CMU Design Listmania
Jeff Howard, a recent CMU Interaction Design alumna and friend, just put together a set of Amazon Listmania booklists that cover the primary readings for the graduate program, along with a couple of selected courses. They’re all good, but I especially recommend the Graduate Design Seminar and Design Management lists. Both were taught by Richard Buchanan, who’s one of the smarter people I’ve met.
It’s a little sad though, seeing the lists. Like all CMU Design grad students, I took the seminar. The list looks like a network without the nodes. Much of the value I got from the classes was from the frameworks he taught, and the connections between Dewey, Goffman, Weiner, Ekuan, Burke, Rand, Simon, etc are missing. It’s still valuable to have the list, but it’s a bummer that Buchanan hasn’t sat down to write it out all out….
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Good suggestion, somehow connecting the nodes of the “design knowledge network”. Sounds like a google project! :-)
But actually, that fundamental “all-encompassing” pattern of knowledge conecting such authors (at least their premises, methods, and interpretations) may well have been written already by Buchanan’s mentor at Chicago, R. McKeon, in his short (but maddeningly dense) essay “Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry”. One guy has called it the “Rosetta stone” for grasping design issues. It is my life mission to understand it someday…
As a grad of this program I can also put understanding “Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry” on my list of things to do before I die…
As it turns out the San Francisco Public Library has quite a few books on the lists. Obviously an incomplete intro to Interaction Design without all the discussion that ties these resources together, but maybe helpful for others who like myself are trying to familiarize themselves with what ID is, and what issues Interaction Designers engage with.
Hey, thanks for putting up that list, John. See you at the library…