Bran Ferren

The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language.

Bran Ferren (born January 16, 1953), is an American technologist, artist, architectural designer, vehicle designer, engineer, lighting and sound designer, visual effects artist, scientist, lecturer, photographer, entrepreneur, and a prolific inventor. Ferren is the former President of Research and Development of Walt Disney Imagineering as well as founder of Associates & Ferren, an engineering and design firm acquired in 1993 by Disney. He is Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds, which he co-founded in 2000 with Danny Hillis. Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent, which features prominently in its legal battle with Samsung, was invalidated by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2013 based on a 2005 patent by Ferren and Hillis for multi-touch gestures.

Quotes

• Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet.
  • Quoted by Douglas Adams, in How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. Retrieved on September 8, 2013.
• In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad.
  • "The Creators". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved on September 8, 2013. 
• “The Net, I guarantee you, really is fire. I think it’s more important than the invention of movable type.”
  • Quoted in Richard Rhodes, Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999)
• There's no Bits, like Show Bits
  • From the Vault of MIT (2016-01-20). MIT Technology Day 1996—"Miracle or Mirage: Technology at the Horizon". Retrieved on 2017-03-12.
• [On the need for ultra high definition television] The problem with television isn't the number of horizontal scanning lines. It's the lines of dialogue spoken by the actors.
  • Museums for the New Millennium: Proceedings. museumstudies.si.edu. Retrieved on 2017-03-12.
• The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language. It will be far more important than reading and writing as a purposeful tool. Everything that is enabled by story telling will be enabled by the Internet.
  • Quoted by Peter Guber, in Guber, Peter (2011). Tell to Win. Crown Business. ISBN 0307587975. Retrieved on September 8, 2013. 
• "Vibrant companies must put together five-year plans. But they must be willing to change these five-year plans every single year."[1]
  • Quoted by J.D. Koch, Russell Stone, 29 Nov. 2019
• The technology needed for an early Internet-connection implant is no more than 25 years off. Imagine that you could understand any language, remember every joke, solve any equation, get the latest news, balance your checkbook, communicate with others, and have near-instant access to any book ever published, without ever having to leave the privacy of yourself.
  • Technology Predictions: Wired for Life: The Internet Implant (June 1998 Columns). Columns Magazine. University of Washington (August 31, 1998). Retrieved on September 8, 2013.
• A ‘good 10 percent’ of American products comes out of big-idea organizations that don’t believe in talking to the customer. They’re run by passionate maniacs who make everybody's life miserable until they get what they want.
  • Quoted by Tom Peters, in Design Mindfullness. Retrieved on September 8, 2013.

Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet.

• Being a successful inventor, starts with being curious, and asking the right questions.
  • Commenting on his having over 500 awarded or pending patents during interview with editor Art Kleiner, for Strategy+Business Magazine, Bran Ferren on the Art of Innovation.
• Trying to assess the true importance and function of the Internet now, is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines AAdvantage miles.
  • Quoted by Kevin Roberts (CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi), in Strategies for Peak Performance. Retrieved on September 8, 2013., and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (publisher of the New York Times), in "NYT publisher Sulzberger spoke yesterday about journalism's future" (in en-US). The Tufts Daily. 2007-10-17. Retrieved on 2017-01-17. 
• Most products are ugly. The harsh reality is that in many of these markets, form follows funding. And that products go where the market takes them.
  • Staff, Wired. "A Conversation About The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" (in en-US). WIRED. Retrieved on 2017-01-18. 
• It's disgraceful and embarrassing that the highest technology in a typical inner city high school in this country is the metal detector the students pass through at the front door.
  • Metal Front Doors with Glass | Like Success. likesuccess.com. Retrieved on 2017-01-16.
• [Visionaries] not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done.
  • Ferren, Bran (March 2014). To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering. Retrieved on January 23, 2018.
• We need to love [children] and help them discover their passions. We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success, as is perseverance.
  • Ferren, Bran (March 2014). To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering. Retrieved on January 23, 2018.
• Art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering.
  • Ferren, Bran (March 2014). To create for the ages, let's combine art and engineering. Retrieved on January 23, 2018.
• Great art isn't about decoration - it's a different language that can both touch our hearts, and open our minds.
  • I.D. Magazine Interview [2]
• When the first alien spacecraft lands in Washington, I want the little green people to walk first into the National Gallery of Art. I want our art to explain who and what we are before our leaders do.
  • The New York Times Magazine, The Creators, 1999

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Bran Ferren at Wikipedia
• Bran Ferren at TED
• Bran Ferren on IMDb 
• The New Yorker article, Future Perfect, by David Remnick
• Applied Minds LLC website
• KiraVan information wabsite