Mit Press imprint: 940 books
by Herbert A. Simon
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 1996
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 1996
Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence adds a chapter that sorts out the current themes and tools—chaos, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms—for analyzing complexity and...
Peripheral Vision
Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2015
How the S-C 4020—a mainframe peripheral intended to produce scientific visualizations—shaped a series of early computer art projects that emerged from Bell Labs.
In 1959, the electronics manufacturer Stromberg-Carlson produced the S-C 4020, a device that allowed mainframe computers to present...
From X-rays to DNA
How Engineering Drives Biology
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2013
An argument that technology accelerates biological discovery, with case studies ranging from chromosome discovery with early microscopes to how DNA replicates using radioisotope labels.
Engineering has been an essential collaborator in biological research and breakthroughs in biology are often...
by Greg Costikyan
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2013
How uncertainty in games—from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors—engages players and shapes play experiences.
In life, uncertainty surrounds us. Things that we thought were good for us turn out to be bad for us (and vice versa); people we thought we knew well behave in mysterious...
FireSigns
A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2017
Semiotics concepts from a design perspective, offering the foundation for a coherent theory of graphic design as well as conceptual tools for practicing designers.
Graphic design has been an academic discipline since the post-World War II era, but it has yet to develop a coherent theoretical...
by Joanna Zylinska
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2017
A new philosophy of photography that goes beyond humanist concepts to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent, as both subject and agent.
Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and...
Moving without a Body
Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2013
A radically empirical exploration of movement and technology and the transformations of choreography in a digital realm.
Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information....
Technology Matters
Questions to Live With
Language: English
Release Date: August 24, 2007
Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant...
Small, Gritty, and Green
The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World
Language: English
Release Date: November 10, 2011
How small-to-midsize Rust Belt cities can play a crucial role in a low-carbon, sustainable, and relocalized future.
America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities—Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others—increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization,...
Feeling Beauty
The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience
Language: English
Release Date: July 19, 2013
A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry.
In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions...
by Andrea Moro
Language: English
Release Date: August 26, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: August 26, 2016
An investigation into the possibility of impossible languages, searching for the indelible “fingerprint” of human language.
Can there be such a thing as an impossible human language? A biologist could describe an impossible animal as one that goes against the physical laws of nature (entropy,...
Ambient Commons
Attention in the Age of Embodied Information
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2013
On rediscovering surroundings when information goes everywhere.
The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and...
Collaborative Media
Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2013
A thorough analysis of contemporary digital media practices, showing how people increasingly not only consume but also produce and even design media.
With many new forms of digital media–including such popular social media as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr—the people formerly known as the...
Living Well Now and in the Future
Why Sustainability Matters
Language: English
Release Date: March 24, 2017
A philosopher and a scientist propose that sustainability can be understood as living well together without diminishing opportunity to live well in the future.
Most people acknowledge the profound importance of sustainability, but few can define it. We are ethically bound to live sustainably...