John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · design, graphic design, technology
Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We’re rebelling against technology that’s too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte “read me” manuals. The iPod’s clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that’s simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.
Maeda—a professor in MIT’s Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of “improved” so that it doesn’t always mean something more, something added on.
Maeda’s first law of simplicity is “Reduce.” It’s not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren’t distracted by features and functions they don’t need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: “Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple.” Maeda’s concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls “The One,” tells us: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2006
Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life series
ISBN 0262134721, 9780262134729
100 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-8-29)
Comment (0)Marquard Smith (ed.): Visual Culture Studies: Interviews With Key Thinkers (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · interview, visual culture, visual studies
Visual Culture Studies presents 13 engaging and detailed interviews with some of the most influential intellectuals working today on the objects, subjects, media and environments of visual culture. Exploring historical and theoretical questions of vision, the visual and visuality, this collection reveals the provocative insights of these thinkers, as they have contributed in exhilarating ways to disturbing the parameters of more traditional areas of study across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. In so doing they have key roles in establishing Visual Culture Studies as a significant field of inquiry. Each interview draws out the interests and commitments of the interviewee to critically interrogate the past, present and future possibilities of Visual Culture Studies and visual culture itself. The discussions concentrate on three broad areas of deliberation:
* the intellectual and institutional status of Visual Culture Studies.
* the histories, genealogies and archaeologies of visual culture and its study.
* the diverse ways in which the experiences of vision, and the visual, can be articulated and mobilized to political, aesthetic and ethical ends.
This book demonstrates the intellectual significance of Visual Culture Studies, and the ongoing importance of the study of the visual.
Publisher SAGE, 2008
ISBN 1412923697, 9781412923699
239 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-6-5)
Comment (1)Robert Adlington (ed.): Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, aesthetics, avant-garde, electronic music, fluxus, music, music history, sound recording
The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era’s social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and “the Sixties” across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory “events,” performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the “Third World,” delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians’ response to the decade’s defining cultural shifts.
Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.
The book
* Explores the rich and complex encounter between avant-garde music and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
* Draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period
* Explores the relevance of avant-garde music to implementing social change
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2009
ISBN 019533664X, 9780195336641
292 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
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