Everyone Is a Designer! edited by Miekke Gerritzon A tiny book of aphorisms, slogans, and brief thinkpieces on design and the "design economy," set in a deliberately "ugly" design. The bits are contributed from a wide range of designers and "new media" types, and the quality varies accordingly: some are genuinely thought-provoking, although these are few and far between. Others elicit little more than a shrug from me. The worst of them are from the pattern of that Wired-style "new economy" boosterism that has become so familiar over the past decade: these seem especially tired in the light of the post-April 2000 landscape. The book had begun to show its age before it was even published.

The book is further marred by shoddy proofreading: its pretensions are seriously compromised by the many spelling and grammatical errors. (I have trouble trusting someone's ideas on interaction design when they use "thrown" where they mean "throne.")

Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras

Two men and two women, all mentally ill, meet in a desolate French convalescent hotel and form their own tiny insular society. They spend much of the book engaging in conversations and semierotic acts which seem utterly pregnant with meaning despite lacking any sort of meaningful foundation whatsoever. This book is built around a whirling nihilistic emptiness which grows more and more pronounced as it proceeds. In the final pages the void roars in every word. Minimal, terrifying.

The interview with Duras that constitutes the second half of the book ranges from the provocative to the completely opaque.

The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard An excellent book, primarily about the status of knowledge in a postindustrial society. Lyotard looks at the various rules that people use to determine whether a statement constitutes "knowledge." Different rules govern what constitues a valid piece of "scientific" knowledge, and what constitutes a valid piece of "narrative" knowledge. He traces the varying importance of each of these types of knowledge. Fascinating, lucid, clear.

The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel deCerteau French theory. And, like much French theory, it functions like a poem, making its argument by way of symbolic relationships and analogy rather than by calling upon the causal/statistical relationships that characterize much American argument.

A dense book, not user-friendly at all. DeCerteau often uses common, general words (say, "writing," or "time") to refer to very particular, highly-nuanced concepts. Simply relying upon the commonly-accepted meanings of those words will not do, and yet deCerteau rarely takes the time to explain the meanings that he has in mind. The result is that the book reads like an enormous cryptogram: you can only decipher what he means by particular words by noting and crossreferencing the varying contexts in those words are used throughout the book — a tedious process.

That said, the arguments that reside at the core of the book are interesting and worthy of focused attention. They primarily deal with control and resistance: deCerteau finds that average people have developed various strategies to establish independence in a world that seeks to dominate them. He's especially interested in how people receive media: he thinks media producers (including writers) seek to impose meaning on media consumers, yet he rejects the notion that consumers consume mindlessly. DeCerteau examines the creative strategies employed by consumers, and he in fact sees them as a form of unrecognized producers (which is part of why this book is of interest to people studying 'fan fiction' and similar phenomena). Interesting, but perhaps not worth the effort required to fully draw it out.