“The Public Debut of a Dream”: Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” 60 Years On

In October, 1962, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart published a document that synthesized over a decade of research and careful thought, a document that would illuminate the work he would do for the rest of his career. He called it “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The Framework is both a research report (for work partially funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research) and a visionary manifesto for how computers and human beings could co-evolve to foster the highest levels of human flourishing. Engelbart sought to empower humanity’s capabilities to address its most complex problems, and he saw networked computing as an essential part of that capability—this, at a time when computers were still thought of primarily as calculating machines, not as communications platforms. While Engelbart’s technological innovations have long been recognized as revolutionary, his ideas about collaboration and human-computer co-evolution as envisioned in the Framework have received less attention. This year, the Doug Engelbart Institute marks the 60th anniversary of “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” through new opportunities to encounter and understand the brilliant future Engelbart imagined. This project briefing describes some of those opportunities, and reflects on the importance of Engelbart’s manifesto for addressing what CNI rightly calls “the transformative promise of digital information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.”