Architects who engaged with cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies poured the foundation for digital interactivity.In Architectural Intelligence, Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group all incorporated technologies...

Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus.What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of...

Making Sense of DesignEffective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns...

More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known as 'the internet of things'.In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of conven...

What if everything in life could be reduced to a simple formula? What if numbers were able to tell us which partners we were best matched with – not just in terms of attractiveness, but for a long-term committed marriage? Or if they could say which films would be the biggest hits at the box office, and what changes could be made to those films to make them even more successful? Or even who out of us is likely to commit certain crimes, and when? This may sound like the world of science-fict...

More Than Sixty Course Syllabi That Bring the New Complexity of Graphic Design to LightAll graphic designers teach, yet not all graphic designers are teachers. Teaching is a special skill requiring talent, instinct, passion, and organization. But while talent, instinct, and passion are inherent, organization must be acquired and can usually be found in a syllabus. Teaching Graphic Design, Second Edition, contains syllabi that are for all practicing designer...

In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writ...

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as ‘meaning’, ‘form’ or ‘expression’ apply to computer art?A Philosophy of Computer Art is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as ‘interactivity’ and ‘user’.Drawing on...

The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases.Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male “computer geek” seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed...

The world is in the midst of a social media paradigm. Once viewed as trivial and peripheral, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and WeChat have become an important part of the information and communication infrastructure of society. They are bound up with business and politics as well as everyday life, work, and personal relationships.This international Handbook addresses the most significant research themes, methodological approaches and debates in the study of social m...

How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop? Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital g...

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself.The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by...