Explore some of our most anticipated new releases for November 2024
This month: a provocative exploration of what makes a city; a feminist approach to media and photographic history; an anthology of seven decades of English-language outputs from computer generation systems; and more. Explore these books and a selection of our other new and soon-to-be-released titles below.
Cities Made Differently by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky
What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika’s then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them. Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit—because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true.
You might also like Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City edited by Kian Goh, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Vinit Mukhija
Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo by Amanda K. Greene
Glitchy Vision takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools as opposed to obstacles, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and our contemporary digital media environment.
You might also like Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg
Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort
The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area—text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley. This anthology, Output, thoughtfully selected, introduced, and edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software. The outputs span many different types of creative writing and include text generated by research systems, along with reports and utilitarian texts, representing many general advances and experiments in text generation.
You might also like ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution by Terrence J. Sejnowski
Antiracist by Design: Reimagining Applied Behavioral Science by Crystal C. Hall and Mindy Hernandez
Behavioral science has been celebrated as a field whose insights can design a better world, but its color-blind approach has perpetuated unjust systems. With over three decades of collective experience at the forefront of applied behavioral science, authors Hall and Hernandez expose the consequences of this failure and the dangers of inaction. While our hesitancy is understandable—applied behavioral science alone won’t dismantle structural racism—we’ve confused limitations with powerlessness. This book provides the tools and a roadmap to an antiracist approach to applied behavioral science, including a step-by-step guide to reimagined behavioral design processes, “fan fiction” with antiracist makeovers to classic studies, and a revised behavioral map template that prompts users to consider systemic barriers.
You might also like Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall
Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons by Theodora Vardouli
In Graph Vision, Theodora Vardouli offers a fresh history of architecture’s early entanglements with modern mathematics and digital computing by focusing on a hidden protagonist: the graph. Fueled by iconoclastic sentiments and skepticism of geometric depiction, architects, she explains, turned to the skeletal underpinnings of their work, and with it the graph, as a site of representation, operation, and political possibility. Taking the reader on an enthralling journey through a polyvalent mathematical entity, Vardouli combines close readings of graphs’ architectural manifestations as images, tools, and infrastructures for design with original archival work on research centers that spearheaded mathematical and computational approaches to architecture.
You might also like Also Known As: Uncovering Representational Frameworks in Architecture, Art, and Digital Media by Michelle JaJa Chang
Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging edited by Joseph F. Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto
Populations around the world are aging, and older adults’ economic influence—already considerable—stands to grow markedly in the decades ahead. Finding ways to make these lives better is a win-win-win: for older consumers; for aging economies; and for companies and the regions where they reside. This much-needed volume edited by Joseph Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto, Longevity Hubs, brings together contributors—entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, public servants, and others—who are addressing the multifaceted concerns of aging societies. Together, they explore the possibility that specific regions will soon distinguish themselves as longevity hubs: a home to disproportionate economic and innovative activity for older populations.
You might also like Methuselah’s Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives by Steven N. Austad
Toy Theory: Technology and Imagination in Play by Seth Giddings
Toy Theory addresses the relationships between toys and technology in two distinct but overlapping ways: first, as underexamined cultural artifacts and behaviors with significant technical attributes and, second, as playful and toylike dimensions of technology at large. Seth Giddings sets out a “toy theory” of technology that emphasizes the speculative, experimental, and noninstrumental in technological paradigms and argues that children’s playthings, rather than being the most ephemeral and inconsequential of technical devices, instead offer analytical and anthropological resources for understanding the materiality and imaginaries of technology over time.
You might also like Families at Play: Connecting and Learning through Video Games by Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee