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From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency
 

The Switch traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as pushing a button or flipping a switch—the deceptively simple act of turning something on or off. More than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.

Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to digital across a range of devices—keyboards, cameras, guns, light switches, computers, game controls, even the “nuclear button”—to understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence today’s pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to radically new forms of action and thought.

The innovative analysis in The Switch makes clear that binary inputs have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even domination.

For anyone interested in visual communication, a training guide for evaluating and developing visual representations for the big ideas in science and technology, essential skills for journal submissions, grant applications, and public understanding.
 
As a scientist, engineer, or other researcher, you may have written an abstract. In a paragraph, you explain the purpose of your research, your approach, the questions you have asked and answered, and your work’s impact. The abstract is a summary and an invitation—to read the paper, attend your talk, and join you in your thinking. You may even have been asked to create a visual abstract—a single image—to achieve the same goals. As a designer or public information officer, you may have had a similar brief—to explain a compelling subject with a visual for a journal cover or press release. And yet, this important skill—devising visual metaphors—isn’t typically taught. With her decades of experience creating compelling images and instructing MIT researchers, award-winning photographer and science communicator Felice C. Frankel helps readers evaluate and create their own visual abstractions.
 
Like in her other books in the Visual Elements series, on photography and design, Frankel asks readers to evaluate different choices—for example, in conveying the uncertainty of a hurricane’s path or the organization of the Standard Model for elementary particles. But in Abstraction, she offers more. With examples from science, engineering, and beyond, the book helps readers consider and evaluate the visuals around them and determine how they work and when they fail: Is this representation the best for communication? Will these abstractions encourage others to engage with my work? Will they mislead? Will they help my ideas evolve? Frankel invites researchers to think about the many meanings behind their images—and, in turn, to think more deeply about their research.

Our favorite tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) provide a chance to act out a fantasy. It might be the desire to wipe out foes with a single strike, the ability to charm even the most curmudgeonly townsfolk, or maybe even just the aspiration to adventure as a potted plant. Since game systems don’t always let players craft the kinds of games they want to experience, this is when they turn to the “homebrew” process to create personal rules and worlds. While Pathfinder has a history of being an underdog to the longtime industry leader Dungeons & Dragons, it has an ethos of open game design that inspires players, indie makers, and third-party content creators to brew up new rules, characters, classes, and game settings. 

Their System, Our Game looks at the history of Pathfinder and how it encourages aspiring makers to break into the game design space. Through interviews with player-creators and third party makers, the authors use a range of perspectives to define homebrew for TTRPGs. Taking a closer look at homebrew design, they create two homebrew campaigns (available as free downloads) collaboratively with two different groups of players. Player accounts of gameplay and designer reflections of how their homebrew actually played out at the game table outline some of the challenges and perks of designing on the fly, creating customized settings, and bending or breaking rules. The book concludes by going through the research, interviews, design, and play analysis to show what homebrew and Pathfinder mean together. Ultimately Their System, Our Game is a celebration of how players use homebrew to explore creation and expression in their own TTRPGs.

A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce waste

Rampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects we buy, keep, and discard, and explores how these attachments might be marshaled to create less wasteful practices and balance our consumerist and ecological impulses. 

Although all economies produce waste, no system generates as much or has become so adept at hiding its excesses as today’s mode of global capitalism. This book suggests that managing the material excesses of our lives as consumers requires us to build on, rather than reject, our desire for and attraction to objects. Increasing environmental awareness on its own will be ineffective at reversing ecological devastation, Harold argues, unless it is coupled with a more thorough understanding of how and why we love the things that imbue our lives with pleasure, meaning, and utility. 

From Marie Kondo’s method for decluttering that asks whether the things in our lives “spark joy” to the advent of emotionally durable design, which seeks to reduce consumption and waste by increasing the meaningfulness of the relationship between user and product, Harold explores how consumer psychology and empathetic design can transform our perception of consumer products from disposable to interconnected. An urgent call for rethinking consumerism, Things Worth Keeping shows that by recognizing our responsibility for the things we produce, we can become better stewards of the planet.

Unveiling the avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design
 

The concept Typophoto, the synthesis of photography and typography, was coined by renowned Bauhaus artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Jessica D. Brier examines how Typophoto was embraced by early graphic designers—a group who ultimately reinvented photography as a tool of modern consumerism.

Typophoto embodied designers’ belief in photography as an efficient form of visual communication, merging the material and the visual by abstracting both typographic and photographic form and transmuting photography into graphic material through the halftone process. Uniquely situating 1920s advertising discourse alongside avant-garde theory and significant interwar photographic concepts, Brier positions Typophoto as an analytical framework for considering how photography—as process, image, material, and metaphor—was effectively reconceived through the professionalization of graphic design in Europe and the United States. This was particularly true in Germany, where the capitalist ethos driving the country’s economic recovery bolstered the belief that graphics could create ideal reader-consumers.

Tracing Typophoto from its inception through New Typography’s experiments with the medium, Brier demonstrates how photography was used as a tool for manipulating perception as it became a visual language of modern life.