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Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Repr Ed)
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.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
2 people are currently reading
125 people want to read
About the author
David Gelernter
33 books65 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Hillel Gelernter (born March 5, 1955) is an artist, writer, and professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center, and sat on the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes widely; his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, LA Times, Weekly Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and elsewhere. His paintings have been exhibited in New Haven and Manhattan.
He is known for contributions to parallel computation and for books on topics including computed worlds ("Mirror Worlds"), and what he sees as the destructive influence of liberal academia on American society, expressed most recently in his book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats).
In 1993 he was sent a mail bomb in the post by Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, which almost killed him and left him with some permanent disabilities: he lost the use of his right hand and his right eye was permanently damaged.
(From Wikipedia)
David Hillel Gelernter (born March 5, 1955) is an artist, writer, and professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center, and sat on the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes widely; his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, LA Times, Weekly Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and elsewhere. His paintings have been exhibited in New Haven and Manhattan.
He is known for contributions to parallel computation and for books on topics including computed worlds ("Mirror Worlds"), and what he sees as the destructive influence of liberal academia on American society, expressed most recently in his book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats).
In 1993 he was sent a mail bomb in the post by Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, which almost killed him and left him with some permanent disabilities: he lost the use of his right hand and his right eye was permanently damaged.
(From Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 29, 2019
Original, insightful and a touch eccentric
Gelernter who, incidentally, was one of the people the Unabomber sent a bomb to, is an engineer who writes with curlicues enough to please a poet from the 18th Century. He loves beauty in design and thinks that much of our modern artifacts or machines are needlessly ugly. He likes his old 1938 Emerson radio as a work of art. He likes the MacIntosh desktop as a thing of beauty, contrasted with the ugliness of DOS. He will not go further than to once mention Microsoft's Windows. He thinks that really good software is beautiful; in fact it is good because it is beautiful. He has an idea for what he calls "Streamlines," a way of interfacing with computer and the Internet that he finds elegant. He puts a high value on elegance in technology.
Gelernter also has a sharp and incisive mind. Consider this quote on the nature of consciousness found on page 23. He is talking about computers and brains, debunking the notion that a brain is an "information processor" like a computer. He writes: "...the brain is no mere information processor, it is a meaning creator—and meaning creation is a trick no computer can accomplish. The brain is a lump of hardware artfully arranged so as to produce an I—to create the illusion that some entity inside you is observing the world that your senses conjure up. That rose over there merely triggered, when you saw it, a barrage of neuron firings in your brain. But you have the sensation that some entity—namely, you, not to put too fine a point on it—actually saw the rose. Computers, so far as we can tell, are capable of no such trick." Nicely put!
This is an original and delightful book that might be compared favorably to the work of Henry Petroski who wrote the much admired The Pencil: a History of Design and Circumstance (1990).
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Gelernter who, incidentally, was one of the people the Unabomber sent a bomb to, is an engineer who writes with curlicues enough to please a poet from the 18th Century. He loves beauty in design and thinks that much of our modern artifacts or machines are needlessly ugly. He likes his old 1938 Emerson radio as a work of art. He likes the MacIntosh desktop as a thing of beauty, contrasted with the ugliness of DOS. He will not go further than to once mention Microsoft's Windows. He thinks that really good software is beautiful; in fact it is good because it is beautiful. He has an idea for what he calls "Streamlines," a way of interfacing with computer and the Internet that he finds elegant. He puts a high value on elegance in technology.
Gelernter also has a sharp and incisive mind. Consider this quote on the nature of consciousness found on page 23. He is talking about computers and brains, debunking the notion that a brain is an "information processor" like a computer. He writes: "...the brain is no mere information processor, it is a meaning creator—and meaning creation is a trick no computer can accomplish. The brain is a lump of hardware artfully arranged so as to produce an I—to create the illusion that some entity inside you is observing the world that your senses conjure up. That rose over there merely triggered, when you saw it, a barrage of neuron firings in your brain. But you have the sensation that some entity—namely, you, not to put too fine a point on it—actually saw the rose. Computers, so far as we can tell, are capable of no such trick." Nicely put!
This is an original and delightful book that might be compared favorably to the work of Henry Petroski who wrote the much admired The Pencil: a History of Design and Circumstance (1990).
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
June 3, 2020
Disappointing. I work in technology, and I had high hopes at the start of this book. I was on board with the definition of beauty as “simplicity and power” but later chapters he comes across as a cranky old person ranting about how computers are ugly and radios from the 30’s are beautiful. Reading about his vision for organizing information (Lifestreams) was tiring as he went on Abbott his simplistic vision for how to make it beautiful.
There are probably better books out there discussing beauty in simplicity, and how difficult it is to achieve.
There are probably better books out there discussing beauty in simplicity, and how difficult it is to achieve.
January 8, 2017
The books starts extremely promising. The first three chapters discuss ideas that are even more relevant today than they were a decade ago. The abundance of technology nowadays makes it hard to find the gems in the swamp of gadgets, software, etc. Beauty is the light from the lighthouse, guiding us towards the shore of elegant, useful, sense-satisfying technology.
But...
After that, the story is centred around Apple, Ms, and the rest of the gang. Well, good! "But I wanted a book on machine beauty!", my inner book-thirsty voice is chanting in my head. "Not a book on the history of personal computers." I even skipped some sections (and I am not such a person!).
At the end, the David Gelernter tries for a comeback to the topic of beauty in general technological terms but since his arguments are missing (not much built in the previous historical chapters), the summary sounds vague and not convincing.
I will come back to the first chapters - nothing beyond that.
But...
After that, the story is centred around Apple, Ms, and the rest of the gang. Well, good! "But I wanted a book on machine beauty!", my inner book-thirsty voice is chanting in my head. "Not a book on the history of personal computers." I even skipped some sections (and I am not such a person!).
At the end, the David Gelernter tries for a comeback to the topic of beauty in general technological terms but since his arguments are missing (not much built in the previous historical chapters), the summary sounds vague and not convincing.
I will come back to the first chapters - nothing beyond that.
December 5, 2016
Gelertner, who in his book Drawing Life, recounts his experience of being a victim of the Unabomber, addresses the question of beauty in technology. Not superficial form, but the deep structural kind of beauty that makes things really work--rightness, we might call it. Are computers beautiful? Could they be? What would it take to make a computer a thing of elegance in both form and function? It is in the logic of design, not superficial style, that the answers to these questions lie. The objects of design should be beautiful to think about, not just beautiful to look at. This book has many pointers in that direction.
May 6, 2017
I believe I read this book because it was recommended to me by someone after I read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line." It's really an amazing look at how technology can be aesthetically pleasing and well designed. The section of elegant software engineering was especially of interest to me, since it's a topic I dabble in. I can't help but think that the way computer science is taught at my alma mater, Vassar College, matches quite well with Gelernter's vision.
February 8, 2014
Starts off okay but then devolves into Apple fanboyism and an explanation of why the author's pet project is the future of beautiful computing (and this book having been written in 1998, it is glaringly obvious that it most certainly wasn't)
Never really proves the interesting points it raises in the beginning
Never really proves the interesting points it raises in the beginning
October 28, 2014
Um livro de estética sobre máquinas. Preciso dizer mais alguma coisa?
É foda!
É foda!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews