Just finished Machine Beauty by David Gelernter: a tiny book about the aesthetics of computing which starts strong but ends in feeble, creepy conservatism — while failing in between to grapple with design in any serious way. It’s written in the classic Don Norman style of “remove half the pages and you’d have a good book” (and it’s short to start with).
Still, even the act of rejecting the book was a good counterpoint to the radiant guano dysfunction that is my [academic] experience recently.
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