Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Master Minds Series) - Hardcover

Gelernter, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465045162 ISBN 13: 9780465045167

Publisher: Basic Books, 1998

Synopsis

When something works well, you can feel it; there is a sense of rightness to it. We call that rightness beauty, and it ought to be the single most important component of design.This recognition is at the heart of David Gelernter's witty argued essay, Machine Beauty, which defines beauty as an inspired mating of simplicity and power. You can see it in a Bauhaus chair, the Hoover Dam, or an Emerson radio circa 1930. In contrast, too many contemporary technologists run out of ideas and resort to gimmicks and features; they are rarely capable of real, structural ingenuity.Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of computers. You don't have to look far to see how oblivious most computer technologists are to the idea of beauty. Just look at how ugly your computer cabinet is, how unwieldy and out of sync it feels with the manner and speed with which you process thought.The best designers, however, are obsessed with beauty. Both hardware and software should afford us the greatest opportunity to achieve deep beauty, the kind of beauty that happens when many types of loveliness reinforce one another, when design expresses an underlying technology, a machine logic. Program software ought to be transparent; it should engage what Gelernter calls ”a thought-amplifying feedback loop,” a creative symbiosis with its user. These principles, beautiful in themselves, will set the stage for the next technological revolution, in which the pursuit of elegance will lead to extraordinary innovations. Machine Beauty will delight Gelernter's growing audience, fans of his provocative and biting journalism. Anyone who manufactures, designs, or uses computers will be galvanized by his cogent arguments and tantalizing glimpse of a bright future, where beautiful technology abounds.

About this title

Review

Gelernter's lyrical rant on the critical role of beauty and aesthetics in computer technology comes just in time. Computer engineers and designers, who create software that is bloated with seldom-used features and that intrusively draws our attention to it rather than the task at hand, could greatly benefit from the pursuit of what Gelernter calls "deep beauty," the marriage of power and simplicity.

Gelernter suggests that the dichotomy between art/beauty and science/technology has led to inadequate academic training of computer-science students. He points out that the greatest minds in science and industry have always pursued beauty. "Machine beauty is the driving force behind technology and science," he says, and yet "beauty bothers us." Somehow it's perceived to be softer and less rigorous to train computer scientists in art, music, architecture, and design. However, Gelernter sees these disciplines as closely aligned with the mathematics and science that are the foundation of technology. Because of this lack of aesthetic education, much user interface has been poorly designed.

Gelernter's persuasive arguments are far-reaching as he casts a shrewd eye on everything from postmodernism to architecture to the nature of beauty itself. This short, often witty book is written by someone who has paid a price for his opinion--Gelernter was a target of the Unabomber and was critically injured in a mail-bomb attack in 1993.

About the Author

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University. His books include The Muse in the Machine, Mirror Worlds, and 1939. His ideas on computers and technology nearly cost him his life when he was letterbombed by the Unabomber.

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0465045162
• ISBN 13: 9780465045167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176