metabolo.org - design

Wii Max Granu Boids gestural interface demo (featuring Howard Rheingold on Cooperation Theory)

gva — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:46:55 -0500

This performance demonstrates my evolving Wii-Max/MSP gestural interface prototype.

Beginning with Howard Rheingold's brilliant interview on cooperation theory, I used the Wii controller to manipulate audio with a granular synthesis patch, and filled the video track with flocking pixels based on Craig Reynold's famous Boids algorithm in an OpenGL Jitter implementation.

In performance I insert realtime video feeds of myself operating the wireless controller, grabbed from the onboard laptop cam. The purpose is to integrate my physical presence and gestures. This material may also be understood as a reference to Narcissus, whose reflected extension of himself was described by McLuhan as one of the first accounts of the narcotic effect of technology.

The demo was completed as part of my coursework for Master of Science degree with the Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

My approach to this project was roughly as follows:

The problem: prepare and present a five-min. audio/video performance using an external controller with a dataflow flow programming environment, namely Max/MSP/Jitter
Start with my previous WiiGrano_6 demo and extend it to include new functionality
Add Nunchuck controller to Wii remote setup for additional input control
Select jit.boids family of patches to modify and control for visuals (http://www.maxobjects.com/?v=objects&id_objet=3980)
Patch Nunchuck joystick, triggers and accelerometer data into boids patch
Select new audio sample material (Howard Rheingold on Cooperation Theory)
Optimize gestural control around interesting & sensitive feedback params.
Practice, record, and present integrated a/v performance

Closer to e-book reality: Amazon Kindle

gva — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:32:49 -0500

Just announced last month is the strangely styled and potentially disruptive new e-book reader from Amazon, dubbed "Kindle." I don't know about you but that title makes me think of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451... Get video, images and blurbs from Amazon or google it for alternate perspectives.

Chief on the features list is wireless connectivity -- with no monthly fee -- using Sprint's high-speed (EVDO) network, more like an advanced mobile phone than a laptop with wi-fi. The gadget sells for 400. USD and early sign seem to suggest success -- it's sold out between now and Christmas....

Could be interesting to see how this entry plays into the emerging ecologies of literate media and media literacy.

designswarm | Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino | Interaction Design

gva — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:45:52 -0400

"Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, freelance interaction designer. I am interested in the way service design ties product design and interaction design together to create meaningful experiences for people both in the virtual and tangible worlds."

ACADIA 2007 : Expanding Bodies : Metabolic Network sensory workshop

gva — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:49:51 -0400

Metabolism, in living systems, has two aspects: anabolism (building up), and catabolism (breaking down). This two-day workshop in electronic sensing in art and design has a special focus on textiles and architectural-scale applications.

Kitchen Budapest

gva — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:22:48 -0400

"New media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams."

Architectures of Control v. Designing for Emergence

gva — Fri, 18 May 2007 13:20:20 -0400

In the course of research for my Media Law paper, on Creative Commons and designing for emergence in law, I came across this excellent blog. In many ways this site might be considered the opposite of "designing for emergence":

Architectures of Control
http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/

What are Architectures of Control?

[example images - Audi A2: The user cannot open the bonnet; Bench designed to prevent lying down: 'redesigned to face contemporary urban realities'; printer: Some HP printers shut down the cartridges at a pre-determined date regardless of whether they are empty]

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

This site aims—with readers’ input—to examine and analyse the ideas and techniques of these architectures of control in design, through examples and anecdotes, and by keeping up-to-date with relevant developments...

I plan to redesign metabolo.org later this summer and intend to emulate many of the successful features I see here...

Short and sweet: succinct definitions of design

gva — Mon, 14 May 2007 15:34:35 -0400

I wrote my own shortest definition of design as a personal challenge to express the term in a manner that was brief, robust and circumspect. The result (discussed elsewhere in this blog):

"Design is creation for reproduction."

Another short definition that I greatly admire was sent to me by Richard Thomas, a colleague at the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity. Ricky said:

"Design is the process of initiating and representing relationships."

Doug Chapman, whom I know as an actor, environmentalist, former director of research at William McDonough + Partners, and graduate of the Institute without Boundaries program I directed until 2003, recently offered this very concise statement:

"Design is the line between idea and result."

In Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life (2002, Oxford University Press), John J. Heskett highlights the multivalent senses of the word "design" by offering and analyzing a bewildering sentence:

"Design is to design a design to produce a design."

"Design," says Heskett, "has splintered into ever-greater subdivisions of practice without any overarching concept or organization, and can be appropriated by anyone."

While I don't consider this situation to be alarming, I do believe in this time of great change and great opportunity that practitioners and theorists of contemporary design will benefit by having a sense of what they have in common with those flying the same colours.

Are Designers the Enemy of Design?

gva — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:02:31 -0400

Patrick Keenan from The Movement sent me this provocative link, which underscores the arguments Bob Logan and I are making in the Designing for Emergence papers:

From Businessweek.com's
Nussbaum on Design column

March 18, 2007
Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?
Bruce Nussbaum

Here's the speech I gave at Parson's on Thursday that deals with the backlash against design. I've edited it just a bit. It's designed to provoke design management students and show how I've redesigned my job at Business Week from the Voice Of Authority to the Curator of the Conversation on Innovation. We all live life in beta now.
Are Designers The Enemy of Design?

In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.

This is simply not true. Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only be done by great star designers. But the design of our music experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs, the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats, the design of our Class of ’95 brochures, the design of our screens, the design of the designs on our bodies?"We are all designing more of our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives....

Article continues... choose URL above for the full piece

“How to Realize a Gallery Exhibition Based on Design-Oriented Content”

gva — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:44:25 -0500

I was recently contacted about the Massive Change project by Matt Garmon, a student of OCAD where I'm currently teaching design. Following are his intro letter and interview questions, along with my answers.

"Hi Greg. I am currently in Todd Falkowsky's 3rd year Thesis Prep class at Ontario College of Art & Design. I am working on a case study based on the Massive Change project and was wondering if I could interview you to gain some personal insight into the project.

Specifically, I'm using the Massive Change exhibit as a model for how to effectively organize and realize a gallery exhibition based on design-oriented content. Your expertise and personal experience with this project would definitely help me generate a content-rich study and would be greatly appreciated. Would you be available to answer the following questions?"

1) What was the biggest obstacle/hurdle that the team encountered while working on the project? How did you overcome it?

In writing, curating and designing Massive Change, the biggest challenge was the overall ambition of the project. By this I mean the implications and reach of the critical questions, the sheer number and variety of deliverables, and the magnitude of the stakes. Everyone attached to the project had much at stake, due to the highly public profile and the way it was organized. This was not an accident or miscalculation but a deliberate factor designed to irreversibly intensify and characterize the learning experience for the Institute without Boundaries students.

2) What was the teams greatest strength when resolving conflicts or while problem solving during the project?

This may seem surprising but the team was so interdisciplinary that no one had the "real" answer to any problem. This meant that a new and often surprising answer arose for most questions. In the absence of experts, everyone becomes an authority of one kind or another. Combining these differing notions of authority produced unexpected and resilient solutions.

3) If you could have changed anything about the way the project was structured, what would it be? Why?

The mix of "economies" was an intentional move away from the usual categories of industrial design, graphic design, architecture etc. and as such it was knowingly tentative, incomplete, but closer to the true intermingling of the worlds systems of exchange. IwB member Mark Beever and I improved the categories by adding "Market Economies" near the start of the project, which I think turned out to be one of the most interesting, unexpected and successful categories. However we were reminded (by KaosPilot's director Uffe Elbaek and others) that we should have also included "Human Economies" -- that is to say, a category focusing on the redesign of education, the art and science of human imagination, or as we might call it at the Beal Institute, Strategic Creativity.

4) Can you explain the organizational structure of the project and how it manifested itself on a daily basis?

We were largely driven by opportunistically embracing sub-projects and by the resulting mix of these smaller deadlines alternating with big official deadlines (e.g. for the Vancouver Art Gallery). By sub-projects I mean interstitial commissions like the Digifest virtual reality environment called "Suspension: A A typical day might see a group-based charrette led by myself, a series of presentations of individual design research to Bruce, and a visit from an outside critic collaborator, such as advertising veteran, Marlene Hore.

5) Were there any eureka moments during the process and what were they?

One eureka moment came when Bruce explained that the key characteristic we were searching for was "capacity." This was the meaning of "Massive Change" -- a paradigm-shifting transformation in the magnitude of human capacity to alter the world. These implications drive us to the brink of the quandary: "Now that we can anything, what will we do?"

6) If you could offer any advice to someone wishing to set up a gallery exhibition, regardless of its size what would it be?

An exhibition places real people physically in contact with work and thus offers an unmatched context for eliciting extreme experience. This opportunity should never be squandered by offering a mere encounter with images. What Walter Benjamin called the "aura" of the artwork is actually not the exclusive preserve of art but applies to all objects that are somehow testament to history and to change. Uniqueness is not the only mandatory criterion. Better thing to look for (or to manufacture) is a confrontational poetic quality. This is one thing we sought to do in creating Massive Change.

7) How did you find peoples reactions to a design-centred exhibit in an art gallery especially with the focus on anti-aesthetic?

I'm told the Vancouver Art Gallery the Art gallery of Onatario had some visitors call in and cancel their memberships in protest. It may have happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago too but I'm not sure. I find this reaction both surprising and heartening. I believe art is in a greater stage of irrelevancy and general crisis than ever before and I'm not alone. See, for example, my comments for the MAK's annual report on the "The Crisis of Art" http://www.metabolo.org/node/183. I'm heartened because it tells me that an institution dedicated to sharing new ideas can still shake its patrons out of slumbering complacency and that it can do so by embracing certain aspects of contemporary culture that are in themselves exciting and troubling. We didn't set out to shock but rather to represent and propagate some exhilarating ideas. If we did exhilarate I'm greatly heartened.

8) How did you generate content for the exhibit?

In general the IwB members contacted scores of authoritative sources of different kinds of material, like data, images, case studies. We also worked from sculptural sketches and build scale models of each room to test the ideas in 3D form. We wrote thematic "frames" to describe the patterns inherent in each case or collection, and wove the different strands together. this whole process was iteratively cycled many times, always testing and refining against our loose but vivid vision of the kind of experience and reaction we sought to arouse.

9) Obviously, the people involved were great assets when generating a show such as this. What attributes would you say to be the most critical to successfully producing this exhibition?

In our recruiting we were very deliberate about seeking and selecting candidates with unbridled curiosity, intellectual and physical stamina to sustain the iterative process, and perhaps most importantly, good cheer, to enable the successful navigation of all these challenges without losing heart or focus. If these were their strengths coming in, I believe each IwB member became what we referred to as "a new breed of designer, one who is, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, a 'synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist."

“Theoretical Primer for Emergent Media” presented at Enterprise 2.0 event

gva — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 10:30:15 -0500

I'll be giving my Hyperpolis presentation and leading a discussion on the idea of "emergent media" as part of a Toronto event beginning 6:30 tonight at the Gladstone Hotel.

Hosted by Tom Purves, the gathering will feature speakers and general discussion on the idea of "Enterprise 2.0" The idea is to look beyond today's mostly consumer-oriented applications of "Web2.0" and "social media" and ask, What do these same technologies portend once they infiltrate the business world? How will these new media forms change everyday work, the structure of firms, and the way companies innovate?

The event has attracted a lot of interest from the Toronto area tech community who are plugged into these ideas, and has been scaled up from a smaller venue to the stately Gladstone.

For more information or to sign up for (free) attendance, visit this wiki: http://barcamp.org/Enterprise20Camp

Lineup for IDMI’s Hyperpolis 3.0 conference

gva — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:35:22 -0400

Below are the themes and speakers of a conference, hosted by the Integrated Digital Media Institute and Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, where I'll be giving a presentation based on the ideas in my paper with Robert K. Logan, "Designing for Emergence and Innovation." More background may be found at http://idmi.poly.edu/

The Production of Politics Thursday October 19th 11am to 2pm

Richard Rogers, Director, govcom.org, University of Amsterdam

Tom Keenan, Director, the Human Rights Project, Bard College

Karen J. Hall, Humanities postdoctoral fellow, Syracuse University

Atopia (Jane Harrison and David Turnbull), Urban research and design office, New York

The Art of Work in the Age of Post-production Thursday October 19th 3pm to 6pm

Rev. Luke Murphy, Artist, VP of Technology, MTV Networks

Greg Van Alstyne, Senior Research Associate, Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity, Ontario College of Art & Design

Ruth Ron, Architect and new media artist, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Florida

Blogging: around the table Friday October 20th 11am to 2pm

Jodi Dean, Teaches political theory at Hobart-William Smith colleges and maintains jdeanicite.typepad.com

Geert Lovink, Media theorist and activist, University of Amsterdam

McKenzie Wark, Author of the Hacker Manifesto and teaches media studies at Lang College, the New School

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

The Politics of Production Friday October 20th 3pm to 6pm

Michael Liegl, Ethnographer, University of Munich

Eric Redlinger, Musician, network administrator, member of Share collective, New York-Montreal-San Diego-Wiesbaden

Michael J. Schumacher, Composer, performer, director of Diapason sound gallery, New York

Katherine Carl, Co-director, the School of Missing Studies, New York-Sarajevo

Sterling, Greenfield, and the Patchy Internet of Things

gva — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:27:44 -0400

I've heard Bruce Sterling taking issue with Adam Greenfield over the title of his book, Everyware (in this great IT Conversations podcast). I was a bit surprised, then, when in our OCAD lecture Sterling gave a big boost to Greenfield's book and said that they talk all the time and are now good buddies. Hey, things change. In any case that's not why I'm writing.

At some point I plan to take up Sterling's original argument, and maintain that the arrival of dataspace (as we call it at the Beal Institute) AKA the Internet of Things will not involve "everything" and "everyone" and "everywhere" -- it will be patchy and spotty. And I agree with Sterling that it may take 30 years to arrive. But I'm not writing about that either.

Actually I'm writing to point out a hard to find and thin but interesting discussion board about the emergence of ubicomp in Greenfield's site. Some nice examples of weak signals or whatever in there -- so, like, check it out.

“Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design” Accepted for Publication

gva — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:38:53 -0400

Along with my co-author, Robert K. Logan, I'm pleased to report our theoretical research paper "Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design" has been accepted for publication by the journal Artifact.

The reviewers said the paper makes a significant contribution and found it "challenging and thought provoking... I really enjoyed the acedemic style -- it got my brain cells working."

With editors from Copenhagen, Illinois and Indiana, Artifact is an international peer-reviewed academic journal targeted to researchers, practising designers, and manufacturers. It is focused on the vast changes that computers have brought to design.

"Artifact does not draw an artificial line between the virtual and the physical. It strives to illuminate the problems and possibilities of their interaction. The journal does not frame digital design as a design discipline such as industrial design or graphic communication, but assumes an open position. The aim of the journal is to promote transdisciplinary design research, encourage cross-fertilization, interconnections, and crossbreeding among different scientific disciplines, the design industry, and the arts."

Artifact's policy permits us to post our original paper online in advance of their official edit. Look for the original paper soon on the web site of the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity. (Or by request from gvanalstyne at faculty dot ocad dot ca).

Nice compendium of location-based games

gva — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:14:31 -0400

Here's a nice compendium forwarded by David Frackman, a fellow student in my Integrated Digital Media program:

http://www.in-duce.net/archives/locationbased_mobile_phone_games.php

“Design is creation for reproduction”

gva — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:03:01 -0400

Note to self: complete this post by quoting my original post from massivechange.com: http://forums.massivechange.com/viewtopic.php?t=15

The Birth of “Interaction Design”

gva — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 15:47:11 -0400

The term "interaction design" is attributed to a number of different parents, some from the academic and theory world and others more rooted in client practice.

Another example comes from the recent book Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer. There is also a "Definition of Interaction Design" post in Saffer's blog. The book offers the following account:

Back in 1990, Bill Moggridge, a principal of the design firm IDEO, realized that for some time he and some of his colleagues had been creating a very different kind of design. It wasn’t product design exactly, but they were definitely designing products. Nor was it communication design, although they used some of that discipline’s tools as well. It wasn’t computer science either, although a lot of it had to do with computers and software. No, this was something different. It drew on all those disciplines, but was something else, and it had to do with connecting people through the products they used. Moggridge called this new practice interaction design.

A recent paper by Wakkary and Budd traces the term's birth to Terry Winograd's “From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design” in Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing:

In recognizing the impact of the increasing role of computing in people’s lives, Terry Winograd at Stanford University was among the first to identify a design practice whose outcome and focus was a qualitative process rather than a thing or an object. He labeled this new practice “interaction design.” Winograd identified the need to focus on the perceptual and psychological aspects of human experience by rooting interaction design equally in graphic design, psychology, communication, linguistics and computing science.

And my fellow instructor at OCAD, Martha Ladly, suggested Nathan Shedroff in a recent discussion about this question.

Thoughts from the readership of this blog are welcome. To be continued?

------

After posting these definitions I received an addendum in the comments field, which I want to add here, to reward the commenter, amend my original post, and stimulate discussion:

Bill Verplank would like some credit as well... From his website:
http://www.billverplank.com/professional.html

"From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at
IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design
world; he started calling it 'interaction design' instead of 'user-interface
design'."

Designing for Emergence at Harvard U

gva — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:30:37 -0400

Here's a Harvard University engineering and applied science graduate class that asks, "How do we engineer robust behavior from the cooperation of vast numbers of unreliable parts? Biology hints that there may be significant power to be achieved from building things out of cheap, imprecise parts with limited life."

CS 266: Biologically-inspired Distributed and Multi-agent Systems

Research topics include: swarm behaviors and robotics, amorphous computing and smart materials, reconfigurable robotics, immune-inspired systems, synthetic biology.

technorati tags:engineeringBlogged with Flock

What is the Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity?

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 21:04:03 -0400

The stated mission of the Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity is: to enhance education with new methodologies in imaginative thinking; to contribute to the development of knowledge and economic wellbeing; and to explore new ways of improving the human condition.

Bruce Sterling’s Speech at ETech 2006

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 20:59:04 -0400

This item links to the transcript -- or the script... not sure which -- of Bruce Sterling's speech at Emerging Technology 2006, San Diego, CA, March 2006. In the author's words, "Delivered at alpha-geek central, it may include indecipherable techie in-jokes. Well over 6,000 words. Includes illustrations." The audio, which is quintissentially Sterling and thus more fun to consume, is available at http://www.itconversations.com (keyword search for Sterling). [del.icio.us/gva]

Innovation vs. Invention

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 20:48:00 -0400

I'm not so much interested in creativity, imagination, or invention on their own, but rather in how these can lead to new, useful ideas and systems in the world, i.e., in how a new design is adopted by large populations. In short, I'm interested in adoption. (There is a literature on the subject that goes by the name "diffusion studies" or "diffusion research" -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations)

In keeping with this idea I distinguish between invention and innovation. Invention signifies the moment when novelty arises, when something new is created. For example, Edison invents a light bulb. I do not apply the word "emergence" to this moment, because at this moment there is not yet a complex dynamic of adoption or diffusion in the picture.

I define innovation, on the other hand, to include a significant element of diffusion, adoption, or as Wikipedia calls it, implementation: "Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved idea, good, service, process or practice that is intended to be useful." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation)

With this in mind, in my most recent research I am seeking to articulate a distinction between emergence and design in a way that recognizes the dynamics of emergence in the patterns of adoption (with less emphasis on the moment of invention).

About Metabolo: From Mechanics to Mimesis

gva — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:56:21 -0400

Far from becoming tamer, the far-reaching effects of electric technology that were presaged by Marshall McLuhan seem to be waxing wilder, penetrating ever more deeply into our personal and social lives. Is it alarm we’re sensing, or the thrill of recognition – a quickening? Are we attempting to maintain control, or building a portrait of our environment and ourselves that is beginning to rival the responsiveness and creativity of the natural world?

We wonder aloud whether we’ve traded too much privacy for convenience and access, meanwhile scarcely noticing that all these musings have migrated into that ever-widening and ever-converging data stream that suddenly seems more real and more -- accessible? -- than ever before. This veritable Mississippi of data offers more manipulability and meaning as the tools, their default settings, and their recombinant interactions increasingly evidence startling levels of transparency, empathy and relevance to daily life....

Our brains, our bodies, our social relationships, the webs of life that nourish and sustain our physical selves and natural environments, no longer are these being taken for granted, denigrated, made incidental -- at any rate, not in the same blind and wholesale way. On the contrary, these are being methodically rediscovered and appreciated as irreplaceable, unique, meaningful, and worthy of support, research, emulation, connection, amplification, celebration.

As a candidate for the Master of Science degree in Integrated Digital Media at Polytechnic University, I offer this space to the investigation of these developments and these questions.

In this discursive space I intend to share and solicit interdisciplinary research interrogating emergent effects at the intersection of three organizing discourses: technology and design; biology and social behavior; ecology and environment. The diagram that follows illustrates broad relationships and selected patterns characteristic of the intersections:

I will survey the literature pertinent to these intersections, including historical texts as well as emerging theoretical and practical developments from both academic and professional sources. The underlying theoretical and methodological framework and vocabulary will be informed by the closely related discourses of cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity, and network studies. My objective will be to document and explicate applicable laws and principles in order to forge a new level of synthetic understanding with an eye to guiding the design and implementation of beneficial systems.

To assist the analysis and communication of my findings I intend to use appropriate techniques in media production that may include data modelling, visualization, and/or motion graphics. The resulting thesis will seek to articulate and demonstrate design principles in response to the critical question: “Can we learn to design for emergence, in order to develop and distribute more human-friendly and ecologically responsive social and technical systems, by studying and mimicking deep patterns originating in the realms of biology and social behavior?”

Following is a preliminary and partial list of sources to be consulted:

Biomimetics; Sociomimetics; Social Software; Networks
Barabasi, A. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Books; 2002.
Benyus, J. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. William Morrow; 1997.
Hock, D. Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1999.
O’Reilly, T. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
Reed, D. P. The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business Review; Feb. 2001
Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books; 2004.

Commons; Cooperation
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books; 1985.
Bricklin, D. The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm August 7, 2000.
Creative Commons. http://www.creativecommons.org
Hardin, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 1968;162:1243-48.
Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books; 2000.
Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books; 2002.
Rheingold, H. and Institute for the Future. http://www.cooperationcommons.com/
Wright, R. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon; 1999.

Cybernetics; Systems Thinking; Complexity
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. Anchor Books; 2002.
Weiner, N. Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. M.I.T. Press; 1961.
Weiner, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin; 1950.

Emergence
Fromm, J. Types and Forms of Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0506028
Fromm, J. Ten Questions About Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0509049
Helms, M. Design That Improves With Use. Ambidextrous. http://www.stanford.edu/~judywen/ambidextrous/page36-39.pdf
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner; 2002.
Van Alstyne, G. From Induction to Incitement: Inside the Massive Change Project. What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design. Ed. Michael Shamiyeh. Birkhäuser; 2005:188–205.
Van Alstyne, G. and Logan, R.K. Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design. Publication pending; 2006.