The Mit Press: 939 books
Sifting the Trash
A History of Design Criticism
Language: English
Release Date: June 2, 2017
How product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill.
Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths through condemnation or indifference....
Soft is Fast
Simone Forti in the 1960s and After
Language: English
Release Date: February 19, 2016
An innovative analysis of Simone Forti's interdisciplinary art, viewing her influential 1960s “dance constructions” as negotiating the aesthetic strategies of John Cage and Anna Halprin.
Simone Forti's art developed within the overlapping circles of New York City's advanced visual art,...
by David E. Nye
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2013
From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation.
The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production....
The Future of Europe
Reform or Decline
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 2008
A provocative argument that unless Europe takes serious action soon, its economic and political decline is unavoidable, and a clear statement of the steps Europe must take before it's too late.
Unless Europe takes action soon, its further economic and political decline is almost inevitable,...
Down Detour Road
An Architect in Search of Practice
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2010
A young architect's search for new architectural values in a time of economic crisis.
I paused at the stoop and thought this could be the basis of a good book. The story of a young man who went deep into the bowels of the academy in order to understand architecture and found it had been on...
Information and Intrigue
From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss
Language: English
Release Date: May 16, 2014
An account of Herbert Field's quest for a new way of organizing information and how information systems are produced by ideology as well as technology.
In Information and Intrigue Colin Burke tells the story of one man's plan to revolutionize the world's science information systems and how...
Fighting Corruption Is Dangerous
The Story Behind the Headlines
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2018
A frontline account of how to fight corruption, from Nigeria's former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
In Fighting Corruption Is Dangerous, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has written a primer for those working to root out corruption and disrupt vested interests. Drawing on her experience as Nigeria's...
American Urban Form
A Representative History
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2012
An illustrated history of the American city's evolution from sparsely populated village to regional metropolis.
American Urban Form—the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life—has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings,...
The Producer as Composer
Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music
Language: English
Release Date: February 26, 2010
The evolution of the record producer from organizer to auteur, from Phil Spector and George Martin to the rise of hip-hop and remixing.
In the 1960s, rock and pop music recording questioned the convention that recordings should recreate the illusion of a concert hall setting. The Wall of Sound...
Sonic Warfare
Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
Language: English
Release Date: August 24, 2012
An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe.
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic...
The Least Likely Man
Marshall Nirenberg and the Discovery of the Genetic Code
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2015
How unassuming government researcher Marshall Nirenberg beat James Watson, Francis Crick, and other world-famous scientists in the race to discover the genetic code.
The genetic code is the Rosetta Stone by which we interpret the 3.3 billion letters of human DNA, the alphabet of life, and the...
by Herbert A. Simon
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 1996
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 1996
In this candid and witty autobiography, Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon looks at his distinguished and varied career, continually asking himself whether (and how) what he learned as a scientist helps to explain other aspects of his life.
A brilliant polymath in an age of increasing specialization,...
Engineers for Change
Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2012
An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.
In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change....
Sacrifice Zones
The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 2012
The stories of residents of low-income communities across the country who took action when pollution from heavy industry contaminated their towns.
Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites....