About Us | RIT Press

About Us | RIT Press

RIT Press is a scholarly publishing enterprise at Rochester Institute of Technology. Established in 2001 as RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press, the Press initially focused on publishing titles that documented graphic communication processes, printing history, and bookmaking. As its editorial policies have evolved, the Press has broadened its reach to include content that supports all academic disciplines offered at Rochester Institute of Technology, our host institution. These include — but are not limited to — business, computer science, applied science and technology, engineering, graphic arts, deaf studies, and liberal arts.

RIT Press is dedicated to the innovative use of new publishing technology while upholding high standards in content quality, publication design, and print/digital production. The Press offers specialized titles for niche academic audiences, trade editions for mass-market audiences, occasional limited editions with unique aesthetic standards.

Do You Read Differently Online and in Print?

Do You Read Differently Online and in Print?

The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext. From the invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C., until about 300 A.D., most written documents were scrolls, which had to be rolled up by one hand as they were unrolled by the other: a truly linear presentation. Since then, though, most reading has involved codices, bound books or pamphlets, a major advantage of which (at least compared to the scroll) is that you can jump around in them, from chapter to chapter (the table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footnote.

In the age of print, nonlinear reading found its most elaborate support in the “book wheel,” invented by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli in 1588: a “rotary reading desk” which allowed the reader to keep a great number of books at once, and to switch between them by giving the wheel a turn. The book wheel was— unfortunately!—a rarity in European libraries, but when you think about all the kinds of reading that print affords, the experience of starting a text at its beginning and reading all the way to the end, which we now associate with “deep” reading, looks less characteristic of print in general than of the novel in particular: the one kind of book in which, we feel, we might be depriving ourselves of something vital if we skipped or skimmed.

The quality of digital media poses one kind of problem for the reading brain; the quantity of information available to the wired reader poses a different and more serious problem. But it’s worth noting that readers have faced this problem before, too. Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455, and by 1500, some 27,000 titles had been published in Europe, in a total of around 10 million copies. The flood of printed matter created a reading public, and changed the way that people read.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design History: Design Observer

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design History: Design Observer

From the packaging of our belongings to the presentation of our surroundings, most of us recognize that design has, over the course of the past century, become a ubiquitous component in everyday life. Design is signage and graffiti and labels and lace, posters and propaganda and toothbrushes and teapots: objects and artefacts that captivate and delight us, frustrate or provoke us, but why?

This is where design historians come in.

Design history is, after all, social history: it’s an evolutionary (and somewhat cautionary) tale of use and abuse, of innovation and migration, of the inevitable tide of obsolescence that puzzles some of us to such a vexing degree that we simply have no other choice but to become design historians to start making sense of things.

And we begin, like all historians, by doing research.

How To Engineer Serendipity – Aspen Ideas – Medium

How To Engineer Serendipity

I’d like to tell the story of a paradox: How do we bring the right people to the right place at the right time to discover something new, when we don’t know who or where or when that is, let alone what it is we’re looking for? This is the paradox of innovation: If so many discoveries — from penicillin to plastics – are the product of serendipity, why do we insist breakthroughs can somehow be planned? Why not embrace serendipity instead?

…

The final piece is the network. Google has made its ambitions clear — as far as chairman Eric Schmidt is concerned, the future of search is a “serendipity engine” answering questions you never thought to ask. “It’ll just know this is something that you’re going to want to see,” explained artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil shortly after joining the company as its director of engineering.

One antidote to this all-encompassing filter bubble is an opposing serendipity engine proposed by MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman. In his book, Rewire, he sketches a set of recommendation and translation tools designed to nudge us out of our media comfort zones and “help us understand whose voices we’re hearing and whom we are ignoring.”

As Zuckerman points out, the greatest threats to serendipity are our ingrained biases and cognitive limits — we intrinsically want more known knowns, not unknown unknowns. This is the bias a startup named Ayasdi is striving to eliminate in Big Data.Rather than asking questions, its software renders its analysis as a network map, revealing hidden connections between tumors or terrorist cells, which CEO Gurjeet Singh calls “digital serendipity.”

Microsoft wants you to teach computers how to learn

Microsoft wants you to teach computers how to learn

As clever as learning computers may be, they only have as much potential as their software. What if you don’t have the know-how to program one of these smart systems yourself? That’s where Microsoft Research thinks it can help: it’s developing a machine teaching tool that will let most anyone show computers how to learn. So long as you’re knowledgeable about your field, you’d just have to plug in the right parameters.

The Work of a Design Researcher | Design on GOOD

The Work of a Design Researcher | Design on GOOD.

The Work of a Design Researcher

Design mind on GOOD is a series exploring the power of design by the editors of design mind magazine. This is the first installment in a miniseries within that blog, and it will run every Thursday for six week.

Ask any seven designers their view of design research, and you will likely get seven different responses. Why that happens is up for interpretation. Some say it’s because different jobs require different goals. Others contend that it’s because we filter observations through our own life experiences. I say it’s because the world is full of surprises.

Whether it’s discovering Barbie dolls in dishwashers while finding out how people collect them or going undercover as a Girl Scout leader to understand the teenage mindset, the job of a design researcher is to uncover and illuminate something about the user experience that was previously unknown.

The best designers approach research without preconceptions. They are ready to absorb and integrate the obvious as well as the hidden, the stated and the unspoken, the ideal as well as the real. Design researchers are always moved by what they see, and it’s that serendipitous moment of discovery and illumination that lifts designer and user alike. The final outcome, whether it’s a product, a service, or a system, is far more meaningful and resonant because of the work we do.

Over the next few weeks, we will present stories from designers at frog design that offer a peek into a day in the life of a design researcher. Each tale illuminates those wonderful moments when observation becomes insight and our way of noticing the world is forever changed. This week: Life as a Table.

Life As A Table, by Elizabeth Roche

We sat in her crowded living room in a building that reflected the paradox of London. Constructed from worn, gray poured concrete,the building was gloomy, with narrow balconies and exterior stairwells that were dark, chilly, stained, and dripping with water. The front door was just as shabby, but on the other side was a cozy apartment, and Jill (not her real name) was cheerful, intelligent, well-spoken, and eager to greet us. Part of our goal in this journey was to understand the characteristics of aesthetically valuable objects.

Right away, Jill showed us the heavy wooden dining table at the end of the room. The top was at least half a foot thick. She told us a story of how she and her father were taking a day trip near London and saw the table outside the kind of random furniture shop that only appears by chance. It was love at first site, she said, and paid the shopkeeper. Then came the saga of going back for the table in a larger vehicle and manipulating it up the gloomy stairwell in her apartment building and through the door of her apartment. Jill never mentioned it, but we could all see in her eyes that this experience added to the table’s beauty, like a friend who becomes better looking the more you get to know them.

Smiling, Jill pointed out that the table was so sturdy that nothing could damage it beyond use. If something fell and dented it, she told us, the blemish would only add to its beauty. This brings to mind the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, tersely summarized as finding beauty in asymmetrical, flawed, or imperfect objects. Often these are objects from nature that have been affected by man.

The unifying note in this story is that the beauty we see in some of our things is enhanced — and sometimes entirely created — by the emotional attachment we have to objects. Interestingly, this attachment grows and takes on more value as the object acquires more of the dings, bumps, and scratches of a well-traveled life.

A version of this piece appeared in the May 2009 issue of design mind magazine.

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alan Turing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a pioneering English computer scientist,mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.^[2]^[3]^[4] Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science andartificial intelligence.^[5]