The Books that Have Shaped My Technological Worldview

This is a personal collection, subject to change at any time.

• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa
  A classic on architecture and urban design that you’ll find on many lists like this. What keeps it here for me — as a text that has shaped my technological worldview — is the very notion of describing problems and solutions or needs and constructions as patterns, and building a system from them. That has deeply shaped how I think about design and technology, taking it out of the imaginal and putting it squarely in the practical.
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, by R. Buckminster Fuller
  Another “classic” for people of a certain vibe. Fuller is wordy in a way that many find (understandably) opaque and off-putting. But, the idea of our planet as a vehicle — as a machine — was mind-blowing to me, and has shaped my thinking in terms of always looking for the unseen or misunderstood complexities that determine what we experience and how we experience it, and naturally, what we make.
• Technics and Civilization, by Lewis Mumford
  Mumford’s view of technology precedes most of the technology we use and think of today, yet it still accurately describes the codependent relationship between tech and society, the ecological costs of progress, and the delicate balances of power that support progress.
• Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler
  This book remains on this list for me as an evergreen reminder of how people respond to change. When you make technology, the goal is always to create change. Toffler emphasized that a technological civilization is prone to overload its constituents with changes, disruptions, choices, and, generally, input.
• A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright
  This collection of CBC Massey Lectures solidified in my mind the precarious balance of ecology, technology, and society. His examples of societal collapses in history demonstrate why these interrelationships can so easily fall out of balance.
• A Sense of the Future, by Jacob Bronowski
  Some truly illuminating thoughts on creativity from a real “Renaissance Man.”
• Technology as Symptom and Dream, by Robert Romanyshyn
  The grand story of technology through the eyes of a psychologist. As a person who began to understand the world as a child through drawing, I was struck by how Romanyshyn begins his story of technology with the innovation of linear perspective drawing, which created a feedback loop between thinking and making across civilizations. There are some really interesting reflections on this book that you can find online, including this interview with Romanyshyn with a the editor of a journal on Jungian psychology.
• What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly
  The notion of technology as a single force — almost an organism — which he calls the technium is a fascinating one. Kelly’s foundational optimism about technology and progress is challenging to me, which I find a useful foil to my own thinking.

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Written by Christopher Butler on  
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