Virtual Wolds and Interactive Design Bibliography

A collection of books that I have found useful when thinking about virtual worlds and interactive design.

These books will be of utility for graphic designers, web designers, software engineers and UI designers. The "more information" links take you to Amazon, where you can get other reviews or buy the book. Many of these won't be too surprising to those in the field, but hopefully, you'll see something you haven't before. Many of these books were recommended to me by other proffesionals, and I've read all of them. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, it is not meant to be one. If you have suggestions, please send me some e-mail. Eventually every book will have a personal review. It may just take a little while.

Architecture

Timeless Way of Building - Oxford University Press, 1977 - more information
A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction - Oxford University Press, 1979 - more information

Andrea Palladio - The Four Books on Architecture - MIT Press, 1997 (reprint)
This is one of the most important books on architecture ever written. It has influenced countless architects. It is worth a read for background information and exposure to architectural alone, but it is also full of practical information. - more information

M. Christine Boyer - The City of Collective Memory : Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments - MIT Press, 1994 - more information

Donlyn Lyndon - Chambers for a Memory Palace - MIT Press, 1996 (reprint) - more information

David MacAulay

Castle - Houghton Mifflin, 1982 - more information
Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction - Houghton Mifflin, 1981 - more information

Urban Planning

Kevin Lynch - The Image Of The City - MIT Press, 1960
Kevin Lynch is one of the gods of city planning. His books, this one in particular, have influenced generations of city planners and architects. The idea of the book is that people orient themselves in public environments in a number of different ways. He demonstrates this using examples from Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City, New Jersey. I like how the ideas in this book can be used for the design of virtual environments and websites. - more information

David MacAulay - City : A Story of Roman Planning and Construction - Houghton Mifflin, 1983
This was a wonderful book about how the Roman empire designed the cities that they built in conquered lands. Many of the Roman's ideas about city planning are still in use today as well as many of their inventions. This is a children's book, but it also serves as a fun and quick introduction to urban issues. Also see David MacAulay's books referenced above in architecture. - more information

Sociology

William H. Whyte - City: Rediscovering the Center - Doubleday, 1988 - more information

Jane Jacobs - The Death And Life Of American Cities - Random House, 1961 - more information

William J. Mitchell - City of Bits : Space, Place, and the Infobahn - MIT Press, 1996
Bill Mitchell is the head of the architecture school at MIT, and he has spent a lot of time thinking about how architecture relates to information spaces such as the internet. This book is a little dated already given the explosive pace of technology, but it still contains some highly provocative thinking on how we influence technology and technology influences us. - more information

M. Christine Boyer - Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication - Princeton Architectural Press, 1996 - more information

Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (editors) - Communities in Cyberspace - Routledge, 1999 - more information
Kollock and Smith are two sociologists from UCLA. Peter Kollock has been at the front of the pack using sociology to look at on-line versus real life communities for quite some time. This collection also includes contributions from Elizabeth Reid and Judith Donath whose work I admire and am familiar with. This book just came out, so it's a little hard to come by, but it's worth finding.

Information Design

Scott McCloud - Understanding Comics; The Invisible Art - Harper Perennial, 1994
Another book that you could not avoid in the artsy computer set in the mid 1990s. This book was written to justify the comic book as an art form, but along the way, Scott McCloud wrote an excellent text on design using the comic book as an example. There are a ton of great ideas here about story telling, user interface design and the visual presentation of information. - more infomation

Edward R. Tufte

Envisioning Information - Graphics Press, 1990 - more information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Graphics Press, 1992 - more information

Industrial Design

Donald A. Norman - The Design of Everyday Things - Doubleday, 1990 - more information
Donal Norman is one of the gods of design theory and this book is a must-read for all information proffesionals. That said, it can be sort of a tough read at times. Norman succeeds most when he is relating tales of bad design. He also tries to come up with a taxonomy of design principles that has some useful aspects, but is not as useful..

Fiction

Neil Stephenson - Snow Crash - Bantam, 1993
This is the book that some credit with inspiring the mid-90s surge in Virtual Worlds Companies and VRML. It certainly inspired Mark Pesce and was constantly referenced in the early days of the VRML list. You could not attend a conference during this time without seeing tons of people carrying it under their arms. It was a cyberpunk fashion accessory. It's actually a pretty good read too, except for the ending, which peters out. If you're interested in possible directions for the technology of today and virtual environments on the net, this is required reading. - more information

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities - Harvest/HBJ, 1986 (reprint)
Calvino is one of my favorite authors of all time. His writing is witty and his stories imaginative. This is the tale of Marco Polo who returns to Kublai Kahn with tales of his travels and the cities he's visited. It is included in this bibliography because of the ways that he describes the cities. It also ties into the ways that a public space can be represented by many different cognitive representations depending on who someone is. - more information

Film

Alan Woods - Being Naked - Playing Dead: the Art of Peter Greenaway - Machester University Press - 1997 - more information

Media Theory

Douglas Rushkoff - Media Virus! : Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture - Ballantine, 1996 (reprint) - more information

Richard Brodie - Virus of the Mind : The New Science of the Meme - Integral Press, 1995 - more information

Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects - Hardwired, 1996 (reprint) - more information

User Interface Design

Brenda Laurel

Computers As Theatre - Addison-Wesley, 1993 (reprint) - more information
The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design - Addison-Wesley, 1990 - more information

Apple Computer Staff - MacIntosh Human Interface Guidelines - Addison-Wesley, 1993 - more information

Cyberarts

Linda Jacobson - Cyberarts : Exploring Art & Technology - Miller Freeman, 1992 - more information

Other Bibliographies

Artistic Representations in Virtual Reality (VRArt)
Toni Emerson, Director of Information Services at the University of Washington HITLab has been building a comprehensive knowledge base of Virtual Reality for quite some time. This page hasn't been updated for a while, but if you're looking for an unabridged source of information, this is the place.

Taylor Nuttall's Sublime Bibliography
Taylor is another member of the virtual worlds list and he has a smaller, but extremely excellent bibliography on virtual worlds.