designcult

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2011

This is a list of the best books I read in 2011. The list is not a Top 10. For one thing, it's not in order. Also, not all of the books were published in 2011, though more of them were recent than is typical for me. All of these are books I read for the first time this year: I do a lot of rereading, but none of the reread books struck me as strongly as these did.

1. Ship Breaker (Paolo Bacigulpi)
   Absolutely the best novel I read this year. I enjoyed the one previous book of his I've read (The Windup Girl) but it did seem a little bit as if he were trying too hard to be dark. Ship Breaker has no such problems. It's ostensibly Young Adult, set in a post-apocalyptic (weather apocalypse version) Lousiana and starts among gangs of ragged youth breaking down old oil tankers for scrap piece by piece. The world-building is perfect, the structure is a concise, perfectly executed update of a classic adventure novel (Kidnapped or Treasure Island) and I would recommend it to anyone. 
    
   
2. Zero History (William Gibson)
   Finishes up the Blue Ant / Hubertus Bigend trilogy. When the trilogy started it felt lighter than the previous trilogies; having recently reread them all, I think it stand up very well. Plus, this one is largely about pants, and I appreciate a writer that can take pants seriously. 
   
   
3. What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly)
   Still mulling this one over. Kelly has a manic mix of total full-on messianic tecnology changes everything woo, but is more grounded (and more literate) than 99% of people with equivalent tecnophile woo. If you want a taste, go read this post on how few technologies truly die out. If you think that's neat, you'll like this book. 
   
   
4. A Night in the Lonesome October (Roger Zelazny & Gahan WIlson)
   Weird & wonderful. I have a soft spot for books narrated by dogs. Gahan Wilson does the illustrations, he's a gem. This is an older book I would never have heard about without Jo Walton's series of book reviews on Tor, she has a knack for highlighting semi-forgotten books that deserve to be read. 
   
   
5. I Shall Wear Midnight (Terry Pratchett)
   Another adult novel. I think the Tiffany Aching books are Pratchett's best works. They have a different tone than the other Discworld novels, and stand alone while working within that world. I think somehow they feel more serious (even though the Discworld novels have tackled some quite serious topics), possibly because Tiffany herself is never played for laughs, though funny things do happen around her. Especially when the Feegles are involved. 
   
   
6. Nobilis: The Game of Sovereign Powers (R. Sean Borgstrom)
   This isn't a novel, it's a very strange role-playing game in an extraordinarily beautiful physical book. It's disastrously out of print, tend to go for more than $100 on eBay, and I was lucky enough to find out about it by actually getting to play it at a friend's house, though briefly. I was hooked. I am one of those people who buys gaming books just to read them sometimes (sorry) and this book is a perfect example of why that is a terrible, and yet irresistible habit. On the one hand, it's an interesting game, and should be played. On the other, it's a grand and lunatic work of plotless fiction. Ask nicely, and I may let you look through it. 
   
   
7. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford History of the United States (Gordon S. Wood)
   I am in love with the Oxford US history series. This one and the next are long, cover basically everything, and are pretty well paced considering how complete they are attempting to be. If, like me, your understanding of US history between the Constitutional Convention and the War of 1812 is "something something XYZ affair something" then this will get you caught right up. My personal takeaways are mostly about how tenuous the early republic was: all worried about a return to monarchy, re-absorption by England (or some other power), or just falling apart into pieces altogether. From our point in history it all seems so inevitable, but really, none of it was. 
   
   
8. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford History of the United States (Daniel Walker Howe)
   Still in love with the Oxford US history series. Lots of juicy stuff here about the increasing role of religion in public life, our emergence as an imperial power, and the truly terrifying white supremacist edge to it all. It's a pretty dark era, with few real heroes: William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the early abolitionists and activists against Indian genocide. But the presidents are a pretty nasty lot: Jackson (evil), Van Buren (inept), Harrison (dead), Tyler (useless), Polk (imperialist). John Quincy Adams comes across well. Reading about the "acquisition" of California was fun, though, as I now know the genesis of about 50% of the street names in my neighborhood. 
   
   
9. Reamde (Neal Stephenson)
   Probably not one of his important books. Totally one of his fun books. And sometimes, it's OK to have a really long, highly improbably adventure story written by a weapons-obsessed nerd. I'm also becoming convinced that, much as many novelists needed to get a 9/11 themed novel out of their system in the last decade, some novelists need to get a World of Warcraft novel out of their system. This is Neal's, and that's just fine. 
   
   
10. Finder: Voice (Carla Speed McNeil)
    Finder is one of those graphic novel series that fans get obsessive and evangelical about, and yet somehow most people have never heard of. It's science-fiction with heavy fantasy overtones, is written in this incredibly layered and dense way while having art that is clean and simple and spare and somehow pulls off tricks like having whole clans of characters that are near-clones of each other, and yet you can tell them apart on the page. If you haven't read any Finder, start with the new Dark Horse collected editions, but when you've read those, read this one next. 

There are 3 nonfiction books and 7 fiction books on this list. One of the fiction books is a graphic novel, one is an illustrated novel, two are marketed as Young Adult, and one is a game. Almost nothing takes place in the present-day real world, I do tend to science-fiction, fantasy, and history. The YA fiction is fully the equal of the "adult" fiction, and these days I appreciate a well-done "slight" novel as much (or more) as a more ambitious work.

Bits and pieces from Reality is Broken

Another book finished: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. I've seen Jane speak at SXSW -- she's phenomenal. The core ideas are not new to me (because I've seen her speak), but she fleshes them out in more detail & adds some nuance and research. Which is nice, and increasingly rare for a Current Thinky Book -- I'm getting frustrated by books that don't have anything more to say than what the author's 20 minute TED talk said.

Anyway, these are the bits that caught my eye. More definitional & pragmatic, so more from the front of the book--the back of the book is more the world-changing ARG stuff, which is fine but not what I'm looking for right now.

First, an examination of two related concepts: hard fun and fun failure. (Funnily enough a Berenstein Bears book I was reading with my daughter also covered hard fun.)

Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress (a combination of the Greek eu, for "well-being," and stress.) From a physiological and neurological standpoint, eustress is virtually identical to negative stress: we produce adrenaline, our reward circuitry is activated, and blood flow increases to the attention control centers of the brain.  (p 32)

But without positive failure feedback, this belief is easily undermined. If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency—and optimism goes down the drain. As technology journalist Clive Thompson reminds us, “It’s only fun to fail if the game is fair—and you had every chance of success.”

That’s why Nicole Lazzaro spends so much time consulting with game developers about how, exactly, to design failure sequences that are spectacular and engaging. The trick is simple, but the effect is powerful: you have to show players their own power in the game world, and if possible elicit a smile or a laugh. As long as our failure is interesting, we will keep trying—and remain hopeful that we will succeed eventually. (p. 67)

Next, some detail around Your MP's Expenses, a crowdsourced investigation by the Guardian after the UK expenses scandal (you may remember the floating duck island incident):

The game interface made it easy to take action and see your impact right away. When you examined a document, you had a panel of bright, shiny buttons to press depending on what you’d found. First, you’d decide what kind of document you were looking at: a claim form, proof (a receipt, invoice, or purchase order), a blank page, or “something we haven’t thought of.” Then you’d determine the level of interest of the document: “Interesting,” “Not interesting,” or “Investigate this! I want to know more.” When you’d made your selection, the button lit up, giving you a satisfying feeling of productivity, even if all you’d found was a blank page that wasn’t very interesting. And there was always a real hope of success: the promise of finding the next “duck pond” to keep you working quickly through the flow of documents.

A real-time activity feed showed the names of players logged in recently and the actions they’d taken in the game. This feed made the site feel social. Even though you were not directly interacting with other players, you were copresent with them on the site and sharing the same experience. There was also a series of top contributor lists, for the previous forty-eight hours as well as for all time, to motivate both short-term and long-term participation. And to celebrate successful participation, as well as sheer volume of participation, there was also a “best individual discoveries” page that identified key findings from individual players. Some of these discoveries were over-the-top luxuries offensive to one’s sense of propriety: a £240 giraffe print or a £225 fountain pen, for example. Others were mathematical errors or inconsistencies suggesting individuals were reimbursed more than they were owed. As one player noted, “Bad math on page 29 of an invoice from MP Denis MacShane, who claimed £1,730 worth of reimbursement, when the sum of those items listed was only £1,480.”

But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. (p. 222-223)

What I like about that is how easily you can imagine applying some of these things to non-investigative crowd-sourcing situations.

Also on crowdsourcing, a warning against building in compensation schemes:

The logic behind these practices is that if people are willing to contribute for free, they'll be even happier to contribute when they're compensated. But compensating people for their contributions is not a good way to increase global participation bandwidth, for two key reasons.

First, as numerous scientific studies have shown, compensation typically decreases motivation to engage in activities we would otherwise freely enjoy. If we are paid to do something we would otherwise have done out of interest--such as reading, drawing, participating in a survey, or solving puzzles--we are less likely to do so in the future without getting paid. Compensation increases participation only among groups who would never engage otherwise--and as soon as you stop paying them, they stop participating.

Second, there are natural limits on the monetary resources we can provide in a community of participants. Any given project will have only so much financial capital to give away; even a successful business will eventually hit an upper limit of what it can afford to pay for contributions. Scarce rewards like money and prizes artificially limit the amount of participation a network can inspire and support. (p. 242-3)

Finally, an explicit crowd-sourcing=MMORPG analogy with Wikipedia:

Second, Wikipedia has good game mechanics. Player action has a direct and clear result: edits appear instantly on the site, giving users a powerful sense of control over the environment. This instant impact creates optimism and a strong sense of self-efficacy. It features unlimited work opportunities, of escalating difficulty. As the Wikipedians describe it, "Players can take on quests (WikiProjects, efforts to organize many articles into a single larger article), fight boss-level battles (featured articles that are held to higher standards than ordinary articles), and enter battle arenas (interventions against article vandalism)." It also has a personal feedback system that helps Wikipedians feel like they are improving and making personal progress as they contribute. "Players can accumulate experience points (edit count), allowing them to advance to higher levels (lists of Wikipedians by number of edits)." (p. 230 -1)

Bits and pieces from Empire of Liberty

I just finished Charles S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. It's an awesome book, and since I don't think any American history from this period stuck in my head from school more than "blah blah XYZ affair blah blah Hamilton Burr duel blah War of 1812" I really needed to read it.

Three unrelated quotes struck me enough to preserve. The first is Madison's description of Jefferson, which I think could apply to half the genius geeks I know. (Or me, excepting the genius part.)

Madison knew his friend and knew that Jefferson's fanciful and exaggerated opinions were usually offset by his own very practical and cautious behavior. As Madison later remarked, Jefferson had a habit like "others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment." Indeed, it was often the difference between Jefferson's impulsive opinions and his calculated behavior that led many critics to charge him with hypocrisy and inconsistency. (p. 150)

Expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment. Awesome. I love that.

The next bit starts by relating the fad of calling things "mammoth" and ties it in to a subject that will be slightly familiar to West Wing fans, the Big Block of Cheese. (I say slightly familiar because this story relates to the Jefferson cheese, and the West Wing episode to the follow-up Andrew Jackson cheese.)

The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Wilson Peale's exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of a mastadon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth inhis celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized scientific exhumation in American history. Peale's discovery electrified the country and put the word "mammoth" on everybody's lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of "mammoth bread." In Washington a "mammoth eater" ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes.  And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a "mammoth cheese," six foot in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds. The cheese was produced from the milk of nine hundred cows at a single milking, with no Federalist cows being allowed to participate. The president welcomed this gift from the heart of Federalism as "an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution" (p. 393)

I do not know how the cows were checked for Federalism. Perhaps their stalls were checked for copies of the New York Post. (Did you know the New York Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton?)

I can also recommend A Big Cheese for the White House: The True Tale of a Tremendous Cheddar to folks with kids who'd like to learn more about this important cheese incident in our nation's history. It's a great book with awesome illustrations, and totally answers any practical questions you might have re: how you make a cheese that size and transport it.

Finally, a bit that tells us American politicians weren't always enemies of science:

When am American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying the United States did not make war on science. (p. 544)

Book Review | Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Gen-Xers got a bad rap for a while in the 90s. There was the whole "slackers" media craze in the 90s (which some of us recognized as not having much to do with true Slack, Praise "Bob"). In retrospect, all that was about was a bunch of relatively smart middle-class youths looking at the jobs the previous generation had in mind for them and thinking: "Nah ...." Which is normal intergenerational behavior. But at the time, I recall a lot of Boomer fretting about lazy kids these days, etc. Funny thing was, (and I'm thinking in terms of zeitgeists here, not actual data), it seems like the minute there was something actually interesting to do -- like a radical technological and cultural shift happening out in the fabled West, for example -- there was a collective packing of bags, moving out, and suddenly all the former slackers were putting in 80+ hour weeks at dot-com jobs. Followed by a boom, then a bust, then a boomlet, and here we all are.

80+ hours can make (some) sense (in certain circumstances, for not too long) when you're changing the world at a crazy start-up. But it makes much less sense as the crazy start-up starts to get big and stable -- and it takes a toll when done over the long haul. Unfortunately, some companies have tried to keep that aspect of their start-up culture a little too long. Which brings us to Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.

Preston Smalley recommended the book to me, and I found it pretty compelling. It's aimed primarily at managers of knowledge workers (e.g. designers and software developers), but could also be useful, or at least therapeutic, for folks who've been subjected to certain kinds of work cultures. It's really a couple of ideas wrapped up in one (smallish) package:

• When dealing with folks like designers and developers, many ways corporations have of maximizing "efficiency" have limited success, can actually backfire and make things slower and more costly, and have pretty serious consequences in terms of burnout, turnover, low quality, lack of innovation. 
• Following these, it discusses more general management issues that spring from the overall efficiency culture he's just poked holes in, taking on various management fads and failings like management by fear and overemphasis on process and quality. He also takes some swipes at Dilbert here, which is always nice.
• Finally he wraps his recommendations for what to do as a manager of knowledge workers primarily around planning for change: ways of creating flexible groups that can adapt to changing circumstances, building slack into schedules to manage risk, and having trust in your team.

There were a bunch of "a-ha" moments for me in the early chapters -- DeMarco has a nice way of capturing the absurdities at the heart of some cherished workplace cultural habits simply and neatly. The later chapters are a little more scattered, but then figuring out what to do is always a little harder than figuring out what not to do. 

Sad Update: Momofuku Ando

Sad news: Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, chairman and founder of Nissin Foods, and the product design-oriented president described in Project X: Cup Noodle, has died. He was 96. The Sydney Morning Herald obituary notes that "In July 2005, Nissin introduced a vacuum packed instant noodle specially designed for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat during the US space shuttle Discovery's mission." (via boingboing)

Book Review | The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

Before I talk about the book, a little background on me and iPods.  iPods are the only Apple products I've ever owned. I have used Apple products (at school and work) and have even had to do tech support for them, back in the bad old days when I did tech support. And supporting Macs? That's most of the reason why I never owned one.

I have have owned three iPods, though. One big shiny 20G model. I used it, loved it, left it in a bag in a restaurant, got the bag back without the iPod, cried. Remembering that I can't be trusted with small, expensive gadgets, I got the first generation shuffle-- used it, loved it, laundered it, cried. At this point I came to terms with the fact that I rent iPods rather than owning them, and got the Nano to keep my rent at least slightly low. So I understand iPod love. I have iPod love.

But perfect thing?  I love my iPod, but is it more perfect than my favorite pair of boots? Or my favorite jacket? Not quite.

The Perfect Thing is a little bit of a muddle -- partly because Levy has "shuffled"  the chapter order in a nod to the shuffle iPod function.  About half of the book is the story of the Ipod's origin (and iTunes, and later iPods, etc.) and about half is commentary on the societal impact of the iPod. The first should be in chronological order, the second should be in some sort of order. Shuffling chapters should be kept to avant-garde fiction, please.

On to the substance of the book. The core story -- the development of the iPod itself -- has been excerpted in Wired. The full story gives a slightly different angle on what happened, though, an angle which tweaks some of the cruder mythology around Apple, design, and product development. The expanded story shows that the iPod team was able to move quickly (once it got under way!) because it grabbed people and companies that had already done key work in the area. Even then, though, they wildly understated the impact the iPod could have, and only slowly realized that instead of a nice adjunct to the Mac universe that would help pull some PC users over to the shiny side, they had the chance to completely dominate a consumer electronics category. Once they did realize it they purused it with gusto, of course.

Finally, there's the view of Jobs as an "uber-designer," with a fixed and  singular product vision around which all his troops rally (or else). Well, sort of.  He actually comes across in this book as similar to the Cup Noodle president. He doesn't have a product vision per se -- he has a strong view of the ideal parameters of  the product (for example, requiring that you be able to play a song in no more than three button click). The team worked toward those parameters but had a great deal of freedom in how to get there. This is a fine distinction, but I think an important one, and one that often gets lost when people talk about the role of strong leaders (especially executive leaders) in product design.

I was intrigued, but less convinced by, the more sociological chapters, but that's probably because I wanted less journalistic argument-from-anecdote and more actual sociological research.

I can probably find that elsewhere, though -- overall this was a very entertaining and pretty useful discussion of an almost perfect thing.

Book Review | Project X: Nissin Cup Noodle

I've been reading a bunch of design and design-related books, and I'm going to try to kick off a habit of reviewing one each Monday.

I'm going to start with a pretty non-obvious choice -- Product X: Nissin Cup Noodle, a Manga history of the product development of Nissin Food's Cup Noodle. Yep, it's comics, it's translated from the Japanese, you read it backwards, and it's nonfiction. It was handed to me by one of my fine local comic shop proprietors, who told me "You have to read this." And he is never wrong--it was a fun read! But it's also a great case study in product design.

The short version is that in the 1970s, Nissin Foods, the original innovators in the instant ramen space, were losing market share due to the commoditization of instant ramen. The president of Nissin Foods decided that they needed to do something radical, so he put to a small team the challenge of developing a new and revolutionary product -- instant ramen in its own container. The book follows each member of the team (container development, noodle development, production, marketing) as they meet challenges along the way. And as starving college students and late-night office workers around the world know, they were extraordinarily successful.   

It's pretty gripping stuff (really!), but what I found most interesting was the constant interplay between the individual team members working on their individual challenges and the president, who had a strong vision of the whole product. Each time they came back to him with a solution that compromised that vision, he would send them back to the drawing board -- even over the most minute details of product shape and ingredient color.

In fact, the whole tale -- with a product development team individually striving to meet the exacting standards of a detail-obsessed executive -- started to remind me of something. And that was before the scene with the president gazing lovingly over the perfectly angled, pure white, almost platonic form of the final cup prototype ... but I'll review that book next week.