How to Speak Machine: Laws of Design for a Computational Age

Reminiscing on a 30-year career in technology and art, Maeda (Redesigning Leadership), former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, offers some worthwhile but scattered insights into navigating the digital age. To explain how to “speak machine,” he uses classic mathematical graphics to illustrate computing’s finer points; for instance, the Koch snowflakes are used to explain that “computation has a unique affinity for infinity, and for things that can be let to continue forever.” To show “what digital consciousness can feel like,” he describes his 1993 Kyoto art installation where people in a disco club posed as computer parts. Maeda chatters nostalgically about his first computer (an Apple II), the basic programs he wrote while in high school to help his parents manage their tofu shop in Seattle, and about attending MIT in the mid-1980s. He refers critically, but only glancingly, to the “despots and other power mongers” who would use social media “to impact millions of minds... with just a few destructive keystrokes.” Perhaps most affectingly, he envisions a future populated by countless numbers of computers in windowless high-rises becoming “better collaborators with each other than we ourselves could ever be.” Given Maeda’s vast experience, readers may wish his fitfully intriguing ramble had more thoroughly anatomized the grim future he envisions. (Nov.)