Russell busted me for not posting the books I promised many from the talk I gave at the Interesting2007 ‘happening’ he organised.
Jack, the lazy pulsar, even beat me to it.
I had in fact written it down, but only mailed it to Rebecca/Beeker, so here it is:
- ‘The death and life of great american cities’ by Jane Jacobs
- ‘Emergence‘ and ‘The Ghost Map‘ by Stephen Johnson
- ‘Out of control‘ by Kevin Kelly
- ‘Shaping things‘ by Bruce Sterling
- ‘Everyware‘ by Adam Greenfield
- ‘Digital ground‘ by Malcolm Mccullough
- ‘The rules of play‘ by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
- ‘The ambiguity of play‘ by Brian Sutton-Smith
- ‘The play ethic‘ by Pat Kane
I probably didn’t mention all of them explicitly in the talk, but they’re definitely all forming the conceptual henge around it…
Petafloptimism 
Great slides & reading list mister… Yet I think there’re at least 2 more books which should definitely be part of this for they not only ask the important questions why we need all this technology, frame how to best use it, but too are full of inspirational anecdotes and projects of a more human focused & ethical approach to design:
John Thackara: “In the bubble”
Neil Gershenfeld: “Fab”
I like the Adam Greenfield piece inspired part of your talk about considering design activity within it’s surrounding context shell. I think we’ll need to go even further and become truly literate in systems thinking, understand & accept that our products (of play or not, physical or not) are due to become part of and will have an effect on a bigger network. To realise this we need to shift design & “innovation” efforts from isolated projects towards continuous processes, much like in nature. Small steps, more often. Nothing new…
Finally re:your slides about scale – more to do with scales of time, but I totally subscribe to Stewart Brand’s theory about architectural layers (site, structure, skin… down to “stuff”). Each layer exists in a different time scale and each layer mainly interacts only with its immediate neighbours….
Rock on! 🙂
Great stuff. Thanks for putting this up – your talk made me dig out my old copy of Jacobs’ Death & Life, and now I can look into the rest of the list too.
nice one dude – i got a couple of them down and they’re on my stack but great to have the rest.
cheers!
Loved the talk, I remember the orbiting cities. there was a brilliant book in the school library about the future. Underwater domes, moonbabses, cross-atlantic monorails. None of it has come to pass qute yet, I still hope that ill be able to travel to work on a jetpack. It will come.
and the extending of parkourist senses outside the body: shades of midnighter there?