Born of perfection and silence: how the QR code was invented
In a quiet corner of Japan in the early 1990s, a humble engineer named Masahiro Hara came up with something that changed the world.
Masahiro worked at Denso Wave, an automotive company, and was fond of playing Go, an ancient board game with black and white stones that is extremely popular in East Asia.
One evening, while relaxing with a game of Go, Masahiro was struck by the idea of the game's multi-layered complexity, where the stones gave the board a unique look with each move that could not be duplicated. What if information could be stored in this way?
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What followed was a quiet revolution on a global scale. Quiet because the Japanese fluent both in silence and perfection ("fluent in both silence and perfection" – - a phrase that refers to the Shibuya aesthetic tradition that combines simplicity, modesty, and restrained elegance. – Ed. Masahiro and his team created a new kind of code – one that not only improved the familiar barcode, but completely redefined it. It can be read in any direction. It can survive damage
They called it a QR code.
There were no hysterical headlines or fanfare. But like all great inventions, it spread – silently, efficiently and universally – everywhere and at breakneck speed. Today, Masahiro's invention touches almost every part of our lives.
Masahiro Hara never sought the limelight. But his creation – born out of a quiet game of Go – now provides access to information for billions of people.
Because sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come when you look at a problem with new eyes.
Interesting: if you teach AI to play Go, could it invent a QR code?
