books_for_this_term

The whole class had to read four books, whose where regarded as the most imortant books regarding to the tangible_interactions course by our teachers.

“Where the Action Is” by Paul Dourish

“Everywhere” by Adam Greenfield

“In the Bubble” by John Thackara

“Shaping Things” by Bruce Sterling

We were told to form reading groups to discuss these books and then to present our findings and understandings of the books to the class. So every group got assigned to a book and had to work with it. Thus not everybody had to read all four books.

Sara, Andre and me got Bruce Sterling´s “Shaping Things”. A very interesting book about the future of things/objects.

If you want to know what our findings of this book were, you can download our presentation here:

bruce-sterling-all-stars.ppt

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Apart from that I´m struggling with some more books this semester. The first one to mention is John Maeda´s “Laws of Simplicity”. It kinda jumped into my eyes while I was searching for some other book in the library. I was cought by it´s simplicity and had to read it.

Maeda sets up 10 Laws whose are as follows:

Of course these laws are not new to anyone who has tried to make an appealing and yet functional product. However it is nice to read about the things you always struggle with while designing an object but until yet you hadn´t had the right words to describe the problem. It was more like a feeling. With these laws you can pinpoint your feelings a bit better.

Read more about the author and the book here:

http://lawsofsimplicity.com/

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The next book in line is a bit different from the above mentioned highly theoretical/philosophical books. It´s “Macromedia FLASH MY Actionscripting Advanced Training from the Source” written by Derek Franklin / Jobe Makar.

Since this class is a lot about building working prototypes using processing and arduino-boards, I figured out that it might be helpfull to brush up my actionscripting skills as well. I tried to struggle with processing but it was kinda hard for me and all my classmates had a full semester of processing last year, so instead of trying to catch up 6 month of programming I decided to rather sticking with what I´m familiar with and hope that I can use my flash skills in this course…

By the way the book got a lot of interesting examples and you are introduced in the AS-Language quite well and playfull.