Spring Reading

The other day, over a hot corned beef sandwich from the 2nd Avenue Deli, someone asked what I'm reading now. As usual, I ended up mumbling a few half complete book titles (not sure why, but I always have difficulty remembering on the spot - probably because I've got four or five things going at once...).

To help fill out the list, and because I'm still doing most of my writing via other outlets, here's a snapshot of the books scattered around my house. It's divided into helpful categories, including 'Books I'd Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn't, Because I'm Still Reading Other Stuff', and 'Books I've Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won't Won't Get To In The Near Future.'

Books I'm Reading Now

• This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Daniel Levitin


• Critical Mass: How One Things Leads To Another. Philip Ball


• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam Greenfield


• Pulse. The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things. Robert Fresnay


• The River Cottage Meat Book. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall


• In Praise Of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire. Mike Davis

Books I'd Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn't, Because I'm Still Reading Other Stuff

• Maximum City. Suketu Mehta


• Atlas of Novel Tectonics. Reiser + Umemoto


• Failure: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. Various


• Istanbul: Memories of A City. Orhan Pamuk


• Uncany Networks. Geert Lovink


• The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein

Books Recently Finished

• Sailing to Byzantium. Robert Silverberg


• A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine. Anthony Bourdain


• The Laws of Simplicity. John Maeda


• Buda's Wagon. Mike Davis


• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Michael Pollan


• The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Sasha Issenberg


• The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Mark Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer

Books I've Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won't Get To In The Near Future

• A Thousand Plateaus. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari


• Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham


• Leonardo's Laptop. Ben Schneiderman


• Emergence. Stephen Johnson


• In The Bubble. John Thackarra


• The Direction of Cities. John Guinther


• Home: A Short History of an Idea. Witold Rybczynsk

Bonus: Things I'm probably Never Going to Start / Finish Reading

• Women Fire and Dangerous Things. George Lakoff


• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

local tags: books, reading

Does Being Ethical Pay?

'Companies spend huge amounts of money to be 'socially responsible.' Do consumers reward them for it? And how much?' is the leader for a short piece titled Does Being Ethical Pay? just published in Sloan Management Review. The quick answer is "Yes", so it's worth reading further to learn the specific ways that ethicality plays into people's spending decisions.

Here's an excerpt:

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

What's more, consumer attitudes played a big part in shaping those results. People with high standards for corporate behavior rewarded the ethical companies with bigger premiums and punished the unethical ones with bigger discounts.

At least according to this research, being ethical is a necessary attribute for a product.

There are clear implications for product design: ethics should be on the table as a concern at all stages of product development, from ideation and concepting of new products, to the marketing and sales of finished products.

And these (limited, certainly not the final word) findings match with the idea of adding ethics to the set of important user experience qualities captured in Peter Morville's UX Honeycomb.

The (Augmented) Ethical UX Honeycomb

How are user experience designers taking the ethical qualities of their work into account?

local tags: ethics, product_design