Thackara’s Books

In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. (Available at Amazon.com)

In the Bubble:
Designing in a Complex World

Book Summary
We’re filling up the world with technology and devices, but we’ve lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if “tech” ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives. Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the ends it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we’re unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how? In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff, and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now — not in a remote science fiction future; it’s not about, as he puts it, “the schlock of the new” but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can’t. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology — ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles — above all, lightness — inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.

John Thackara’s book In The Bubble is published by MIT Press whose names and contact details are listed below.

Contacts at MIT Press:

U.S. media and publicity queries (including author interview requests) -Colleen Lanick: colleenl@mit.edu
European media & publicity queries – Ann Twiselton: atwiselton@HUP-MITpress.co.uk
Subrights queries – Cristina Sanmartín: csan@mit.edu
Permissions requests – Pam Quick: quik@mit.edu
U.S. Book Orders: mitpress-orders@mit.edu
European Book Orders: cs-books@Wiley.co.uk
Orders from other countries – Tom Clerkin: clerkin@mit.edu
Bulk sales – Erika Valenti: erikav@mit.edu
http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262201577

“One of my best business books of the year”
Howard Rheingold in Strategy+Business magazine
www.strategy-business.com

“visionary”
Paul Makovsky, Metropolis
www.metropolismag.com/artid=1737
www.metropolismag.com/artid=1720

“inspiring and thought-provoking”
Gerd Waloszek, SAP Design Guild
www.sapdesignguild.org/community/book_people/review_bubble.asp

“alive, connected, contemporary”
Jamer Hunt in ID Magazine

When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design.
Bruce Nussbaum in Business Week,  January 4, 2005. www.businessweek.com

Tech Nation (USA): In The Bubble radio interview
“John Thackara’s brilliant book about quotidian design describes innovation driven by social fiction instead of science fiction.”
Paul Hawken, author (with Amory and Hunter Lovins) of Natural Capitalism

“Whatever you are designing, keep this book next to you”
Bill Moggridge, Co-founder of IDEO

“Design with a conscience: that’s the take-home message of this important, provocative book. John Thackara, long a major force in design, now takes on an even more important challenge: making the world safe for future inhabitants. We need, he says, to design from the edge, to learn from the world, and to stop designing for, but instead design with. If everyone heeded his prescriptions, the world would indeed be a better place. Required reading, required behavior.”
Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, author of Emotional Design

“To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently, John Thackara writes. I agree! In the Bubble is the first strong, thoroughly documented statement on the importance of the local and the embedded in our fluid, hyper-connected world. A fundamental contribution to a new design culture.”
Ezio Manzini, author of The Material of Invention

“I eagerly devoured every last page of John Thackara’s lofty, captivating book, up to and including his wry footnotes and that superb bibliography.”
Bruce Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown and Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years

“In the Bubble is insightful and delightful. It’s at the intersection of business, technology, design, and culture, where the future is created”.
Nathan Shedroff, author of Experience Design 1

“John Thackara is able to take in the most disparate events, locations, trends, and apparent minutiae and deliver back a synthesis of the way the world moves for those who use design as a powerful life-forming tool. Not only an enriching, but also a fun read.”
Paola Antonelli, Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

“a deeply reflective meditation on the underlying changes in the structure of globalized society, and a revelation about what designers can do to make that shifting structure more robust and sustainable”
J C Herz

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