Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
By Tyler Cowen
Stripe Press, 2018

Economists are among the only people in our society who have a measure of influence on policy and who think about problems from a systemic perspective. So designers working on complex information environments should pay attention to them — especially when they set their sights on the long term, as Tyler Cowen does on Stubborn Attachments.

When thinking about policy, Mr. Cowen says, a little voice inside his head nudges him to consider only short-term, small improvements. In what amounts to a thesis statement, he explains:

I would … like to be more suspicious of our little voice in favor of supreme short-run pragmatism. I wish to suggest that it is a vice, the thinking man’s equivalent of the savage’s short-run gratification. It is our latest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves, at the expense of letting Rome burn. I suggest that we should instead turn our political energies to thinking about the long-run fortunes of our civilization. That means focusing on the future of freedom, wealth, science, and healthy, well-functioning institutions governed by rules and rights.

The book argues that securing a future for these things requires that we boost economic growth, make civilization more stable, and deal with environmental problems. To do so, Mr. Cowen proposes that we maximize the rate of sustainable growth and constrain the quest for higher economic growth in favor of “inviolable human rights.” The bulk of the (short) book justifies these positions with clear, rational arguments.

In our time of highly polarized civic discourse, Stubborn Attachments comes across as a refreshing, non-political take on complex (and pressing) problems. It does so by arguing lucidly from first principles. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, the book serves as a model of how to present difficult positions on complex issues to a non-technical audience in a non-partisan manner.

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Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design
By Barry M. Katz, with a foreword by John Maeda
The MIT Press, 2015

It’s been almost five years since my family and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. We had several reasons for doing so, but foremost among them for me was the fact that the Bay Area is home to the world’s most important information environments. As a designer in this space, I wanted to be where the most interesting, impactful, and lucrative technology is being created. That meant moving to Northern California.

In this part of the world, good design is seen as a prerequisite for technology to succeed. But this wasn’t always the case. The first designers in the Valley (many of whom were drawn here, like me, by the “exceedingly fast pace and dynamic instability of the product development cycle within a rapidly changing technology environment”) had to prove their mettle. What was seen at first as a field for those who couldn’t make it as engineers — as a way to add superficial appeal to products that were first and foremost engineering marvels — would eventually become the force that puts human concerns at the core of technological products.

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Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
By Gary Klein
Public Affairs, 2013

I’m often called on to facilitate workshops with executives, managers, individual contributors, and third-party partners. These are costly engagements — not because of my fees, but because getting groups of busy people to focus their attention on a single thing for two or three days comes at the expense of many other things they have to do. The upside: good workshops can generate incredibly valuable insights. So I’m always looking for ways of becoming better at creating the conditions that allow insights to emerge. Seeing What Others Don’t is a guide for doing so, and one of the most useful books I’ve read on the subject.

It starts with a valuable insight: performance improvements usually result from decreasing errors and increasing insights. However, most organizations focus on the former (Klein cites Six Sigma as a notable example), but not enough on the latter. (“When we put too much energy into eliminating mistakes, we’re less likely to gain insights. Having insights is a different matter from preventing mistakes.”)

The book seeks to answer three fundamental questions:

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Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape
By Molly Wright Steenson
The MIT Press, 2017

We are now far enough into the information revolution that we can examine critical influences with perspective. Architectural Intelligence surfaces key contributions of architectural thinking and doing towards the shaping of current information environments. It does so by examining the work of four influential architects: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte.

During the early years of digital computing, many architects saw computing as a better way to manage complex problem-solving in traditional architectural practice. However, some architects recognized they were dealing with a different type of architecture, one where information played a more significant role than merely augmenting design practice. The architects profiled in this book were the first — and most influential — to do so:

• Christopher Alexander, perhaps the best known of the four, originated (and then transcended) the idea of pattern languages. Looking to systematize architectural design, he was mostly shunned by the architectural profession. His work resonated more with software engineers, so Alexandrian thinking has influenced modern software development practices.
• Richard Saul Wurman vies with Alexander as the best-known of the bunch, although his fame comes from an achievement only tangentially related to the subject of the book: he founded the TED conference. But Wurman’s multi-faceted career is important for other reasons, not the least of which is recognizing information as an architectural material that, when structured correctly, can foster understanding.
• Cedric Price was unknown to me before reading this book. (Which intrigues me, given that my background is in architecture.) The object of most of Price’s projects was a built environment, albeit always peculiar ones that aimed to exploit the systemic capabilities of new information technologies.
• Nicholas Negroponte, is the founder of the MIT Media Lab (and its predecessor, the MIT Architecture Machine Group, which is the focus of this chapter.) Negroponte and his collaborators at the AMG laid the foundations for modern conceptions of what it means to inhabit information and how we can effectively collaborate with artificially intelligent systems.

Were these people “architects” in the sense most people think of? Of the four, only Price and Alexander focused on designing built environments during their careers. (And the latter’s buildings have had little impact in the domain of architecture. While in architecture school, I recall being advised to read A Pattern Language but avoid Alexander’s buildings.) While definitely architectural, the work of all four pushed boundaries for which we (still) lack adequate terms. Wright Steenson captures the issue succinctly:

As Alexander, Wurman, Price, and Negroponte began to conceive of their work in terms of informational processing and computational practices, they found themselves in a liminal space between the two fields, which caused them to question whether what they were doing was architectural at all, or something in opposition to it, or something altogether different.

Those of us who design information environments still inhabit this liminal space. Alas, many among us are not aware of it. By examining the pioneering work of these four architects, Architectural Intelligence offers insights into what it means to architect information environments today — and in the future.

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The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
By Daniel J. Levitin
Dutton, 2014

If you’re like me (and many other people), you have at least one “junk” drawer in your home. You know what I mean: a place where you store assorted batteries, screws, cables, pens (functional and otherwise), and so on — usually somewhere out of sight.

Far from something to be embarrassed by, junk drawers represent an innate human skill. They’re the result of how we make sense of the world: by categorizing things, establishing distinctions between them. The lightbulbs over here, cleaning products over there, office supplies in that other place. And the rest? The stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a category? The junk drawer.

The fact junk drawers are common doesn’t result from them being the best way to organize stuff. If you’ve ever been at a loss trying to find something in your home, only to find it later among the many knick-knacks stuffed out of sight, you’ve experienced this firsthand.

The Organized Mind is a deep — yet accessible — dive into the neuroscience of how we make sense of the world. It explains how we (our bodies, including the all-important nervous system) establish distinctions between things (and people) so we can remember where they are, what they are, how to best interact with them, etc.

While the science behind all of this is fascinating, the book doesn’t stop at science. The author makes the subject practical by translating scientific insights into actionable heuristics. For example, he offers three organization rules to help you minimize the junk drawer problem:

• Organization rule 1: A mislabeled item or location is worse than an unlabeled item.
• Organization rule 2: If there is an existing standard, use it.
• Organization rule 3: Don’t keep what you can’t use.

Some of this may seem obvious, but it’s good to understand the reasons why it works. For people like myself, who categorize things for a living, it’s especially useful to grok our nervous systems’ organizational abilities at a low level.

That said, the book covers a lot of ground. So much so, that in parts I found it difficult to follow how specific subjects connected to the greater whole. Ironically, I found The Organized Mind to be something of an intellectual junk drawer. That said, junk drawers are not without their uses — and pleasures.

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Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
By Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Flatiron Books, 2018

Like many people, I first heard about Hans Rosling via his popular TED talk, where he showed evidence the world is getting better by using animated bubble charts. Factfulness — which Bill Gates called one of the most important books he’s ever read — is like a paper-based version of that presentation: It does, indeed, use data to explain how things are getting better. But it does more than that: It also explains why we find that so hard to believe.

The book divided into ten chapters corresponding to biases or “instincts” that delude us:

1. The Gap Instinct: Our tendency towards polarizing what we see.
2. The Negativity Instinct: Our tendency to spread bad news over good news. (I.e., “Good news is not news.”)
3. The Straight Line Instinct: Our tendency to project future trends based on current trends.
4. The Fear Instinct: Our (deeply hard-wired) tendency to pay more attention to frightening things.
5. The Size Instinct: Out tendency to gravitate towards impressively large or small numbers, losing our sense of proportion.
6. The Generalization Instinct: Our tendency to generalize and categorize data.
7. The Destiny Instinct: Our tendency to not perceive change when it happens slowly and gradually.
8. The Single Perspective Instinct: Our tendency to see things only from our angle.
9. The Blame Instinct: Our tendency to find scapegoats to blame for the way things are.
10. The Urgency Instinct: Our tendency to react to changing conditions by intervening immediately.

Looking at data objectively, it’s hard not to see how humanity has made enormous progress. But you wouldn’t know this if you look at the news or interact with others in social media. This is in part because most people argue from a perspective that is distorted by these “instincts.” This book shows you how to overcome these biases so you can understand things more objectively. It’s not a dose of optimism, but a dose of possibilism, a word Rosling coined (and which I’ve written about before.)

Hans Rosling died of pancreatic cancer before finishing the Factfulness. His collaborators — his son Ola and daughter-in-law Anna — conclude the book with a note regarding the impact he hoped it would have: to help us work towards a fact-based worldview. Given the power and outreach of our technologies, we need it more than ever. This book is an important contribution in that direction.

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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
By Jaron Lanier
Henry Holt and Company, 2018

Jaron Lanier is not just a VR pioneer. He’s also one of the earliest critics of the technological and economic conditions that have led to our current social media-instigated malaise. His book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010) was more than prescient: it diagnosed the broken fundamentals of the advertising business model years before most of us understood the pernicious effects of moving important social interactions to environments that are financed by attention-mongering.

Lanier’s latest book doesn’t pull punches. True to its title, it consists of ten short arguments for quitting social media cold turkey. Quoting the back cover, these arguments are:

1. You are losing your free will.
2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
3. Social media is making you into an asshole.
4. Social media is undermining truth.
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
7. Social media is making you unhappy.
8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.
9. Social media is making politics impossible.
10. Social media hates your soul.

Some of these are more effective than others. (For me, at least — Lanier offers several YMMV disclaimers.) While the overall impression is that we do have a problem with social media, I’m put off by the book’s overly confrontational approach. For example, early on, Lanier proposes an acronym to describe advertising-supported internet companies: BUMMER. From then on, he refers to companies such as Facebook and Google as BUMMER companies.

This is a short book and something of a rant, so I didn’t expect nuance. That said, the argument could’ve been stronger if it acknowledged more of the genuine value people get from some of these information environments. One of the book’s underlying premises is that we become addicted to these environments by design. That’s truer of some than others. For example, WhatsApp is where my family and I catch up with each other. I’m not compulsively drawn to that environment in the same way that I am to Twitter and Facebook. Yes, there are other reasons why WhatsApp may not be good for me, but I do find some value there. The book doesn’t delve enough into these types of distinctions.

The combined effect of the confrontational stance and ranty nature of the work detract from the seriousness of its subject. That said, it’s a short read, and well worth your while: It will make you think about the way you approach your online interactions, and where.

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