In Chasing the Perfect, designer Natalia Ilyin investigates the roots of modernist design, and looks at how it has trickled through our education system and into the philosophy of today's generation of designers. She uses her own experience as a RISD MFA student to talk about her own struggle to conform to this idea before coming to the realization that she appreciates and even seeks out the messy, the creative, the disordered and the "real" in her work.

This book resonated in two ways, the first being that she wrote her book after going through the same graduate program that I find myself in now. Secondly, she was arguing for a tactile, messy, unexpected and "real" design aesthetic that I find appealing even if I don't always seek it in my own work.

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It makes me think about the two endpoints of this spectrum that she talks about, and it echoes the struggle between online and real world interaction.

This small book by Bruce Sterling combines science fiction with an imaginative prediction for how we will relate to our designed objects in the future. He moves through classifying the objects we currently interact with - Artifacts, Machines, Products, and Gizmos. In order to talk about how we might ultimately interact with objects Sterling coins a word called spimes, which are:

SPIMES are manufactured objects whos informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaeterial system. SPIMES being and end as data. They are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time through-out their earthly sojourn.

SPIMES are sustainable, enhanceable, uniquely indentifiable, adn made of substances that can and will be folded back into the production stream of future SPIMES. Eminently data-mineable, SPIMES are protagonists of an historical process.

The concept was interesting and engaging, and I am still trying to wrap my head around what sorts of things this idea might mean for designers. It also presented some new possibilities for an object to be a hybrid of a digital and physical world. Of course it could be disastrous, but its also fuel for the imagination.

** Just found a supplemental video where Sterling talks more about spimes, and how they might contribute to an Internet of Things.

Books
Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media
Edward Tufte. Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Reas, Fry. Processing
Fry. Visualizing Information.
Neil Gershenfeld. FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

Articles/Publications
"The Deam Factory" Wired, 2005.
Wired
Make:

Blogs
O'Reilly Radar

Organizations
FabLabs

A quick, dynamic way of representing data in websites, with an example of me playing around with the commands.
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

While I am not necessarily interested in the Google's graphic displays, the idea of dynamically generating an image by passing in some structured data has possibilities. Using the url string as the delivery mechanism is also quite cool, because it means that a lay user could put complex information into a website without having to write code.