Flying Bookshelf 2004 Summer | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2004.09.18
During the summer vacation, I inevitably spend a lot of time traveling by plane. This year, I again had the opportunity to visit universities and national research institutes overseas. For research related to network robots, I visited the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) in Switzerland, and LAAS-CNRS (French National Organization for Academic Scientific Research) in France. Afterward, I joined my lab students to participate in UbiComp 2004, held at the University of Nottingham in the UK.
There is something I look forward to when traveling by plane. Besides watching movies I don't usually get to see, it's the chance to catch up on my reading. For instance, when I'm back in Pittsburgh, I always go to the chain stores B or B&N. Not only are they open until 11 p.m., but they also have cafes where you can read books while drinking coffee.
This year, I purchased and read several books while traveling: Lawrence Lessig's third book, "Free Culture," and Steven Johnson's "Emergence" while I was back at CMU; Donald A. Norman's "Emotional Design" at the Stanford Bookstore; and "Shaping the Network Society," edited by Schuler and Day, in London on my way back from UbiComp 2004.
First, Lessig's "Free Culture" is just as easy to read as his previous two books, and I highly recommend it. In fact, I was surprised to find the translated version stacked up for sale at the co-op when I returned to SFC. Although I haven't finished it all yet, for software researchers like us who have published our research results not only in papers but also as Open Source, its values are completely aligned with the "Free" spirit of the Free Software Foundation started by RMS (Richard M. Stallman). As he also says, it's "Free" as in "Free Society," not as in "Free Beer." Starting with "CODE" and moving to a higher layer with "The Future of Ideas," he presents his vision for a free culture.
The author of the second book, Johnson, was unfamiliar to me. It turned out to be the original version of a translated book I had introduced in my class on autonomous, distributed, and cooperative systems during the spring semester. I found the $14 paperback edition completely by chance. I recommend it to anyone interested in autonomous, distributed, and cooperative systems. Incidentally, the subtitle is "The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software," and it outlines the concept of emergence in various systems.
The third book, "Emotional Design," is the latest work by Norman, famous for classics such as "The Design of Everyday Things," "Things That Make Us Smart," and "The Invisible Computer." It was published in January 2004. For some reason, it was placed in the marketing section at the Stanford Bookstore! For those of us researching ubiquitous computing environments that support communication and collaboration between "people and people," "people and things," and "things and things," Norman's analysis of the role played by emotion is extremely interesting.
The last book is from MIT Press, which I found in a London bookstore. It has 16 chapters in total, with each chapter written by a different person. At last year's ORF, we discussed "the shape of a ubiquitous society," and this book, in a sense, discusses "the shape of a cyber society" from various angles. Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs," also contributed a chapter titled "What Do We Need to Know about the Future We're Creating? Technobiographical Reflections."
I haven't finished reading all the books from my "Flying Bookshelf 2004 Summer" yet, but I plan to take them with me, along with my iPod, on my next trip.
(Date Published: 2004/09/18)