Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Master Minds Series) [Hardcover]

David Gelernter (Author)

Book Description

Series: Master Minds Series | Publication Date: January 23, 1998

When something works well, you can feel it; there is a sense of rightness to it. We call that rightness beauty, and it ought to be the single most important component of design.This recognition is at the heart of David Gelernter’s witty argued essay, Machine Beauty, which defines beauty as an inspired mating of simplicity and power. You can see it in a Bauhaus chair, the Hoover Dam, or an Emerson radio circa 1930. In contrast, too many contemporary technologists run out of ideas and resort to gimmicks and features; they are rarely capable of real, structural ingenuity.Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of computers. You don’t have to look far to see how oblivious most computer technologists are to the idea of beauty. Just look at how ugly your computer cabinet is, how unwieldy and out of sync it feels with the manner and speed with which you process thought.The best designers, however, are obsessed with beauty. Both hardware and software should afford us the greatest opportunity to achieve deep beauty, the kind of beauty that happens when many types of loveliness reinforce one another, when design expresses an underlying technology, a machine logic. Program software ought to be transparent; it should engage what Gelernter calls ”a thought-amplifying feedback loop,” a creative symbiosis with its user. These principles, beautiful in themselves, will set the stage for the next technological revolution, in which the pursuit of elegance will lead to extraordinary innovations.Machine Beauty will delight Gelernter’s growing audience, fans of his provocative and biting journalism. Anyone who manufactures, designs, or uses computers will be galvanized by his cogent arguments and tantalizing glimpse of a bright future, where beautiful technology abounds.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Gelernter's lyrical rant on the critical role of beauty and aesthetics in computer technology comes just in time. Computer engineers and designers, who create software that is bloated with seldom-used features and that intrusively draws our attention to it rather than the task at hand, could greatly benefit from the pursuit of what Gelernter calls "deep beauty," the marriage of power and simplicity.

Gelernter suggests that the dichotomy between art/beauty and science/technology has led to inadequate academic training of computer-science students. He points out that the greatest minds in science and industry have always pursued beauty. "Machine beauty is the driving force behind technology and science," he says, and yet "beauty bothers us." Somehow it's perceived to be softer and less rigorous to train computer scientists in art, music, architecture, and design. However, Gelernter sees these disciplines as closely aligned with the mathematics and science that are the foundation of technology. Because of this lack of aesthetic education, much user interface has been poorly designed.

Gelernter's persuasive arguments are far-reaching as he casts a shrewd eye on everything from postmodernism to architecture to the nature of beauty itself. This short, often witty book is written by someone who has paid a price for his opinion--Gelernter was a target of the Unabomber and was critically injured in a mail-bomb attack in 1993.

From Publishers Weekly

Although based on a solid thesis?that great design is the marriage of simplicity and power?Gelernter's chronicle of beauty's role in the "rise of the desktop" often amounts to little more than a rehash of the rise of the Macintosh through the lens of aesthetics, plus some promotion for his own software. A Yale technologist who survived a 1993 Unabomber attack (described in his Drawing Life, 1996), Gelernter begins by demonstrating the affinity between the good design of computer hardware and software and the form-driven innovations of the Bauhaus. Soon, however, he is explaining Microsoft's triumph over Apple as at least partly due to the fact that "elegance gives everyone the creeps." A later chapter tells the story of the shift from time-sharing computing to the personal computer, and of the creation of a window-based operating system at a Xerox think tank?which Apple then co-opted. In the name of demonstrating alternatives to current modes of Web surfing and multimedia computing, Gelernter introduces his own computer programming language, "Linda," and "Lifestreams," a system for navigating the Web's info-glut. Gelernter envisions everyone having a personal Lifestream by 2010?a Web site where you receive personalized culls from the Web and conduct all personal business. While Gelernter's observations on how ideas get promulgated in the highly competitive world of computer futurism ring true, his paeans to his favorite products serve to obfuscate rather than illuminate his otherwise intriguing discussion of how design works in the realm of computer science and industry.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (January 23, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465045162
• ISBN-13: 978-0465045167
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #834,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Mirror Worlds Companion, March 14, 2002

By 

B. Scott Andersen (Acton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Repr ed) (Masterminds) (Paperback)

What is beauty? Gelernter, in a work that is more an
essay than full-blown book, does a wonderful job of
drawing the reader into exploring that question. He
asks, "...could a mathematical proof, scientific theory,
or piece of software be 'beautiful' in the real, literal
way that a painting or symphony or rose can be beautiful?"
The answer, according to Gelernter, is a resounding "Yes".

Machine beauty, a simple elegance that resonates in its
observer, is the subject of the work. But, how might one
sense this? Gelernter offers this: "You might experience
something resembling machine beauty, even if you are no
scientist or engineer, when you drive a nail into a
board with one clean, graceful hammer stroke." Precisely!

"Deep beauty, 'resonant beauty' in which many types of
loveliness reinforce one another, is a principal topic
of this book" according to the author. He then explores
the following two claims: (1) "...machine beauty is
the driving force behind technology and science", and
(2) "... machine beauty bothers us. We act as a society
as if our goal were not to nurture or celebrate it but
to stamp it out."

Gelernter, a computer scientist and sometimes artist,
applies his many observations to the sad state of today's
computer software. "The hell with mathematics; let's
teach of our programmers about beauty" he exclaims!

There are long running comparisons between the WinTel
PC and Apple Macintosh in the work. It isn't a "sales
pitch" for one or the other; just a set of observations
on how the emphasis (or deemphasis) of beauty and
elegance drove both efforts.

The work is easy to read yet fully researched. A "Notes"
section appears at the end of the 144 pages of prose to
provide all of the references to the other works Gelernter
drew upon. I thought the effort made to keep the meat of
the book uncluttered was well worthwhile.

This book is an excellent companion to Gelernter other
work "Mirror Worlds". Read Mirror Worlds first and then
eat this for dessert--you won't be disappointed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some interesting insights, January 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Repr ed) (Masterminds) (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book, it is well written. I thought from the cover it was more about telephones and radios instead of software interfaces. I find the author's perception that we strive for beauty and elegance in design, yet are afraid to admit to as much. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we put beauty and aethetics in design up there with efficiency and price? If something is truly well designed, it is beautiful. I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in design, maybe it will change a few people.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty as a Means of Handling Complexity, March 4, 2001

By 

Tom Gray (Fort-Coulonge, Quebec Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Repr ed) (Masterminds) (Paperback)

Modern engineering systems are very complex and must be designed to meet conflicting constraints. The major hurdle facing an engineering designer is to find a way to meet these many competeing contraints in an affordable amount of time at an affordable price. Much work has gone on in computer science on the analysis of systems by formal methods. The hope of these technques is that the entire operation and requirements of a system can be captured in a mathematical model which would allow the 'correctness' of the sytem to its requirements to be proved.

This is the major ideas of such distingushed researchers as Hoare and Parnas. Unfortunately these methods have never been found to work in practice. For anything but a toy system the complexity of the formal model becomes intractable. But there is a more important reason for the failure. How can 'correctness' be defined fro a real world system which must work in a filed of changing requirements.

Gelernter identifies this problem but notes that it is solved everyday by real world engineers who must face real world requirements. These engineers are not deterred by the failure of formal methods. Instead they rely on a sense of beauty which is a sense gained from experience in how a system can meet its requiremtns. It is this abilty to see though the complexity to see the structure and pattern in the design that will dictate its degree of success that enable a human designer to function where strictly mathematical and logical techniques fail. Only techniques which use holistic thinking can succeed in in the real world.

It is often thought that human reaoning pales beside the clarity of logic and mathematics in understanding the world and how devices function. Gelernter rightly points out that this common attitude is precisely worng. Formal mathematical technqiues have failed where they have been claimed to be paramount. The human understanding of beauty is an ability to function in the world by identifying what is most suited to an issue.

Gelernter seems to be saying that the quest of many people to reduce the world to mathematics can only result in failure. It is confusing certainty with knowledge. Experience has shown that these technqiues cannot cope with real world complextity. The proponents of such techniques often portray themsleves as realisitc pragmatists who confront the problem which others try to avoid. Gelernter shows that these people are blind to the real problem and exhibit an unjustified faith in cold specific logic. Only techniques which can view the problem and proposed solutions holistically can hope to cope with real world complexity. It are these technqiues which supposed pragmatists heap scorn on which are most practical. It is poetry and not mathematics which bests describes the world.

This book is worth reading.