Readings in Digital Design

The Master of Digital Design launched this year with an introductory unit which featured UC alumni Supermanoeuvre, and turned out some great work. Next year it ramps up, with more units and more students - very exciting. I'm currently preparing "Readings in Digital Design", a history and theory unit that presents some key concepts in this nascent, multidisciplinary field (or meta-field). While developing the unit I've also been thinking about how to make the whole course "open" in the broadest sense - accessible, transparent, connective, collaborative. There's a tangle of technical and institutional issues here which I have no single solution to, so in the meantime I'll take a "small pieces loosely joined" approach - this post is the first of those small pieces - the draft reading list at the core of the new unit.

The list attempts to sample the breadth of digital design practices and approaches - so it spans cyberculture, architecture, product design, interaction design, and media art. It also mixes historical sources, academic articles, blog posts and web video, for the same reason, to give a sense of the range of contexts and discourses at work here. With the exception of a couple of firewalled papers (thanks Wiley and ACM), all the sources are freely available online.

Feedback very welcome, as well as additions or gap-plugging - especially on open source in digital design, and tangible / physical computing. Please reuse / remix also, and let me know if you do - call it Creative Commons by-nc-sa.

Readings in Digital Design - Master of Digital Design 2010

Being Digital

• Horswill, Ian. “What is Computation?,” 2007.
• Palfreman, Jon. “Giant Brains.” The Machine that Changed the World. WGBH Boston, 1992.
• Rheingold, Howard. “The First Programmer Was a Lady.” In Tools for thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Pre/Histories of Digital Design

• Kay, Alan. “Personal Dynamic Media.” In The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.
• Ivan Sutherland : Sketchpad Demo (1/2), 2007.
  
• Mark, Earl, Mark Gross, and Gabriela Goldschmidt. “A Perspective on Computer Aided Design after Four Decades.” In eCAADe 2008: education in computer aided architectural design in europe annual conference, 2008.

Networks

• Rheingold, Howard. “Xanadu, Network Culture, and Beyond.” In Tools for thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
• O'Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005.
• Burke, Anthony. “Network Paradigms.” In Network Practices, edited by Anthony Burke and Therese Tierney. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Open Source

• Raymond, Eric Steven. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” 2000.
• Lessig, Lawrence. “On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code” presented at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin, 2006.
• The Open Art Network

Designing with Data

• “The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More - More is Different.” Wired, June 23, 2008.
• Jones, Matt. “Data as Seductive Material” presented at the Umeå Institute of Design Spring Summit, March 2009.
• Armitage, Tom. “Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like.” BERG Blog, October 23, 2009.
• Whitelaw, Mitchell. “Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice.” Fibreculture 11 (2009).

Fab!

• Gershenfeld, Neil. "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication," presented at TED, 2007.
• Menges, Achim. “Manufacturing diversity.” Architectural Design 76, no. 2 (2006): 70-77.
• Smith, Greg J. “Means of Production: Fabbing and Digital Art.” Rhizome, March 4, 2009.

Ubiquitous Computing and Urban Informatics

• Weiser, Mark. “The computer for the 21st century.” Scientific American 256, no. 3 (1991): 66–75. Reprinted in IEEE Pervasive Computing, January 2002.
• Hill, Dan. “The street as platform.” City of Sound, February 11, 2008.
• Galloway, Anne. “Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City,” 2003.
• Greenfield, Adam. “All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings.” Boxes and Arrows, December 1, 2004.
• Haque, Usman. “Pachube, Patching the Planet: Interview with Usman Haque.” Interview by Tish Shute, January 28, 2009.

Parametricism and its Discontents

• Schumacher, Patrik. “Parametricism - A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design,” 2008.
• Jacob, Sam. “The Ruins of the Future.” Strange Harvest, December 5, 2008.
• Love, Tim. “Between Mission Statement and Parametric Model.” Design Observer, May 11, 2009.

Tangible and Physical Computing

• Moggridge, Bill. “Multisensory and Multimedia.” In Designing Interactions. The MIT Press, 2007.
• Igoe, Tom. “Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses).” hello., July 27, 2008.

Biomimicry, Complexity and Self-Organisation

• Weinstock, Michael. “Self-organisation and material constructions.” Architectural Design 76, no. 2 (2006): 34-41.
• Bentley, Peter. “Climbing Through Complexity Ceilings.” In Network Practices, edited by Anthony Burke and Therese Tierney. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
• Kaplinsky, J. “Biomimicry versus humanism.” Architectural Design 76, no. 1 (2006): 66-71.

Redesigning Design

• Sanders, Elizabeth, and Pieter Jan Stappers. “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design.” CoDesign 4 (March 2008): 5-18.
• Howe, Jeff P. “Is Crowdsourcing Evil? The Design Community Weighs In.” Epicenter | Wired.com, March 10, 2009.

Sustainable Digital?

• Bonanni, Leonardo, Amanda Parkes, and Hiroshi Ishii. “Future craft: how digital media is transforming product design.” In CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2553-2564. Florence, Italy: ACM, 2008.
• DiSalvo, Carl, Kirsten Boehner, Nicholas A. Knouf, and Phoebe Sengers. “Nourishing the ground for sustainable HCI: considerations from ecologically engaged art.” In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, 385-394. Boston, MA, USA: ACM, 2009.
• Karsten Schmidt. “Sustainablity and generative design.” toxi.in.process 22 Jul 2007.