "go to jail" remark, I offered that theft is a crime. And theft of or children's future would someday be a crime. But I realized for that to be true, for theft of our children's future to be a crime, there must be a clear demonstrable alternative to the take-make-waste industrial system that so dominates our civilization, and is the major culprit, stealing our children's future, by digging up the earth and converting it to products that quickly become waste in a landfill or an incinerator. In short, digging up the earth and converting it to pollution.
According to Paul and Anne Ehrlich and a well known environmental impact equation, impact -- a bad thing -- is the product of population, affluence and technology. That is, impact is generated by people, what they consume in their affluence, and how it is produced. And though the equation is largely subjective, you can perhaps quantify people, and perhaps quantify affluence, but technology is abusive in too many ways to quantify. So the equation is conceptual. Still it works to help us understand the problem.
So we set out at Interface, in 1994, to create an example, to transform the way we made carpet. A petroleum intensive product for materials as well as energy. And to transform our technologies so they diminished environmental impact, rather than multiplied it. Paul and Anne Ehrlich's environmental impact equation: I is equal to P times A times T. Population, affluence and technology. I wanted Interface to rewrite that equation so that it read I equals P times A divided by T. Now, the mathematically minded will see immediately that T in the numerator increases impact -- a bad thing. But T in the denominator decreases impact. So I ask, "What would move T, technology, from the numerator, call it T1, where it increases impact, to the denominator, call it T2, where it reduces impact?
I thought about the characteristics of first industrial revolution, T1, as we practiced it at Interface, and it had the following characteristics. Extractive: taking raw materials from the earth. Linear: take, make, waste. Powered by fossil fuel derived energy. Wasteful: abusive and focused on labor productivity. More carpet per man hour. Thinking it through, I realized that all those attributes must be changed to move T to the denominator. In the new industrial revolution extractive must be replaced by renewable, linear by cyclical, fossil fuel energy by renewable energy, sunlight. Wasteful by waste-free. And abusive by benign. And labor productivity by resource productivity. And I reasoned that if we could make those transformative changes, and get rid of T1 altogether, we could reduce our impact to zero, including our impact on the climate. And that became the Interface plan in 1995. And has been the plan ever since.
We have measured our progress very rigorously. So I can tell you how far we have come in the ensuing 12 years. Net greenhouse gas emissions down 82 percent in absolute tonnage. (Applause) Over the same span of time sales have increased by two thirds and profits have doubled. So an 82 percent absolute reduction translates into a 90 percent reduction in greenhouse gas intensity relative to sales. This is the magnitude of the reduction the entire global technosphere must realize by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate disruption. So the scientists are telling us. Fossil fuel usage is down 60 percent per unit of production, due to efficiencies in renewables. The cheapest, most secure barrel of oil there is is the one not used through efficiencies. Water usage is down 75 percent in our world-wide carpet tile business. Down 40 percent in our broadloom carpet business, which we acquired in 1993 right here in California, City of Industry, where water is so precious. Renewable or recyclable materials are 25 percent of the total, and growing rapidly. Renewable energy is 27 percent of our total, going for 100 percent. We have diverted 148 million pounds -- that's 74,000 tons -- of used carpet, from landfills. Closing the loop on material flows through reverse logistics and post-consumer recycling technologies that did not exist when we started 14 years ago.
Those new cyclical technologies have contributed mightily to the fact that we have produced and sold 85 million square yards of climate-neutral carpet since 2004. Meaning no net contribution to global climate disruption in producing the carpet throughout the supply chain, from mine and well head clear to end-of-life reclamation. Independent third-party certified. We call it Cool Carpet. And it has been a powerful marketplace differentiator, increasing sales and profits. Three years ago we launched carpet tile for the home, under the brand Flor, misspelled F-L-O-R. You can point and click today at Flor.com and have Cool Carpet delivered to your front door in five days. It is practical, and pretty too.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
We reckon that we are a bit over halfway to our goal -- zero impact, zero footprint. We've set 2020 as our target year for zero, for reaching the top, the summit of Mount Sustainability. We call this Mission Zero. And this is perhaps the most important facet. We have found Mission Zero to be incredibly good for business. A better business model. A better way to bigger profits. Here is the business case for sustainability. From real life experience, costs are down, not up, reflecting some 400 million dollars of avoided costs in pursuit of zero waste. The first face of Mount Sustainability. This has paid all the costs for the transformation of Interface.
And this dispels a myth too, this false choice between the environment and the economy. Our products are the best they've ever been, inspired by design for sustainability, an unexpected wellspring of innovation. Our people are galvanized around this shared higher purpose. You can not beat it for attracting the best people and bringing them together. And the goodwill of the marketplace is astonishing. No amount of advertising, no clever marketing campaign at any price, could have produced or created this much goodwill. Costs, products, people, marketplaces. What else is there? It is a better business model.
And here is our 14-year record of sales and profits. There is a dip there, from 2001 to 2003: a dip when our sales, over a three year period, were down 17 percent. But the marketplace was down 36 percent. We literally gained market share. We might not have survived that recession but for the advantages of sustainability. If every business were pursuing Interface plans would that solve all our problems? I don't think so. I remain troubled by the revised Ehrlich equation, I equals P times A divided by T2. That A is a capital A, suggesting that affluence is an end in itself. But what if we reframed Ehrlich further? And what if we made A a lowercase 'a,' suggesting that it is a means to an end, and that end is happiness. More happiness with less stuff.
You know that would reframe civilization itself -- (Applause) and our whole system of economics, if not for our species then perhaps for the one that succeeds us. The sustainable species, living on a finite earth. Ethically, happily and ecologically in balance with nature and all her natural systems for a thousand generations, or 10,000 generations. That is to say, into the indefinite future. But does the earth have to wait for our extinction as a species? Well maybe so. But I don't think so.
At Interface we really intend to bring this prototypical sustainable, zero-footprint industrial company fully into existence by 2020. We can see our way now. Clear to the top of that mountain. And now the challenge is in execution. And as my good friend and adviser Amory Lovins says, "If something exists, it must be possible." (Laughter) If we can actually do it, it must be possible. If we, a petro-intensive company can do it, anybody can. And if anybody can, it follows that everybody can.
Hawking fulfilled business and industry, leading humankind away from the abyss. Because with continued unchecked decline of the biosphere, a very dear person is at risk here. Frankly, an unacceptable risk. Who is that person? Not you. Not I. But let me introduce you to the one who is most at risk here. And I myself met this person in the early days of this mountain climb. On a Tuesday morning in March of 1996 I was talking to people, as I did at every opportunity back then. Bringing them along and often not knowing whether I was connecting. But about five days later back in Atlanta, I received an email from Glenn Thomas, one of my people in the California meeting. He was sending me an original poem that he had composed after our Tuesday morning together. And when I read it it was one of the most uplifting moments of my life. Because it told me, by God, one person got it. Here is what Glenn wrote. And here is that person, most at risk. Please meet "Tomorrow's Child."
"Without a name, an unseen face, and knowing not your time or place,
Tomorrow's child, though yet unborn, I met you first last Tuesday morn.
A wise friend introduced us two. And through his sobering point of view
I saw a day that you would see, a day for you but not for me.
Knowing you has changed my thinking. For I never had an inkling
that perhaps the things I do might someday, somehow threaten you.
Tomorrow's child, my daughter, son,
I'm afraid I've just begun to think of you and of your good,
though always having known I should.
Begin, I will.
The way the cost of what I squander, what is lost,
if ever I forget that you will someday come and live here too."
Well, every day of my life since, "Tomorrow's Child" has spoken to me with one simple but profound message, which I presume to share with you. We are, each and every one, a part of the web of life. The continuum of humanity, sure. But in a larger sense, the web of life itself. And we have a choice to make during our brief brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet. To hurt it or to help it. For you, it's your call.
Thank you.
(Applause)
[ QUOTE ]
"Just trust me and order some tiles. What more do you need to see that sustainability looks pretty good?"
