MITPressLog

Bill Moggridge at Kepler's

Bill Moggridge will speak about his new book, Designing Interactions at Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park, California at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow, January 31st.

He will tell stories of designers who changed the way people use everyday things in the digital era, based on his interviews with the founders of Google, the creator of The Sims, and the inventors and developers of the mouse and the desktop computer.  Moggridge is a founder of the Palo Alto-based design firm IDEO, one of the first to integrate the design of software and hardware into the practice of industrial design.  He is also a consulting associate professor in the Joint Program in Design at Stanford University.

For more on Moggridge and Designing Interactions, check out this recent interview with Brian Braiker on Newsweek.com.

From the Corn Laws to Your Mailbox

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, author of  From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective, reminds us of the political and economic origins of a very popular magazine:

Any reader of The Economist is aware of that publication’s commitment to free trade, but less well known is the dramatic context in which James Wilson founded the new paper in September 1843—i.e., the historic struggle for repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in Britain. One might pause at this point to ask the relevance of such an event to the 21st century, but as Anne Krueger (former managing director of the IMF) recently noted, “the debate over the Corn Laws is a powerful reminder of how little has fundamentally changed in the way the debate over free trade is conducted.”(1) The early 1840s were a time of protests, turmoil and agitation throughout Britain as the Conservative government under Sir Robert Peel staunchly refused to consider changing decades of protection for agriculture (known as the Corn Laws). As Parliament consisted of mostly landowning aristocrats, those in power were also perceived to be the chief beneficiaries of the Corn Laws, which raised the spectre of class conflict between the middle class industrialists who sought free trade in agriculture as a means to expand the export of manufactured goods and landowners, who sought to preserve both their economic and political monopoly.

So how did The Economist enter into the story? By spring of 1843, Wilson had frequently assisted the free trade lobby (the Anti-Corn Law League) in its repeal campaign with his well-argued speeches and essays, which relied on statistical figures and facts to demonstrate the case for free trade, but were expressed plainly and clearly.(2) In summer 1843, the League was dissatisfied with the press coverage it was receiving and Wilson proposed to found a new publication, The Economist, which would be “devoted to the ideas of free trade but not an avowed organ of the League.”(3) As an independent newspaper, Wilson and the League hoped it would appeal to important individuals who were interested in economic issues but averse to the overt pressure tactics of the Anti-Corn Law League.(4) The less well-known part of the story is that the League provided substantial financial assistance to The Economist – for instance, in purchasing 20,000 copies of the paper to distribute to leading Tories who might be persuaded by the succinct and persuasive (and independent) arguments of The Economist to support free trade, and reputedly also in donating funds directly  to the newspaper.(5)

Not Just Fun and Games Anymore

Ian Bogost recently told an Associated Press reporter, Greg Bluestein, that he’s not against fun.  Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and founder of the quirky gaming company, Persuasive Games, sees in the video game an opportunity for tremendous potential to influence us, both politically and financially. Here’s a bit from Bluestein’s story:

Just as the documentary developed as a potent force within the film industry, Bogost is among a growing number of designers who develop video games that focus and comment on the world's social and political ills.

"I'm not against fun. I like to play the same video games everyone else does. But I don't believe that video games have to be fun," Bogost said. "I think they need to be given the opportunity to bother and disturb us."

The games don't quite carry the same weight as opinion pieces in traditional media. But their creators say they can still carry a punch as they force players to consider serious issues, such as security policy or the volatile price of gasoline.

Watch for Ian Bogost’s new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. will be out later this spring.  You should also check out Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism.

Major Milestone

Recently, we reached a major milestone—we logged the eight thousandth book published by MIT Press into our archive. 

Book number 8,000 is Design on the Edge: The Making of a High-Performance Building by David W. Orr. The book looks at the planning, performance, and design of the Lewis Center at Oberlin College, the first substantially green building on a college campus.  In writing about this one building, Orr tells a larger story about the art and science of ecological design and the difficult process of institutional change.         

How on earth did we get to eight thousand titles? 

Book number 1 in the archive, Max Born's Problems of Atomic Dynamics, was published in 1926.  Book number 6,000 was logged into the archive in June 2000, and book number 7,000 in July 2004, so you will see that we have picked up the pace in recent years.  (The archive count does include paperback editions of our original hardcovers.) Book number 8,000’s title Design on the Edge reminds us of the importance of distinctive book design to the MIT Press throughout its history – and of the leading position of many of our publications, “on the edge” of new developments in their fields.

Here's to continued success in publishing the next 8,000 titles and beyond...... 

ipod overload

Barry Blesser, author of Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture, reports on one of many discussions that he has had with those who recognize the universal importance of sound and hearing.

The younger generation’s love of portable listening systems, such as iPods, is actually a manifestation of a new type of aural architecture. Although our auditory system evolved without ear-lids in order to maintain an ever-present connection to social and physical events in our immediate environment, iPods transport the listener to a far away space. With respect to the here-and-now, these devices produce functional deafness: the inability to hear events as they are happening.

As deafening loud machine noises of industrial cities in the early 20th century have been reduced, we now have a generation that replaces quiet with loud music. There is some preliminary research suggesting that continuous exposure to loud music has an addictive quality, and a small percentage of these people show withdrawal symptoms when place in a quiet environment.

Aside from producing social isolation, continuous loud music also produces serious damage to the inner ear. Headphones are usually not very good at reproducing lower frequencies, and these are responsible for the perceptual sense of loudness. Listeners therefore turn the sound level up still higher. But the accompanying high frequencies, at these loud levels, literally burn out the hair cells of the inner ear. Functional deafness now becomes physical deafness.

Just as we had a generation of soldiers returning from WW II with major hearing disabilities, we will now have a generation with self-inflicted damage. The consequences of embracing social isolation as well as the functional damage caused by using portable listening systems is likely to change our culture significantly in the coming years.

Join author Barry Blesser in an online Q&A that is taking place at the Planeta Forum.

Ashley’s Rights

Norman Cantor, author of Making Medical Decisions for the Profoundly Mentally Disabled, comments on the recent debate over the medical treatment of a 9-year-old girl named Ashley who is severely mentally and physically disabled:

Some disability rights advocates say that Ashley’s medical intervention violates “basic human  rights.”   I disagree.  I argue (in Making Medical Decisions for the Profoundly Mentally Disabled, MIT Press, 2005) that every profoundly mentally incapacitated person has a right to have decisions about potentially beneficial medical interventions made by a conscientious surrogate acting with careful attention to the incapacitated person’s interests, well being, and dignity.  Bodily integrity is normally part of human dignity, but there are circumstances when bodily invasions are justified by the patient’s own interests.  For example, a therapeutic sterilization can be appropriate for a person whose bodily condition means that pregnancy and/or child birth would be torturous.  The surrogate’s decision must be free of negative stereotypes and must include consideration of alternative ways, other than bodily intervention, to promote the person’s well being.

Ashley’s case seems to fulfill the criteria for humane treatment.   Her parents have always been devoted to Ashley’s well being.  They have consulted with medical experts and with a 40 person ethics committee.  They have had considerable input from parents of similar children indicating that normal bodily development will result in a significantly diminished quality of life for Ashley.  If, as claimed, Ashley could not enjoy the normal benefits of physical maturation, and if there are no less intrusive alternatives, her parents’ decisions about medical intervention do not violate Ashley’s rights.

Read the New York Times article about Ashley.
Read about the debate that Ashley’s case has generated.

A Fanny Howe Celebration

This Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 7pm there will be a Fanny Howe celebration, at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fanny Howe, a Cambridge native, is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Indivisible published by Semiotext(e) in their Native Agents series.

In 2004, The Boston Globe published an in-depth article about Howe by Joshua Glenn. Here is an excerpt:

Between 1968 and 1987 the Cambridge-born Howe lectured at Tufts, MIT, and other local institutions while publishing 19 books of poetry and fiction, including a series of seven semi-autobiographical novels obsessively chronicling not just particular Boston neighborhoods but the social, economic, and political tensions that plagued the city in the racially charged `60s and `70s. Yet it wasn't until the University of California at San Diego offered her tenure in `87 that Howe began to be recognized as one of the country's least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers. Since then, she has won the National Poetry Foundation Award, the Pushcart Prize for fiction, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among other prestigious awards.

Barn cum Museum Takes Budding Cognitive Scientists by Storm

Harvard Medical School researcher and MIT Press author Dr. J. Allan Hobson (Dreaming as Delirium and The Dream Drugstore) has converted part of his barn into an "interactive sleep museum," reports Katie Zezima in today's New York Times. The Caledonia County farm owner envisions the museum--which features a "sleep chamber," a preserved brain, and multimedia presentations about the brain and dreams--as a pedagogical tool in a nationwide "sleep curriculum" that examines the encephalon and its activities in the land of Nod.

Scholarpedia

Wikipedia is useful for finding quick information, answering trivia questions, and for getting up to speed on things you think you should know.  But whether Wikipedia ought to be used for an academic citation is another story. 
One scholar, Eugene M. Izhikevich (author of Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience), has decided to harness the concept of Wikipedia into a format that is more likely to please academics:  he has founded Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia.  Each article in Scholarpedia has a "curator", usually a leading researcher or scholar in that field.  The initial version of an article is submitted for a peer review process, and each successive version is permanently saved for purposes of citation.  While (in the spirit of a Wiki) anyone can propose changes to an article, the curator is responsible for approving these changes. 
Scholarpedia's current content focuses on Computational Neuroscience, Dynamical Systems and Computational Intelligence, but it plans to move in other directions if all goes well. 
An exciting aspect of Scholarpedia is that some articles are written and curated by the very people who discovered the concept - as in the case of Lotfi Zadeh, who has written about Fuzzy Logic, or Mandlebrot, who is slated to write the article on Mandelbrot sets.   And who can argue with that kind of citation?

Vesely Wins RIBA Award

The winner of the Annie Spink Award for Architectural Education was announced last month in an awards ceremony at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Dalibor Vesely from the University of Cambridge was awarded the Annie Spink trophy and the prize of £10,000 at the RIBA President's Medals Student Awards 2006 in association with Atkins.

The biennial award is open to individual or groups of teachers working on any internationally recognised RIBA course who are involved in the development of architectural education and engage with the process of teaching and learning.

Dr. Vesely, who is the second individual recipient of the award, was nominated by colleagues Carolyn Steel and Kenneth Frampton. He has been Director of the M.Phil. programme in the History and Philosophy of Architecture at Cambridge University since 1988 and the RIBA received letters of support from an impressive array of past and present students and colleagues. He is the author of Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: Questions of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. 

Professor Kenneth Frampton, Columbia University, New York said:

This is without doubt one of the most seminal and ethical educators on the British architectural tradition over the past two decades.