Transforming Grounds

Just received three new books. Looking forward reading them. Especially since I know the authors of two of the books.

It seems as if we live in a time where everything can be solved with a 'hack' or a 'fix'. There are infinite websites, blogs, Youtube videos that show how to 'hack' a specific problem or even your life, 'life hacks'. The idea is that there are some smart, maybe almost 'magical', ways of doing things that some people know and now, finally, they are sharing it with the rest of us. You can find videos that say "You have been folding your laundry the wrong way" or "How to peel a banana the right way". These examples are of course harmless but it seems as if we are seeing a shift in mindset. People want quick fixes, smart hacks, that won't require long periods of learning, practice and experience. It is possible that this mindset is also seeping into areas where it is not appropriate. For instance, the process of designing, of becoming a designer, is not something you can do or become by learning a few tricks or hacks. In the...

Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico City is publishing the Spanish language edition of our book " The Design Way -- intentional change in an unpredictable world " (MIT Press) by Harold G. Nelson and me. This is quite exciting and it will make the book accessible to an even larger audience. We are also quite happy that the book has now been referenced almost 1.000 times by other authors. I hope that means that at least some of them have read it, or at least parts of it :-) We do not have any date for when the Spanish version will be out, it will probably be a while.

My friend and colleague Harold Nelson pointed me towards a wonderful book " The Creative Architect -- inside the great midcentury personality study " by Pierluigi Serraino. This book presents in a beautiful way the enormous volume of research done at IPAR (Institutes of Personality Assessment, today IPSR at Berkeley) during the 1950's and 60's led by Dr. Don MacKinnon. The purpose of the research was to create a deeper understanding of creativity. In this new book, Serraino presents the background to the studies, how they were conducted, who was involved, and the final outcomes. The core subjects of the studies were some of the most famous and influential architects in the world at the time. It is fascinating to read about the work that MacKinnon and his large team performed and the incredibly ambitious research approach they used. They performed studies that were heavily data-oriented, quantitative and analytical, based on highly detailed and personal reportin...

For quite some time I have had the pleasure to work with Zeljko Obrenovic on the topic of design complexity. We recently self-published a book on the topic, called " Design Instability - notes on design complexity ". It is a short book that explores the complexity of design and why design is not easily simplified. We describe the book like this: "Designers deal with an overwhelmingly rich reality, undetermined requirements, highly intricate social situations, lack of information, as well as lack of resource and time restrictions. Every designer is faced and challenged by this complexity. Discussing complexity in design, however, is difficult, as complexity is a very loaded and often vaguely defined term. With this book, we want to better describe and give a structured definition of what design complexity may mean. We believe that such more structured overview can help researchers and practitioners to better understand some of the experiences designers are going ...

With the development of sensors and conversational interactions, it is obvious that what an interface is, becomes less clear. This is something that we address in our book "Things That Keep Us Busy - the elements of interaction" (MIT Press, 2017) when we develop the concept of "faceless interaction". However, what an interface is or can be understood, has a history. In the book, we devote a chapter to what we call "interface thought styles". (The idea of 'thought styles ' is from Ludwick Fleck and simply means a particular way of thinking about a phenomenon. A way of thinking that influences and in some ways determine what can be thought and known about the phenomena. Thomas Kuhn developed his idea about paradigms heavily influenced by Fleck's ideas.) So, what are the different ways we can think about the interface? Well, in Chapter 2 we write: "The notion of interface has developed over a period of several decades and has been influ...