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› Find signed collectible books: 'About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design'
"The following description is for the second edition of About Face. The 3rd Edtion, About Face 3 (ISBN 0470084111), is now available."
First published seven years ago-just before the World Wide Web exploded into dominance in the software world-About Face rapidly became a bestseller. While the ideas and principles in the original book remain as relevant as ever, the examples in About Face 2.0 are updated to reflect the evolution of the Web.
Interaction Design professionals are constantly seeking to ensure that software and software-enabled products are developed with the end-user's goals in mind, that is, to make them more powerful and enjoyable for people who use them. About Face 2.0 ensures that these objectives are met with the utmost ease and efficiency.
Alan Cooper (Palo Alto, CA) has spent a decade making high-tech products easier to use and less expensive to build-a practice known as "Interaction Design." Cooper is now the leader in this growing field. Mr. Cooper is also the author of two bestselling books that are widely considered indispensable texts. About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, intro-duced the first comprehensive set of practical design principles. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum explains how talented people and companies continually create aggravating high-tech products that fail to meet customer expectations.
Robert Reimann has spent the past 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, and consultant. He has led dozens of interaction design projects in domains including e-commerce, portals, desktop productivity, authoring environments, medical and scientific instrumentation, wireless, and handheld devices for startups and Fortune 500 clients alike. Joining Cooper in 1996, Reimann led the development and refinement of many goal-directed design methods described in About Face 2.0. He has lectured on these methods at major universities and to international industry audiences. He is a member of the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Institute of Design. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design'
An excellent book for anyone who wants to understand why so much software is so poorly designed -- and an even better book for anyone who wants to DO something about the problem. Must reading (and doing!) for programmers of any level. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software'
A far-reaching and strikingly original collection of essays on the culture of software by British new-media critic Matthew Fuller, Behind the Blip looks at the many ways in which the ostensibly neutral user interfaces, search engines, intelligent agents, and word processors that are now part of our everyday life are actively reshaping the way we look at and interact with the world. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cognitive Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction for Geographic Information Systems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Computers As Theatre'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Design of Everyday Things'
Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans--from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools--must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Design Wise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction'
In revising this well-known book, Ben Shneiderman again provides a complete, current, and authoritative introduction to user-interface design. Students will learn practical techniques and guidelines needed to develop good systems designs - systems with interfaces the typical user can understand, predict, and control. This third edition features new chapters on the World Wide Web, information visualization, and computer-supported cooperative work. It contains expanded and earlier coverage of development methodologies, evaluation techniques, and user-interface building tools. The author provides provocative discussion of speech input/output, natural-language interaction, anthropomorphic design, virtual environments, and intelligent (software) agents. An associated booksite on the World Wide Web provides students with additional resources: http://www.aw.com/DTUI [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications And Clever Devices'
Explore the new design discipline that is behind such products as the iPod and innovative Web sites like Flickr. While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices. It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of an engineer.
This much-needed guide is more than just a how-to manual. It covers interaction design fundamentals, approaches to designing, design research, and more, and spans all mediumsInternet, software, and devices. Even robots! Filled with tips, real-world projects, and interviews, youll get a solid grounding in everything you need to successfully tackle interaction design.
Designing for Interaction is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing Interactions'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing Interfaces'
Designing a good interface isn't easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your ui technology -- web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices -- may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well. Ui designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence. Designing interfaces captures those best practices as design patterns -- solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You'll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them. Each chapter's introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight. A book can't design an interface for you -- no foolproof design process is given here -- but designing interfaces does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach To The Web Usability'
Usability design is one of the most important though often least attractive tasks for a Web developer. In Don't Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humour and excellent to-the-point examples.
The title of the book is its chief personal design premise. All of the tips, techniques and examples presented within it revolve around users being able to surf merrily through a well-designed site with minimal cognitive strain. Readers will quickly come to agree with many of the book's assumptions. For example, "We don't read pages--we scan them" and, "We don't figure out how things work--we muddle through". Getting to grips with such hard facts sets the stage for Web design that then produces top-notch sites.
Using an attractive mix of full-colour screen shots, cute cartoons and diagrams, and informative sidebars, the book keeps your attention and drives home some crucial points. Much of the content is devoted to proper use of conventions and content layout, and the "before and after" examples are superb. Topics such as the wise use of rollovers and usability testing are covered using a consistently practical approach.
This is the type of book you can blow through in a couple evenings. But despite its conciseness, it will give you an expert's ability to judge Web design. You'll never form a first impression of a site in the same way again. --Stephen W Plain [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Donnerjack'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Envisioning Information'
This book celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen, showing superb displays of high-dimensional complex data. The most design-oriented of Edward Tufte's books, Envisioning Information shows maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, a pop-up, and many other wonderful displays of information. The book provides practical advice about how to explain complex material by visual means, with extraordinary examples to illustrate the fundamental principles of information displays. Topics include escaping flatland, color and information, micro/macro designs, layering and separation, small multiples, and narratives. Winner of 17 awards for design and content. 400 illustrations with exquisite 6- to 12-color printing throughout. Highest quality design and production. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gui Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers'
In GUI Bloopers, consultant Jeff Johnson uses 550+ pages to illustrate common pitfalls in user interface design, the all-important iceberg tip that end users confuse with applications and that developers confuse with end users. Reporting on 82 incidents of bad design, Johnson manages to cover the essential point of his message: software designers should think of their user interfaces from the user's point of view. Not profound, but profoundly overlooked in most low-end to mid-range development efforts. His codification of GUI design in eight predictable principles will help GUI newbies realize that the customer must be pleased with the product. Of course, the customer doesn't always understand what he or she wants. Hence, GUI development is iterative. When the customer is not at hand, a surrogate will do, so usability testing is essential.
The bloopers include mistakes in window design, labeling consistency, visual/grammatical parallel construction, coherence of look and feel, and clarity. Most perceptively, Johnson observes that CPU speed in the development group hides many design mistakes. Moreover, context-scoping, already a subtle problem in software design, must be implemented in GUI design. Input error handling is the most psychologically sensitive of all GUI design characteristics. User error messages can easily be too vague or too specific, and diagnostic error messages should be user-manageable, if not actually user-interpretable.
Like the Hollywood outtakes that gave us the "blooper," the entertainment quotient here is measured in mistakes, not successes. Teaching by counter example rather than by example at an estimated ratio of three to one, Johnson panders to our invertebrate instinct to measure our own successes by someone else's failure. To his credit, he recognizes that user interfaces include pedestrian texts (like his) as well as graphical interfaces for computer applications. His self-referential style gives the book an egocentric slant, but he is both priest and practitioner: he submitted a draft to usability testers and reports the results in an appendix. One criticism was that there were too many negative examples. Hmmm.
Thanks to other tester comments, GUI Bloopers is a browsable book, allowing the few nuggets of wisdom to be located. For the most part, the book's value can be captured by reading the seven-page table of contents carefully. --Peter Leopold [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Human-Computer Interaction'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Human-Computer Interaction'
Extensively revised and rewritten in light of recent advances, this best-selling book is a comprehensive examination of human-computer interaction. It provides a multi-disciplinary approach to the subject through a synthesis of computer science, cognitive science, psychology and sociology, and stresses a principled approach to interactive systems design that fits a software engineering environment. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Beginning...Was the Command Line'
Neal Stephenson, author of the sprawling and engaging Cryptonomicon, has written a manifesto that could be spoken by a character from that brilliant book. Primarily, In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line discusses the past and future of personal computer operating systems. "It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old," he writes, "but it is the fate of operating systems to become free." While others in the computer industry express similarly dogmatic statements, Stephenson charms the reader into his way of thinking, providing anecdotes and examples that turn the pages for you.
Stephenson is a techie, and he's writing for an audience of coders and hackers in Command Line. The idea for this essay began online, when a shortened version of it was posted on Slashdot.org. The book still holds some marks of an e-mail flame gone awry, and some tangents should have been edited to hone his formidable arguments. But unlike similar writers who also discuss technical topics, he doesn't write to exclude; readers who appreciate computing history (like Dealers of Lightning or Fire in the Valley) can easily step into this book.
Stephenson tackles many myths about industry giants in this volume, specifically Apple and Microsoft. By now, every newspaper reader has heard of Microsoft's overbearing business practices, but Stephenson cuts to the heart of new issues for the software giant with a finely sharpened steel blade. Apple fares only a little better as Stephenson (a former Mac user himself) highlights the early steps the company took to prepare for a monopoly within the computer market--and its surprise when this didn't materialize. Linux culture gets a thorough--but fair--skewering, and the strengths of BeOS are touted (although no operating system is nearly close enough to perfection in Stephenson's eyes).
As for the rest of us, who have gladly traded free will and an intellectual understanding of computers for a clutter-free, graphically pleasing interface, Stephenson has thoughts to offer as well. He fully understands the limits nonprogrammers feel in the face of technology (an example being the "blinking 12" problem when your VCR resets itself). Even so, within Command Line he convincingly encourages us as a society to examine the metaphors of technology--simplifications that aren't really much simpler--that we greedily accept. --Jennifer Buckendorff [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web'
Today's web sites have moved far beyond "brochureware." They are larger and more complex, have great strategic value to their sponsors, and their users are busier and less forgiving. Designers, information architects, and web site managers are required to juggle vast amounts of information, frequent changes, new technologies, and sometimes even multiple objectives, making some web sites look like a fast-growing but poorly planned city-roads everywhere, but impossible to navigate. Well-planned information architecture has never been as essential as it is now.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition, shows you how to blend aesthetics and mechanics for distinctive, cohesive web sites that work. Most books on web development concentrate on either the graphics or the technical issues of a site. This book focuses on the framework that holds the two together.
This edition contains more than 75% new material. You'll find updated chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, and searching; and a new chapter on thesauri, controlled vocabularies and metadata will help you understand the interconnectedness of these systems. The authors have expanded the methodology chapters to include a more interdisciplinary collection of tools and techniques. They've also complemented the top-down strategies of the first edition with bottom-up approaches that enable distributed, emergent solutions.
A whole new section addresses the opportunities and challenges of practicing information architecture, while another section discusses how that work impacts and is influenced by the broader organizational context. New case studies provide models for creating enterprise intranet portals and online communities. Finally, you'll find pointers to a wealth of essential information architecture resources, many of which did not exist a few years ago.
By applying the principles outlined in this completely updated classic, you'll build web sites and intranets that are easier to navigate and appealing to your users, as well as scalable and simple to maintain. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition is a treasure trove of ideas and practical advice for anyone involved in building or maintaining a large, complex web site or intranet.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web : Designing Large-Scale Web Sites'
In Chapter 6 of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the authors discuss the details of good search-engine design. In a bitingly humorous segment, they analyze a Web site's search-page results: "Let's say you're interested in knowing what the New Jersey sales tax is.... So you go to the State of New Jersey web site and search on sales tax. The 20 results are scored at either 84% or 82% relevant. Why does each document receive only one of two scores?... And what the heck makes a document 2% more relevant than another?"
With a swift and convincing stroke, the authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web tear down many entrenched ideas about Web design. Flashy animations are cool, they agree, as long as they don't aggravate the viewer. Nifty clickable icons are nice, but are their meanings universal? Is the search engine providing results that are useful and relevant? This book acts as a mirror and with careful questioning causes the reader to think through all the elements and decisions required for well-crafted Web design. --Jennifer Buckendorff [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Information Visualization: Perception for Design'
Most designers know that yellow text presented against a blue background reads clearly and easily, but how many can explain why? Information Visualization: Perception for Design explores the art and science of why we see objects the way we do.
Although more technical than most graphic design books, the book "is intended to make [the data from the science and study of visualization] available to the non-specialist." Each chapter focuses on a different facet of human vision, like "Lightness, Brightness, Contrast, and Constancy" in chapter 3, or "Static and Moving Patterns" in chapter 4.
Although the author tries to put a great deal of scientific research data into pedestrian terms, the nature of the subject matter and the papers from which he culls his information make this task an uphill battle from the start. As a result, the book is full of valuable information, but it may not necessarily be right for the average graphic designer looking for a new inspirational spin. Serious interface designers, presentation designers, data analyzers, or any artist tasked with presenting ideas in a visual format, though, should come away from Information Visualization with a clearer understanding of the inner workings of perception. At the very least, they'll be able to explain why yellow text against blue is a good combination. --Mike Caputo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity'
In this book about the darker side of technology's impact on our lives, Alan Cooper begins by explaining that unlike other devices throughout history, computers have a "meta function:" an unwanted, unforeseen option that users may accidentally invoke with what they thought was a normal keystroke. Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously reevaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process.
Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or deprioritize lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays, "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorized all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitized by too many years of badly designed software.)
Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e., "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes, "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book.
Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers, and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. --Jennifer Buckendorff [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate'
Steven Johnson turns the tables on the way we consider our computer interfaces. While many discussions focus on how interfaces help us work by adapting to our ways of thinking and our real-world metaphors, Johnson jumps from there to look at how our thinking and world view are altered by our computer interfaces.
He begins with the simple: The mouse improved the spatial nature of our computers by letting us move, by the proxy of our pointers, within the screen. The windows metaphor made cyberspace a 3-D space. And while we tend to think about the graphical nature of interfaces, Johnson also explores the textual side and how it has changed the way we work with the written word.
Interface Culture then goes on to show how, with each advance in technology, the interface shapes our perceptions in new ways. Where mice and windows turned the computing world into cyberspace, agents have created a perception of software as personality. On the larger scale, Johnson sees these tools, originally built on noncyber metaphors, as creating, in their turn, a new set of metaphors for looking at the rest of the world. And while he finds it exciting, he spends considerable time on such shortcomings in our approach to interfacing: what he considers the excessive emphasis on graphics elements at the cost of anything textual. Johnson, who is the editor of the cerebral Feed Web site and whom Newsweek called one of the most influential people in cyberspace, has written an intelligent book about interface design, its relationship to the real world, and how it affects our perception of worlds both cyber and physical. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Interface Design: The Art of Developing Easy-To-Use Software'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Invention by Design'
Henry Petroski's previous bestsellers have delighted readers with intriguing stories about the engineering marvels around us, from the lowly pencil to the soaring suspension bridge. In this book, Petroski delves deeper into the mystery of invention, to explore what everyday artifacts and sophisticated networks can reveal about the way engineers solve problems.
Engineering entails more than knowing the way things work. What do economics and ecology, aesthetics and ethics, have to do with the shape of a paper clip, the tab of a beverage can, the cabin design of a turbojet, or the course of a river? How do the idiosyncrasies of individual engineers, companies, and communities leave their mark on projects from Velcro® to fax machines to waterworks?Invention by Design offers an insider's look at these political and cultural dimensions of design and development, production and construction.
Readers unfamiliar with engineering will find Petroski's enthusiasm contagious, whether the topic is the genesis of the Ziploc baggie or the averted collapse of Manhattan's sleekest skyscraper. And those who inhabit the world of engineering will discover insights to challenge their customary perspective, whether their work involves failure analysis, systems design, or public relations. Written with the flair that readers have come to expect from his books, Invention by Design reaffirms Petroski as the master explicator of the principles and processes that turn thoughts into the many things that define our made world.
[via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology'
Inviting Disaster, by technology and history writer James R Chiles, is an unusual book: it appeals to the prurient desires that keep us riveted to highway accidents, while knowledgeably discoursing on the often preventable mistakes that caused them. At its heart are the colourful stories behind more than 50 of the most infamous catastrophes that periodically chilled the advance of the industrial age, both those well remembered (the 1986 Challenger explosion, for example) and those now largely forgotten (a 1937 gas explosion at a Texas school that killed 298). But along with lively depictions of these deadly devastations and white-knuckle calamities--the Maine battleship, Apollo 13 and Three Mile Island among them--Chiles offers an informed analysis of the unfortunate chain of events that brought them about. And by grouping like incidents to show how fatal "system fractures" eventually developed through a combination of human error and mechanical malfunction, he also suggests how we might sidestep such tragedies in the future. In so doing he fashions these spectacular accounts of failed planes, trains, ships, bridges, dam s, factories and other conveyances and facilities, into a cautionary tale about the progress we are making to "learn the way of the machine (and) act before an otherwise routine day rises to disaster". --Howard Rothman [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology An Inside Look at Catastrophes and Why They Happen'
Inviting Disaster, by technology and history writer James R Chiles, is an unusual book: it appeals to the prurient desires that keep us riveted to highway accidents, while knowledgeably discoursing on the often preventable mistakes that caused them. At its heart are the colourful stories behind more than 50 of the most infamous catastrophes that periodically chilled the advance of the industrial age, both those well remembered (the 1986 Challenger explosion, for example) and those now largely forgotten (a 1937 gas explosion at a Texas school that killed 298). But along with lively depictions of these deadly devastations and white-knuckle calamities--the Maine battleship, Apollo 13 and Three Mile Island among them--Chiles offers an informed analysis of the unfortunate chain of events that brought them about. And by grouping like incidents to show how fatal "system fractures" eventually developed through a combination of human error and mechanical malfunction, he also suggests how we might sidestep such tragedies in the future. In so doing he fashions these spectacular accounts of failed planes, trains, ships, bridges, dam s, factories and other conveyances and facilities, into a cautionary tale about the progress we are making to "learn the way of the machine (and) act before an otherwise routine day rises to disaster". --Howard Rothman [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Language of New Media'
In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Laws of Simplicity'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maeda Media'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Metaphors We Live by'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Multimedia and Virtual Reality: Designing Multisensory User Interfaces'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Neuromancer'
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." William Gibson's Neuromancer starts out with one of the great opening lines in all of fiction and never lets up. This is the novel that introduced the term "cyberspace," and it remains one of the most vibrant and compelling looks at the world being built by computers and information technology.
Plus, it tells a great story. Case is a top-line hacker who made one mistake that cost him his greatest love. To get it back, he agrees to work for people who in turn are working for an artificial intelligence named Wintermute. Wintermute wants freedom, and Case is the man who can do the job. (Some of the secondary characters, including Molly from "Johnny Mnemonic," will be familiar to readers of Gibson's short stories.) The intensity never lets up as Gibson creates a world that is one of the most distinctive in science fiction. And the story is told in a high-tech poetic prose style that owes as much to William S. Burroughs as it does to Gibson's predecessors in SF. The end result is a book that is both stylistically creative and thoroughly gripping in its unfolding adventure. In short, Neuromancer packs more ideas into its 250 pages than most writers can manage in a 900-page trilogy. It was hailed as an instant classic when first published as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1984, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards, and it remains one of the most influential science fiction novels ever written. --Greg L. Johnson [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Simple Techniques for Designing and Refining the User Interface'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Parallel Port Complete: Programming, Interfacing & Using the PC'S Parallel Printer Port'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design'
Here's a comprehensive sourcebook, filled with concrete design guidelines for developing clear software interfaces. In it, readers will find practical guidelines including the high level conceptual model, dialog styles, organization of functionality to support user tasks, and effective error handling. Suitable for novice and experienced software development professionals. Based on extensive research in human computer interaction. Provides guidance for both the design of traditional interfaces, such as menus and fill-in forms implemented on character-based screens, and for the design of state-of-the-art user interfaces such as direct manipulation interfaces including graphics, color, windows, and pointing devices.e
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Psychology of Everyday Things'
With the many recent advances in technology, it seems, there has followed a diminution of quality. Electronic books have several advantages over their print counterparts, for instance. But for the time being, they're hard to use and unattractive to boot. Computers, which are supposed to make our lives easier, are commonly sources of frustration and wasted time. Movies are wondrously chock-a-block with special effects--but someone forgot the story. And so on.
Donald Norman, a retired professor of cognitive science, is bothered to no end by the fact that grappling with unfriendly objects now takes up so many of our hours. Over the course of several books, of which The Psychology of Everyday Things was the first, he has railed against bad design. He scrutinizes a range of artifacts that are supposed to make our daily living a little easier, and he finds most of them wanting. Why, he asks, does a door need instructions that say "push" or "pull"? A well-designed object, he argues, is self-explanatory. But well-designed objects are increasingly rare, for the present culture places a higher value on aesthetics than utility, even with such items as cordless screwdrivers, dresser drawers, and kitchen cabinets. In their concern for creating "art," many designers don't seem to consider what people actually do with things. Such disregard, Norman suggests, leads to few objects being standardized: think of all the different kinds of unsynchronized clocks that lurk in microwave ovens, VCRs, coffee makers, and the like--and of all the different kinds of batteries needed to drive them. Why, he wonders, must we reset all those clocks whenever the power goes off? Some designer somewhere, he ventures, ought to develop a master clock that communicates with all other electric clocks in a home--one that, when reset, synchronizes its slave units.
You don't need to be especially interested in technological matters to enjoy Norman's arguments. The book's underlying question is aimed at a global audience: will the design of everyday things improve? If this entertaining and, yes, well-designed book changes even a few minds, perhaps it will. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Quick Solutions to Great Layouts'
Keep this book in an easy-accessible spot. "Quick Solutions to Great Layouts" solves design problems. This combination of how-to-book and swipefile provides readers with grids hanglines, margins, borders, rule measurements and type specs. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rosary: Chain of Hope'
Responding to the Pope's Apostolic Letter on the Rosary, his five new "Luminous Mysteries", and declaration of 2003 as "The Year of the Rosary", Fr. Groeschel presents this book of meditations on all 20 mysteries of the rosary. Drawing on his vast personal experiences as well as the grand traditions of the Church, he takes us on a spiritual journey that will inspire us to greater depths of prayer. This special book includes: The Pope's Letter on the Rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, and lavishly illustrated with 20 classic color paintings. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Serial Port Complete: Programming and Circuits for Rs-232 and Rs-485 Links and Networks'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shaping Things'
"Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic."
Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of objectwe have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmablethat will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.
The vision of Shaping Things is given material form by the intricate design of Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiersand anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces'
The importance of sociological and anthropological contibutions to the design of human-computer interfaces has recently become recognised. Human-computer interfaces range from interfaces for single users to computer supported co-operative work. The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces considers issues concerning interpersonal dynamics, cultural readings of technology, the organisational contexts of technology, and the 'situated' nature of use and the processes of design. It is an unusual volume in that it covers theory, methodology and applications in depth. Researchers, designers, and graduate students concerned with the social implications of computers will find this book compelling reading. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine'
Bestselling scientist Norman explores the nature of memory and knowledge and the representation and display of ideas in all forms, drawing attention to the distinctively human qualities that can be manipulated by machines and which are often threatened by designers who disdain those qualities as "distractable" or "inefficient". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Twisty Little Passages'
Interactive fiction -- the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure -- has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it.Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that produced by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Usb Complete: Everything You Need To Develop Custom Usb Peripherals'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'User Interface Design for Programmers'
Most programmers' fear of user interface (UI) programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphic designthe mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-black-wearing people produce cool-looking, artistic pieces. Most programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers insteadstrong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment, and incapable of doing UI design.
In this brilliantly readable book, author Joel Spolsky proposes simple, logical rules that can be applied without any artistic talent to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to websites to consumer electronics. Spolsky's primary axiom, the importance of bringing the program model in line with the user model, is both rational and simple.
In a fun and entertaining way, Spolky makes user interface design easy for programmers to grasp. After reading User Interface Design for Programmers, you'll know how to design interfaces with the user in mind. You'll learn the important principles that underlie all good UI design, and you'll learn how to perform usability testing that works.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Web Design Flash Sites'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design: An Application Design Guide'
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