A List of Books: Interaction Design ’10 NYC Redux

Interaction Design is an interesting field because it is informed by so many disciplines – psychology, story telling, film making, business, jazz composition, game design, and urban planning, just to name a few. I’m always jotting down book recommendations from ixd practitioners to deepen my understanding of interaction design and am never bored by the range of topics covered. A few weeks ago the New York branch of the Interaction Design Association held a redux event, revisiting some of the presentations and themes from the annual international conference. I thought I’d post a list of the books mentioned, along with a link to the video for each talk, for anyone who might be interested as well as for my own reference.

Greg Vassallo

10 Things I Learned About Being a Design Consultant While Living in the Hospital For a Year (video)

Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty
“Written in the same dynamic style as his previous bestsellers including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni illustrates the principles of inspiring client loyalty through a fascinating business fable. He explains the theory of vulnerability in depth and presents concrete steps for putting it to work in any organization. The story follows a small consulting firm, Lighthouse Partners, which often beats out big-name competitors for top clients. One such competitor buys out Lighthouse and learns important lessons about what it means to provide value to its clients.”

Cindy Chastain

Thinking Like a Storyteller (video)
Poetics
“In one of the most perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, third century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle examines the literature of his time, describing the origins of poetry as an imitative art and drawing attention to the distinctions between comedy and tragedy. Aristotle helped establish the foundations of Western philosophy, and his influence is evident in philosophical thought today.”

Narration in the Fiction Film
“What is cinematic storytelling? How can we understand its technique and complexities? What are its extents and limitations? In this monumental work, David Bordwell catalogues every aspect of film narrative, offering insight into an amazing variety of fiction films. The author, who is as comfortable talking about Al Jolson movies as he is describing the career of Jean-Luc Godard, has made a major contribution to film studies and the field of narrative theory.”

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting
“McKee is passionate about the art of screenwriting. “No one needs yet another recipe book on how to reheat Hollywood leftovers,” he writes. “We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent.” Story is a true path to just such a rediscovery. In it, McKee offers so much sound advice, drawing from sources as wide ranging as Aristotle and Casablanca, Stanislavski and Chinatown, that it is impossible not to come away feeling immeasurably better equipped to write a screenplay and infinitely more inspired to write a brilliant one.”

MJ Broadbent and Chris Avore

Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures
“Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, a BusinessWeek bestseller, taught readers the power of brainstorming and communicating with pictures. It presented a new and exciting way to solve all kinds of problems-from the boardroom to the sales floor to the cubicle jungle. The companion workbook, Unfolding the Napkin, helps readers put Roam’s principles into practice with step-by-step guidelines. It’s filled with detailed case studies, guided do-it-yourself exercises, and plenty of blank space for drawing. Roam structured the book as a complete four-day visual-thinking seminar, taking readers step-by-step from ‘I can’t draw’ to ‘Here is the picture I drew that I think will save the world.’”

Liz Danzico

Frames: Notes on Interaction and Design (slideshare)
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
“Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust’s case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with “what reality feels like.” Sometimes it’s the art that’s most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled.”

Allan Chochinov

Girls and Women: Object Lessons in the Primacy of Interaction (video)
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
“New York Times columnist Kristof and his wife, WuDunn, a former Times reporter, make a brilliantly argued case for investing in the health and autonomy of women worldwide. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century, they write, detailing the rampant gendercide in the developing world, particularly in India and Pakistan. Far from merely making moral appeals, the authors posit that it is impossible for countries to climb out of poverty if only a fraction of women (9% in Pakistan, for example) participate in the labor force. China’s meteoric rise was due to women’s economic empowerment: 80% of the factory workers in the Guangdong province are female; six of the 10 richest self-made women in the world are Chinese. The authors reveal local women to be the most effective change agents: The best role for Americans… isn’t holding the microphone at the front of the rally but writing the checks, an assertion they contradict in their unnecessary profiles of American volunteers finding compensations for the lack of shopping malls and Netflix movies in making a difference abroad.”

Christopher Fahey

The Human Interface (video)
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
“Cyborgs have long been a part of America’s cinematic imagination (think Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator), but Clark says they’re very much a reality. Not only that; pretty much everyone is a cyborg already, according to the author, who heads up Indiana University’s cognitive science program. With our laptops, cell phones and PDAs, we’re all wired to the hilt and becoming more so every day. As Clark points out, ‘the mind is just less and less in the head’; when we need information, we usually fire up our PC and access it elsewhere. Clark is at his best when he’s writing for a wide audience, distilling arcane technological advances into their essential meaning. But sometimes his sheer enthusiasm for the subject takes over, and the book feels as if it’s intended only for tech wonks who can appreciate the minutiae of various mind-machine experiments. Clark gives a passing nod to the negative consequences of an increasingly cyborg world-social alienation, information overload-but retains his essentially positive take on the ‘biotechnological merger’ that is transforming so many people’s lives.”

Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places
“Some Place Like Home introduces the new field of Design Psychology, using in-depth interviews with design superstars Michael Graves, Andres Duany and Charles Jencks to examine how places from the past contain the seeds of future choices – for home locations, dwellings and interior design.”

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
“Falling somewhere between Donald A. Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things and Ben Shneiderman’s Designing the User Interface, Raskin’s book covers ergonomics as well as quantification, evaluation, and navigation. Raskin was the original creator of the Apple Macintosh project before Steve Jobs took over and has a background in technology and art, which gives him a unique perspective on usability; recommended for university and large public libraries.”

Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction
“In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls “embodied interaction”—an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality—reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.”

The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places
“Reeves and Nass, who combine expertise in fine arts, communications, math, sociology, television and computers, were consultants to the world’s foremost software corporation on the creation of the Microsoft Bob software package. Not surprisingly, their breezy tone and emphasis on the benign practical applications of their discoveries give their discussion an optimistic bias. Why not make media easier to use and more fun? Yet, their more important contribution may lie in alerting us to specific media dangers. The evidence of our suggestibility offers particularly powerful new arguments for monitoring children’s television. And if the mere number of rapid-fire visual cuts in political advertisements really correlates with an impression of honesty, intelligence and sincerity, the more viewers who are put on guard, the better.”

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
“A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. The reader is given an overview of some 250 patterns that are the units of this language, each consisting of a design problem, discussion, illustration, and solution. By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design.”

Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach
“If the characters in a game have depth, complexity, consistency, mystery, humanity, and charm, then they are going to feel real to the player, and that helps the whole game world feel real, and allows the player to suspend his or her disbelief and get lost in the world. Everything the player does will be more exciting if they’re doing it for someone, or with someone, or in opposition to someone who feels real. Simply put, good character design helps the player to have what we all know can be an amazing, unforgettable experience. This book is not just about making great characters, but also about making great games.”