THINK66 | Course Materials

Primary Texts

Adapted from the book Artful Design, Design that Understands Us draws from engineering, philosophy, art, and social sciences to examine how we shape technology, and how technology shapes us in turn. Below are the primary texts for the course. Additional readings will be added below.


  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 350 B.C.E.
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
  • Bruno Munari, Design as Art. Penguin Global, 1966.
  • Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, 1988.
  • Ge Wang, Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime. Stanford University Press, 2018.

Software Tools

Some tools for course work and exploration:


Related Reading and Resources

(These and many more can found in the Annotated Bibliography of Artful Design.)

  • Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. The University of Chicago Press. 1966.
  • Martha Nussbaum. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press. 2013.
  • Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press. 1964.
  • Mark Weiser. "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American 265:94-104 (1991).
  • Christopher Small. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
  • Ge Wang. "The DiY Orchestra of the Future," TEDxstanford. 2014. https://go.ted.com/gewang/
  • Edward Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative information. Graphics Press, 1983.
  • John Maeda. Design by Numbers. MIT Press, 1999.
  • Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot li, and Floraine Berthouzoz. "Design Principles for Visual communication," Communications of the ACM 54(4):60-69 (2011).
  • Max Mathews. "The Digital Computer as a Musical Instrument," Science 142(3591):553-557 (1963).
  • Ge Wang, Perry R. Cook, and Spencer Salazar. "ChucK: A Strongly-timed Computer Music Language," Computer Music Journal 38(2):8-21 (2015).
  • Perry R. Cook. "Principles of Designing Computer Music Controller," ACM SIGCHI, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Workshop. 2001.
  • Scott R. Klemmer, Björn Hartmann, and Leila Takayama. "How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design," ACM Designing Interactive Systems. 2006.
  • Sile O'Modhrain and Georg Essl. "Pebblebox and Crumblebag: Tactile Interfaces for Granular Synthesis," New Interfaces for Musical Expression. 2004.
  • Bill Verplank. The Interaction Design Sketchbook. 2009.
  • Rebecca fiebrink. Real-time Human Interactions with Supervised Learning Algorithms for Music Composition and Performance. Ph.D. Thesis. Princeton University, 2011.
  • Saleema Amershi, Maya Cakmak, William Bradley Knox, and Todd Kulesza. "Power to the People: The Role of Humans in Interactive Machine Learning," AI Magazine 35(4):105-120 (2014).
  • John W. Campbell. "Twilight," Astounding Stories, 1934.
  • Anna Anthropy. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories Press. 2012.
  • Thomas Turino. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
  • Stanley Milgram. "The Familiar Stranger: An aspect of urban anonymity," in The individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Edited by John Sabini and Maury Silver. McGraw-Hill, 1972.
  • Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757.
  • Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason. 1788.
  • Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgement. 1790.
  • Melvin Kranzberg. "Technology and History: 'Kranzberg's Laws,'" Technology and Culture 27(3):544-560 (1986).
  • Ken Taylor and John Perry, Co-hosts. Philosophy Talk. KALW. http://philosophytalk.org/ 2004-present.
  • Timothy M. Costelloe, ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge University press, 2012.
  • Steward Brand. The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Random House, 1968.
  • Friedrich Schiller. Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. 1794.