Now You See It

When Cathy Davidson and Duke University gave free iPods to every member of the incoming freshman class in 2003, they didn’t expect the uproar that followed. Critics called it a waste: What educational value could a music player have for college kids? Yet by the end of the year, Duke students had found academic uses for the new devices in virtually every discipline.

Professor Davidson brings together diverse and fascinating projects, stories, examples and research in this passionate exhortation on collaboration, intelligence, and technology. Arguing that paying attention to something inherently blinds us to other things, Davidson implores readers to embrace collaboration on the theory that multiple people working on the same problem from different perspectives will compensate for each other's blind spots and lead to vastly improved learning and better solutions.

Professional magician Mystic Max hosts a reality TV show. It allows the winning three teams of minors, would be-TV directors and cameramen and the best young magicians some of them present, to go on to a final competition at Hollywood's Magic Mansion.

"Design is a way to engage with real content, real experience," writes celebrated essayist Michael Bierut in this follow-up to his best-selling Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (2007). In more than fifty smart and accessible short pieces from the past decade, Bierut engages with a fascinating and diverse array of subjects. Essays range across design history, practice, and process; urban design and architecture; design hoaxes; pop culture; Hydrox cookies, Peggy Noonan, baseball, The Sopranos; and an inside look at his experience creating the "forward" logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Presents a series of abstract, colorful, computer-generated pictures–created with the use of the "Salinsky Dot" image-rendering system–from which a 3-D image will emerge, accompanied by instructions to help viewers discover the images.