Dust or Magic - by Bob Hughes
As I was reading Dust or Magic, I underlined the following bits that I found interesting:
-Creativity has become the new methodism - an ideology that perverts workers into embracing their own humiliation.
-Scheiderman (Ben Shneiderman, author of Leonardo's Laptop) does not seem aware that a huge portion of the world's population has never made a phone call, let alone use a computer or that the technology that he describes depends on the poverty wages and environmental squalor he'd never tolerate himself.
-In the US economy, an average of $3,000 in hardware, software and related services is spent per citizen.
-The broad-brush definition of "a medium" is: anything that you can use to give somebody else an experience of some kind, in your absence.
-The urge to make something beautiful, impressive or just pretty is so ingrained that the 1930s Modernist idea of making things 'purely functional' came as a shock.
-Technology (graphics, animations, java applets) can sometimes: impair the job's effectiveness (long download time), become the tail that wags the dog (assets are sometimes not dumped because of the amount of money put into them, even though they are not effective) and considered as a tool (a computer's empowerment is surreptitiously selective, it doesn't actually make everything easy).