Book Review: Let’s look at a pair of books that contain deep critiques of the world where more and more of our devices’ functionality is exposed only through interfaces on screens, and lay out a path to a more human-centered technological future filled with devices that engage us more richly in a wide variety of ways instead of asking us to keep poking at black glass rectangles with our stubby fingers.
I sat on the hotel room floor, surrounded by guitars, keyboards, and gadgets, doodling on a complimentary Holiday Inn notepad. Dad tinkered with a motherboard as his soldering iron glowed, delicately balanced on the edge of an ashtray. The smell of pork chops, rice and beans wafted through the air as mom worked her magic on our portable double burner stove. I sat on the floor, glued to the television. It was that very moment the iconic M came to life and made its beautiful debut.
Someday, you’ll be sitting at your desk, minding your own business.
Your boss, or a client, will come in and start explaining this cool new IoT project you’ll be working on. As you listen, the timeline splits:
In the Darkest Timeline, no one on your team knows about what’s discussed in this book. Your boss/client starts specifying requirements that sound cool to them, but are really bad ideas in ways that aren’t immediately evident. Your team builds the project as it was specified, and it fails in the marketplace because of mistakes that could have been avoided.
In the Prime Timeline, you’ve read this book.
After returning from a three month journey through Southeast Asia, I’ve been doodling elephants. Lots and lots of zentangle elephants. I attribute this to the set of Micron pens I bought in Thailand, and wonder if these fine writing instruments are even capable of drawing patternless, non-tropical animals. Testing that theory hardly appeals to me since I’m still in elephant mode. So instead, I decided to challenge myself in other ways by creating the world’s first purely HTML/CSS “hachyderm”.
