Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and SoftwareSteven Johnson "This book is about the mystery of why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts."Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model; rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner, emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different — ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems — all turn out to follow the rules of emergence. In each of these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies a scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites create neighborhoods.In the tradition of "Being Digital and "The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" ("The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening intellectual journey from the discovery of emergence to its applications. He introduces us to our everyday surroundings, offering suprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected association of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web?Drawing upon evolutionary theory, urban studies, neuroscience, and computer games, "Emergence is a guidebook to one of the key components of twenty-first-century culture. Until recently, Johnson explains, the disparate philosophers of emergence have worked to interpret the world. But today they are starting to change it. This book is the riveting story of thatchange and what it means for the future. If you've searched for information on the Web, played a recent video game, or accepted a collect call using voice recognition software, you've already encountered the new world of artificial emergence. Provocative, engaging, and sophisticated, "Emergence puts you on the front lines of a sweeping revolution in science and thought. The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart GovernanceStephen Goldsmith, Susan Crawford Leveraging Big Data and 21st century technology to renew cities and citizenship in America Life Between Buildings: Using Public SpaceJan Gehl “. . .thoughtful, beautiful, and enlightening...” Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban LegacyAnthony Jones, Larry W Green Larry W. Green, a 1975 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has put together a dynamic book of digital photographs and paintings depicting water tanks in all their glory. Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy grew out of one artist s vision as he started to sketch and paint the urban environment in and around Chicago. Green found himself drawn to water tanks as iconic symbols of the city. The tanks were distinctive all by themselves, and an integral part of the city s skyline. As SAIC President Tony Jones, says in his Foreword to the book, Chicago s crumbling water-tanks take on a new significance when seen in Green s paintings surely we knew they were there, they d registered, but they weren t the star of the street-show. But we ve woken up to them, become part of his celebration of them as dynamic incidents in what is clearly a Chicago landscape. The New Science of CitiesMichael Batty In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks — the relations between objects that comprise the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. The Urban Spectator: American Concept-Cities from Kodak to GoogleEric Gordon Winner of the AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, scholarly illustrated category Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big DataDietmar Offenhuber, Carlo Ratti The MIT based SENSEable City Lab under Carlo Ratti is one of the research centers that deal with the flow of people and goods, but also of refuse that moves around the world. Experience with large-scale infrastructure projects suggest that more complex and above all flexible answers must be sought to questions of transportation or disposal. This edition, edited by Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti, shows how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. It discusses the impact of real-time data on architecture and urban planning, using examples developed in the SENSEable City Lab. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. It also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control. The authors address issues with which urban planning disciplines will work intensively in the future: questions that not only radically and critically review, but also change fundamentally, the existing tasks and how the professions view their own roles. | Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of TechnologyDavid Gelernter When something works well, you can feel it; there is a sense of rightness to it. We call that rightness beauty, and it ought to be the single most important component of design.This recognition is at the heart of David Gelernter's witty argued essay, Machine Beauty, which defines beauty as an inspired mating of simplicity and power. You can see it in a Bauhaus chair, the Hoover Dam, or an Emerson radio circa 1930. In contrast, too many contemporary technologists run out of ideas and resort to gimmicks and features; they are rarely capable of real, structural ingenuity.Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of computers. You don't have to look far to see how oblivious most computer technologists are to the idea of beauty. Just look at how ugly your computer cabinet is, how unwieldy and out of sync it feels with the manner and speed with which you process thought.The best designers, however, are obsessed with beauty. Both hardware and software should afford us the greatest opportunity to achieve deep beauty, the kind of beauty that happens when many types of loveliness reinforce one another, when design expresses an underlying technology, a machine logic. Program software ought to be transparent; it should engage what Gelernter calls ”a thought-amplifying feedback loop,” a creative symbiosis with its user. These principles, beautiful in themselves, will set the stage for the next technological revolution, in which the pursuit of elegance will lead to extraordinary innovations. Machine Beauty will delight Gelernter's growing audience, fans of his provocative and biting journalism. Anyone who manufactures, designs, or uses computers will be galvanized by his cogent arguments and tantalizing glimpse of a bright future, where beautiful technology abounds. Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live NextJohn D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay This brilliant and eye-opening look at the new phenomenon called the aerotropolis gives us a glimpse of the way we will live in the near future―and the way we will do business too. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the InfobahnWilliam J. Mitchell Entertaining, concise, and relentlessly probing, City of Bits is a comprehensive introduction to a new type of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway. William Mitchell makes extensive use of practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and the growing domination of software over materialized form. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary HistoryFranco Moretti Professor Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among “the most backwards disciplines in the academy.” Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About CitiesWitold Rybczynski In this new work, prizewinning author, professor, and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski returns to the territory he knows best: writing about the way people live, just as he did in the acclaimed bestsellers Home, A Clearing in the Distance, and Now I Sit Me Down. In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental KnowingMalcolm McCullough Digital Ground is an architect's response to the design challenge posed by pervasive computing. One century into the electronic age, people have become accustomed to interacting indirectly, mediated through networks. But now as digital technology becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, even more activities become mediated, and networks extend rather than replace architecture. The young field of interaction design reflects not only how people deal with machine interfaces but also how people deal with each other in situations where interactivity has become ambient. It shifts previously utilitarian digital design concerns to a cultural level, adding notions of premise, appropriateness, and appreciation. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the SensesJuhani Pallasmaa Since the book's first publication, interest in the role of the body and the senses has been emerging in both architectural philosophy and teaching. This new, revised and extended edition of this seminal work will not only inspire architects and students to design more holistic architecture, but will enrich the general reader's perception of the world around them. |