John Kolko – Thoughts on Interaction Design
Summary This lovely treatise strikes a compelling balance between meditative handbook, practitioner’s guide (to navigating practitioners’ political spaces), and manifesto. It is decidedly not, nor does it attempt to be, a quick reference toolkit for aspiring or currently practicing Interaction Designers. There are no lists of techniques, no screenshots, no sample code, and no step-by-step procedures. In this way, the book is actually rather refreshing (this coming from an academic, admittedly). While it’s not a deeply researched book, it is nevertheless an expediently researched one, which seems quite adept at citing the �

Nathan Shedroff – Experience Design
Summary Shedroff’s main point in this book is that great experiences are both deliberate and designable, provided designers know the underlying principles and learn the practical tools (2). Like Jakob Nielsen and Edward Tufte, Shedroff values a “clutter” free interface (91). Yet, the book is almost schizophrenic in this regard, as its attempt to perform an experiential book design is often distracting from the reading process itself thanks to the busy background images and often difficult-to-read text (p 92-93 & 96 are good examples of this). Nonetheless, the book retains relevance for its prescient views of aud

Joseph Pine & James Gilmore – The Experience Economy
Summary The subtitle of this book says it all: “Goods and services are no longer enough.” Pine and Gilmore’s central assertion is that in an economic environment in which it is increasingly difficult to stand out amid all the choices, companies that market experiences as their product are more likely to succeed than companies which rely solely on the sale of goods and/or services. Experiences are distinct from both goods and services because they leverage these things to create something new for the customer. Pine and Gilmore say, “The newly identified offering of experiences occurs whenever a company intentionally uses services as the stage and

Richard Lanham – The Economics of Attention
Summary Lanham’s main thesis in this book is that we are living not in an information economy (a ‘marketplace of ideas,’ as it is often called in business circles), but rather in an attention economy. That is, the resource that is most scare in today’s society is attention, for, attention is the resource needed to sift through the mind-boggling exabytes of readily available information. Not only that, but attention is the resource needed to shape otherwise raw data into useful and usable information . For Lanham, the shift from an information economy—characterized by “stuff” or substance—to an attention economy—characterized by “fluf

Robert Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Summary This book is a response to two main research questions, which the author succinctly lays out in the Introduction: “What are the factors that cause one person to say yes to another person?” “Which techniques most effectively use these factors to bring about such compliance?” (xvi) To answer these questions, Cialdini employed a methodology of participant observation coupled with a thorough examination of empirical research from the fields of sociology and psychology. He actually immersed himself in the work of successful “compliance professionals—sales operators, fund-raise