Remix: The Copyright Wars

[This is a Xmas present to all my blog readers - a posting on the most inspiring book I have read in 2009.]

Lawrence Lessig is a lecturer in law at Harvard University and a leading authority on intellectual property rights in the digital age. He helped to found the Creative Commons movement, and he's a former member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. His works are a passionate defence of the rights of the individual to the creativity of the past, and a crusade against those forces which try to limit the free exchange of information. This is the latest in a long line of books he has written in support of such causes - explaining in non-legal language the way in which human rights have been eroded by the vested interests of big business. Whilst upholding the right of all content originators to make a living from what they create, he believes that the current copyright laws restrict the free exchange of information. He also argues that all creativity builds on the creativity of the past, and it is modern technology which has democratised and speeded up the process.

In the past, you could own the 'source code' to Shakespeare's works, but only printing press owners could make copies. Now, as soon as something becomes digitised, any kid in his back bedroom can copy at will. This has given rise to a panic over copyright, which he explores in some depth.

First of all he examines the 'war against piracy' in the American courts by a close inspection of the terms in which it is commonly pursued:

In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought.

You would almost think he was talking about the Americans in Afghanistan - but no, this is the 'copyright wars'. He cites many examples where companies have paid out legal fees ten times greater than the lost revenue they were seeking to recoup.

He agrees with Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow that the Nay sayers and prophets of doom on all this are wrong. The future is not likely to be an either/or choice between prohibition and control versus unbridled anarchy. It's much more likely to be a creative symbiosis of past and future technologies.

He then addresses the central theme of the book - how much is it possible to quote from someone else's work in a new work for private or public consumption? The rules and general practice are quite different, depending on the medium. With printed text it is a perfectly normal, accepted practice to quote from someone else's work. In fact academic writing specifically requires a knowledge and accurate quotation of previous works in the same subject.

But use the same approach with audio recordings and you'll end up with a solicitor's 'cease and desist' letter from Sony or Decca. And his argument is that this restriction is a brake on both creativity and freedom of information.

On mixed media he also makes the very good point that the sort of well-edited video clips with over-dubbed sound tracks shown in TV political satire (and now on blogs) are more effective than long-winded essays taking 10,000 words to make the same point. Most people today don't even have time to read long articles. They get their information in much shorter chunks. As he puts it, very pithily - "text is today's Latin". It's an extreme view, but you can see his point.

A propos of which, he also practices what he preaches. He developed a style of presentation which uses rapid display of short, memorable phrases or pictures. Here's an example which takes a while to load, but is well worth the wait. It's quite old now, but it demonstrates a technique of presentation which will not date: sound and text being used together for maximum effect.

One thing about his writing I found quite inspiring is that for every bold proposition he makes, he looks at the possible objections to it. (In fact a whole section of his web site is devoted to criticisms of his work.)

He makes a profound distinction between what he calls read-only (RO) and read-write (RW) culture. Both are important, but they have the difference that RO encourages passive reception, whereas RW encourages a written, that is a creative response. This leads him to argue for the enhanced value of all 'writing' - by which he means not only text, but the manipulation of other media, such as the audio and video files which are the stock-in-trade of the mashup artists.

His point is that these collage-type works are definitely not examples of parasitic imitation, and that in almost all cases they reveal a skilled appreciation of the medium. If you don't believe it, have a look at this inspired example of blending maps and flight data.

The second part of the book is an investigation of eCommerce - conducted at a level just as radical and profound. He looks Google, Amazon, and Netflix as examples of businesses that have become successful by defying the normal laws of commerce. They allow other companies to share their information, and in Amazon's case they even allow competitors onto their site. By doing this they make more money, and they control more of the field.

For the sake of those people who didn't catch it first time round, he explains Chris Anderson's Long Tail Principle. He then looks at the 'sharing economies' to which the Internet has given birth - the Open Source projects and the Wikipedias which exist on the voluntary efforts of volunteers.

Next he passes on to what he calls the 'hybrid economies' - companies such as Slashdot and Last.fm who offer a community but make money by advertising revenues. The subtle distinctions between these different models have to be handled carefully - otherwise sensibilities (and revenue streams) might be affected.

He looks at the ethical and practical conflicts between Old and New economies - those based on greed and naked competition, and those based in the 'hybrid' sector of sharing and cooperation. Eventually this takes us back to the issue of copyright, where he has some radical proposals for reform.

The first is that basically all genuinely amateur use of copyrighted material should be exempt from prosecution. It is pointless issuing legal writs against some kid sampling and posting on YouTube. The second is a suggestion that copyright is returned to its original status - a fourteen year term which is renewable if the owner so wishes.

Next comes a suggestion called 'clear title' - which means that the item being copyrighted needs to be clearly defined. Then comes the de-criminalisation of P2P file sharing, and the end of prosecuting sampling and mashups. As he suggests, supported by people in the pop music business, there is no evidence to prove that a sample or mashup detracts from sales of the original. All of these seem perfectly reasonable - though I suspect vested corporate interests would think otherwise.

This is a passionate and thought-provoking book on the ethics of copyright and creativity in an age of rapid technological change. It is radical, free-thinking, and a challenge to anyone participating in the digital world right now. Lawrence Lessig is a voice to take note of. But you'll have to move fast. He seems to be in a permanent state of rapid development, and by the time you've read this, his latest book, he'll have moved on elsewhere. If you go to his official site at lessig.org you'll see what I mean.

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Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp.327, ISBN 0143116134

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Art Tatum - the John Coltrane of the piano

I've been struggling to get Art Tatum - the Pablo Solo Masterpieces onto my iPod in time for our annual Xmas cocktail party. I won't embarrass myself by recording how difficult it's been to master the control panel of iTunes. But I'll admit that because I didn't refuse duplicates, some of the 140+ tracks were recorded more than once. So I had to listen to repeat tracks on test playback via my new Bose docking system (which is pretty good).

What's to worry? Tatum is just pure genius - especially on his own. And it struck me tonight, listening to that huge repertoire of the Great American Song Book, that he treats the material just like John Coltrane.

First there's a deep appreciation of the basic melody - including the unstated lyrics. But almost immediately the theme has been expressed he goes off into improvisations which include variations in tempo and rhythm; changes in key signature which follow the harmonic structure of the song; bravura arpeggios which punctuate any available space; and mind-bending references to other parts of the same song.

Rather surprisingly for a great jazz pianist, he doesn't improvise in melodic terms, and he does't often quote from other songs. But what he creates is simultaneously a sincere homage to the original and a re-creation which is instantaneously recognisable as his own voice.

Afghanistan - the new Vietnam

There was a very good report from BBC2 tonight on the state of play within US services in Afghanistan.

Good in the sense that it revealed just how nobody within the UK-US axis seems to have learned a single lesson from wars brought on other people within the last fifty years or so.

US troops were being despatched into tours of 'duty' which were preceded by heavy artillery fire into civilian populations.

There wasn't the slightest sign of local Afghans being trained to 'combat terrorists'.

Religious services were conducted in a spirit of avenging former troop losses.

The pre-operation briefings were scabrous foul-mouthed encitements to do the worst.

And every engagmenent with the population was an opportunity to smash down doors, destroy people's homes, arrest the local population, and leave behind a trail of destruction.

And they wonder why the world doesn't love them.

Open Source eCommerce

Here are some of the new guidelines that emerge from the seemingly upside-down world of digital enterprise. I thought I would make a list which can easily be updated as we go along.

1. It's possible to make a lot of sales with minority products - because of the wide reach of the Internet. See Chris Anderson's the Long Tail.

2. Once a product can be digitised, the price you can charge for it rapidly diminishes to zero.

3. But there is more money to be made by giving things away free of charge than trying to persuade people to pay more for them. See Chris Anderson's FREE: The Future of a Radical Price.

4. The profit is to be made from subsidiary products and services. Linux is free open source software: Redhat makes a profit selling versions of Linux with professional support. Google gives its search service away free of charge - and makes a profit from advertising on its results pages.

5. If thousands and thousands of people are grabbing your work free of charge - celebrate the fact! They are your potential customers.

6. Giving away a free downloadable copy of a book is a good way of increasing sales of a printed version. See Cary Doctorow's Content.

The Tradition of Constructivism

The artistic movement we know as constructivism began in Russia in 1920 as an attempt to define a new art for a new age and New Man. It spread to Germany, attaching itself to the Bauhaus movement, and then moved in the 1930s to France and Switzerland. In theory it continued after the second world war, but it was more evident in practice than in theoretical form, and it now finds modern reflections in the work of designers such as Neville Brody. This collection of manifestos, articles, and agit-prop documents represents the theoretical and propagandist side of the movement - and it must be said that it captures well the exuberance and desire to create something new which erupted from artists such as Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Editor Stephen Bann offers a prefatory essay, putting the documents into a historical context, and he supplies biographical notes to introduce each document, tracing the various intersections of the principle figures.

This was a movement which embraced many forms of art - painting, sculpture, typography, architecture, and photography - as well as what we would now call 'mixed media'. The artists were keen to break with the romantic past, keen to embrace new technologies, new functionalism (useful art) and new abstractions. Many of them also held left-wing political views that harmonised well with the tenor of the early 1920s.

However, their theoretical writings are of a different order than the art works they produced. Many of their artistic manifestos and declarations of intent are couched in terribly abstract generalisations. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner declare quite baldly in The Realistic Manifesto of 1920:

No new artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of life.

And Alexei Gann is even more uncompromising in his proclamation Constructivism of 1922:

DEATH TO ART!

It arose NATURALLY

It developed NATURALLY

And disappeared NATURALLY

MARXISTS MUST WORK IN ORDER TO ELUCIDATE ITS DEATH SCIENTIFICALLY AND TO FORMULATE NEW PHENOMENA OF ARTISTIC LABOUR WITHIN THE NEW HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT OF OUR TIME.

Ironically, these radical attitudes gave the artists problems as soon as the official line in the Soviet Union changed abruptly from pro- to anti-modernism only a few years later under the rise of Stalin. It's interesting to reflect that this form of argument in abstract generalisations, with no detailed examination of concrete examples, is precisely the rhetorical method which was to be used against these modernists by the apparatchicks of the Ministry of Culture from the late 1920s onwards.

The Zhdanhovs of this world didn't sully their proclamations against 'formalists' and 'decadents' by anything so simple as the analysis of real works. For them, naming names or even just dropping hints was enough to send typographists, poets, and artists to the Gulag.

However, it should perhaps be remembered that many visual artists, from art-college onwards, come badly unstuck when it comes to expressing their ideas in words. That's why theories of constructivism and any other movement should be founded on what is produced, not what is said. This is one of the weaknesses of extrapolating aesthetic theories from documents such as those reproduced here. Much huffing and puffing can be expended on whatever artists said about their art, rather than what they produced. But these are theories based on opinions rather than material practice.

This is a publication that is wonderfully rich in scholarly reference and support. There are full attributions for all the illustrations used, notes to the text, a huge bibliography, and full attributions for the sources of all the original documents reproduced. There are also some rather grainy black and white images of constructivist art, typography, and architecture which illustrate the fact that the imaginative products of these artists (irrespective of their sloganeering) was genuinely revolutionary.

Taking a sympathetic attitude to the early efforts of these artists to develop a revolutionary approach to art, it's interesting to note that they thought subjective individual expression ought to be replaced by collective works. They also fondly imagined that the working class would unerringly prefer the most imaginative and original works over traditional offerings. This was a period in which the term 'easel painting' was used in a tone of sneering contempt. The fact that they were largely ignored by the class for whom they thought they were fighting this aesthetic war in no way diminishes their achievements.

And occasionally nuggets of genuine insight emerge from all the generalizing dreck - as in Osip Brik's observation regarding Rodchenko's approach to constructivism:

The applied artist has nothing to do if he can't embellish an object; for Rodchenko a complete lack of embellishment is a necessary condition for a proper construction of the object.

The documents span the period from the birth of constructivism in 1920 up to the post-war remnants of the movement. This is something of a special interest publication, but it's well worth studying to understand the political and theoretical notions that provided the impetus behind an artistic endeavour which is still influential today. The theory might be dated, but constuctivist works of art are certainly not.

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Stephen Bann (ed), The Tradition of Constructivism, Da Capo Press, 1990, pp.334, ISBN 0306803968

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Content - copyright, DRM, and open sources

Cory Doctorow is a young Canadian freelance writer and web entrepreneur who lives in London. He's co-editor of Boing-Boing and former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; he writes science fiction novels, and he gives his work away free of charge - yet makes a living from his writing. How can it be done? That's one of the things he explains here. This is a collection of speeches, essays, and articles he has produced in the last few years, proselytising in favour of open source software, against digital rights management (DRM) systems, against censorship, in favour of the free exchange of information, unhindered by state controls or commercial prohibitions. At their most fervent, his arguments come across like those of a students' union activist - but he's brave. He speaks against Digital Rights Management (DRM) to an audience at Microsoft.

The reason he's a successful journalist is that he understands new media technology, and he has a gift for wrapping up his arguments in a vivid and succinct manner:

Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

He has a racy and amusing journalistic style. He writes in short, almost epigrammatic statements with a no-holds-barred attitude to any potential opposition.

As Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology, and the King of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of [embarrassing] information off the Internet is like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool. Good luck with that.

Some of the items are quite short - quick reprints of web pages from the Guardian technology section - but they are all pertinent to the issues of creativity and new media. Why for example does the best eCommerce site in the world (Amazon) want to control what you do with your Kindle downloads? Doctorow argues that these are short-sighted policies which prevent the spread of information and the creation of new developments.

He's gung-ho about the business of eBooks and eCommerce. He makes his books available free as downloads on the Internet, confident that this will result in more sales of the printed book. There's no actual proof that it results in more sales - but he's happy with the results, and so is his publisher, and the publicity gives him income from other sources, such as journalism and speaking engagements.

Having said that, more than 300,000 copies of his first novel were downloaded for free, resulting in 10,000 printed books sold. As he argues, that's like thirty people picking up the book and looking at it in a bookstore for every one who made a purchase. But the thirty pickups cost almost nothing, and I think many authors would be very happy with sales of ten thousand.

[It should be remembered that the average full time writer makes approximately £3,000-5,000 a year - and if you look at that in terms of a forty hour week, it's less than £2.50 per hour.]

The sheer range of his subjects is truly impressive. There's a chilling insider report from a committee discussing DRM, an essay on a sub-genre of science fiction writing called fanfic, and even a satirical piece calling into question the limitations of meta-data.

He's at his strongest on the subject of copyright - and that includes the rights of the person who buys the book, the film, or the MP3 music file. The author has the right to be paid for selling it to you, but you have the right to do with it (almost) whatever you wish.

He has any number of interesting things to say about the nature of eBooks - from their apparent problems, their multiple formats, and their malleability, to the issues surrounding copyright. And the encouraging thing is that he writes not just in theory but as a working writer who is exploring the eBook business and what it can do - for both authors and readers.

If you want to know what's happening at the sharp end of digital publication and new ideas about the relationships between authors and their readers - do yourself a favour and listen to what he has to say. You might not agree with it all, but it will give you plenty to be thinking about.

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Cory Doctorow, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008, pp.213, ISBN 1892391813

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Open Source Publishing

The open source movement began in software development. People hacking code for operating systems and Big Applications started writing the same thing, but for free, and were joined by thousands of others. They were prepared to give their labour without charge to a cause for the common good.

That's all rather abstract. In concrete terms it means you can now have everything from operating systems (Linux, Ubuntu) to office suites (Open Office) and media software (Gimp, Audacity) completely free of charge.

More than that - the software is regularly updated (free again) and it probably even updates itself automatically. So you can't lose.

At the same time, there have been two other developments in technology which have had a profound effect on the way business is conducted in the digital age.

The first of these is that more and more people conduct business transactions over the Internet.

The second is that .if something can be digitised (book, picture, music) and can be downloaded - then there's no real reason why it shouldn't be free. WIRED editor Chris Anderson argues quite persuasively in his recent book FREE that modern businesses have shifted to a model whereby the basic goods are given away - free of charge. The business then makes money out of selling supplementary services.

Pop bands release their songs as free MP3 downloads, but then sell well-packaged CD versions containing extra tracks and videos of live performances. Airlines sell flights for next to nothing - but then make their money selling you coffee and Hello magazine. Software companies give away copies of operating systems such as Linux and Ubuntu - but then make their money in offering support services.

So far this model has not affected book publishing - which is notoriously conservative in its methods. But now two things are obvious. One, that a physical printed object is only one form a book might take. Second, that publishers (and individual authors) can go down this same route of the digital revolution - if they have the inclination and courage. Cory Doctorow has recently taken this step - even with a literary genre as (semi)traditional as science fiction. His basic text is released free of charge. You download it as a text file or a PDF. In both cases you can read the text on screen - free of charge. But if you want the comfortable feeling of a printed book to hold in your hands, then you have to pay - though not much.

And if you want the book printed in some glamorous fashion, with lots of extras, you have to pay a little more. Then if you want the super-delux hardback edition, which has a memory stick embedded in the cover - there's a premium to pay.

All these variations are possible because of another recent technology - print on demand. It's now possible to produce quite small print runs of books (with runs as small as just one) so long as the source code is digitised.

All of this adds up to what I am calling Open Source Publishing.

If you've written something, it's quite obvious that you can put the text on the Web for the whole world to see. You can circulate news of that publication as widely as you wish. But you can also make that text available to anyone who wishes to download it - and simultaneously profit from your labours by selling versions in other formats which some people might prefer.

All of this might seem slightly amateurish and homespun compared with the multi-million pound earnings and the best-selling sales of celebrity authors.

But they are the exception. Most writers earn very little from the books they write. The average earnings of most full time writers are about £5,000 per annum - which when you spread that over a normal working day is less than the minimum wage in the UK. In financial terms, you are earning less than a domestic cleaner. In fact you are earning roughly £2.50 per hour.

More on this shortly.

Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching

I have been critical of these Moodle guides in the past. That's because most of them are not much more than an explanation of Moodle features, but no suggestions about how they might be used to create dynamic eLearning courses, exploiting the interactivity that Moodle offers. This book is far more useful, because it approaches these issues the other way round. It starts with the premise of online learning design, then shows how it can be done using Moodle. Jeff Stanford very sensibly begins by explaining the structure of a course in Moodle, and how its parts relate to each other. It's important if you haven't used Moodle before to understand the difference between course content and the extras that can be attached via blocks and add-on modules. [You also need to get used to the names of all these features.] All this will help you to conceptualise your course design, and it explains clever supplements such as Mobile Quiz which allows the downloading of quiz questions onto mobile phones.

Stanford also explains how to choose all the important settings for a course - the various permissions, users, course timetable, and what will be shown to students in the way of grades, results, and feedback. All of these options are amazingly detailed and customisable from within Moodle - so long as you know your way around the various settings.

All of his explanations are offered in a direct 'Here's how to do it' manner, with screenshots showing you what to expect and copious lists of free software to help you achieve what you're looking for. But be warned! Take anything new one step at a time, and don't expect to create a richly interactive multimedia course in just a few days. Or - if you are new to Moodle - even a few weeks.

He explains how to create quizzes - and here's an extra tip from someone who did this the hard way. You should learn how to categorise and store your quiz questions groups, so that you can re-use them in different combinations. This will save you the laborious effort of re-keying questions and their multiple possible answers.

The book understandably uses language learning as its pedagogic objective, but in fact almost all of the features of Moodle discussed could be used for creating courses in other subjects. For instance the glossary building activity to create lists of key terms and a 'word a day' feature; the Chat module, which acts in the same way as other Instant Messaging systems; or the 'Hot Potatoes' quiz-making module.

It's assumed that the second language being taught is English, so this makes both the ideas and the examples useful for teachers of English, communication skills, or other language-oriented courses.

Many of the stages of course creation involve entering small items of information into a data base using forms. There is quite a conceptual gap between the data entry process and what appears on screen as the final result to a user. You should expect to find this quite arduous at first, but then straightforward once you've done it a few times.

There are lots of different types of quizzes possible - missing words, multiple choice questions, matching words, or matching pictures to text - and you can also shuffle questions so that no two people see them in the same order (which I can assure you helps to minimize copying by students using adjacent screens).

For a language course he naturally explains the use of audio and video files to enhance learning. There's a free add-on module called NanoGong which can be used in conjunction with a quiz to produce vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, and word stress exercises. You can also make short podcasts or add dictation exercises to which students reply in writing.

There are any number of opportunities to allow students to interact with each other, compare notes, see each other's blog entries, rate discussion contributions, swap messages via email and the forum, and comment on each other's work. But here's another tip from hard won experience. Before you design a course, make sure how much time the tutor (even if that is you) can spend monitoring all this activity and participation in group work. Many institutions see online learning as a way of saving the expense of tutor time, rather than enhancing the student's learning experience.

Writing activities are relatively straightforward. Students enter text and save their efforts as a journal, a blog, their profile, or as an assignment. You'll be lucky if they do just one of these. But they do like feedback on any work submitted - so the book quite rightly ends with a section explaining the huge variety of assessment and grading systems that are available in Moodle.

In fact there is so much guidance and support available that it won't all fit in this (fairly long) book. So two additional chapters have been placed on the publisher's web site. These cover making your Moodle course materials look nice on screen, and preparing your students to use Moodle.

I've a feeling that the publishers Packt have learned from feedback on their earlier Moodle guides, and have wisely gone down the road of putting the designer's needs first. Their formula works well here, and this guide for me is a better manual for designing courses than all the others currently available.

We've been designing customised Moodle courses at www.texman.net for the last few years now, and having a guide like this at the outset would have flattened what at times was a painfully steep learning curve.

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Jeff Stanford, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching, Birmingham: Packt, 2009, pp.505, ISBN 1847196241

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More on CMS

The content management system (CMS) continues to preoccupy me as I prepare for a re-launch of my web site. It's been built up over so many years (I now realise) that it has 1,500 pages - many more than most small business sites. And as I've recorded earlier, only a CMS can help me with managing this amount of material.

Entering information about pages, products, and services into a database is a strange experience - because there is such an enormous gap between the page where one enters this information and its final appearance on screen. In fact the main observation about this process (which I might have made before) is that there is a complete separation of content and appearance.

Almost every detail of the information is separated into a different part of the database - the title of a page, the sub-title, any graphics, the tags, the category to which an item belongs, the author, the date of composition, and anything to which it might be related.

And the good thing about a CMS is that these separate items of information are stored in their own little boxes (I'm being a bit metaphorical here) which can be reassembled in any way required later. The data base is the MySQL part, and the software which decides what to do with this information is PHP. It can be programmed to drag whatever you wish out of the boxes and assembled on the page which appears on screen.

Because all the items are kept separate, it's easy to say - give me a list of page titles in alphabetical order' or give me three lists of items in category x, y, and z. You can even say - put all these items into one web page, arranging the information in two columns.

How it actually appears on screen is decided by style sheets (CSS) - which I must say is something of an arcane wizardry. I know only the first rudiments of this business, but what I appreciate is that it's another element which is more powerful for being kept separate from all the other information.

So if you want any mention of class A widgets to appear in Arial bold, this is arranged just once in the style sheet, as are all other decisions regarding the appearance of headers, footers, body text, sub-titles, captions, and even the placing of graphical elements on the pages.

Sounds very sensible and logical doesn't it? Well, I can tell you that getting all these separate elements to work with each other to produce an aesthetically pleasing result is something of a nightmare. It's what some people call a 'challenge'.

Small Things Considered

Henry Petrowski is professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, North Carolina. He writes extensively on engineering and design in a populist manner which helps to explain academic and scientific matters to the average reader. And he does it very well. He has a fluent and easy style which reads like someone talking to you over drinks on a veranda on a hot sunny afternoon. His main argument in this, one of his many books on the subject, is that considerations of design affect even the small matters of everyday life. And I mean small. Nothing is too insignificant in the running of a normal house to escape his attention - thirty pages on a glass of water, a whole chapter on coffee cup holders in cars, or on the design of paper bags. There's even a chapter on the positioning of handles on doors.

The reason this is all spelled out at such length is that as part of his leisurely style, he looks at all the ways the design of something might have gone wrong, how the designers could have failed or overlooked some important requirement - before he goes on to look at the more essential element of how they got it right. Nevertheless, his sub-title is significant: even the best-designed objects can eventually be improved upon. As he points out, most patent applications carry 'Improvement on ...' as part of their title.

The best parts of his accounts are where he delivers the history of a design or an invention, the practicalities of making something work and the financing of prototypes and commercial models. He's also good the moment he strays into issues of patents, copyright, and ownership, because he obviously knows the history of his subject.

He waxes eloquently about very basic products such as duct tape, WD-40, and Teflon, pointing out just how much research and design went into these apparently simple items. Indeed, WD-40 even gets its name from the fact that the manufacturer's previous thirty-nine attempts to develop a Water Displacement prototype had not been successful. It was the fortieth that delivered the goods - and then more so when people found all sorts of inventive uses for it. Now it is used for oiling squeaky hinges, loosening stubborn bolts, dissolving glue, and even killing insects.

The most successful chapters are those that consider the details of a specific and complex product. Office chairs are a good case in point. His account of how the Herman Miller Aeron displaced the Steelcase chair of the 1950s takes into account ergonomics, materials, design innovation, ecology, and even social attitudes, though curiously enough he doesn't mention economics (the Aeron is formidably expensive - as I discovered when I tried to buy one recently).

This is a book to be read alongside Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World. It certainly warrants a place on the syllabus of any serious design course, though I doubt that it will reach the classic status of those other two texts, even though it attempts to do so.

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Henry Petrowski, Small Things Considered, New York: Vintage Books, 2003, pp.288, ISBN 1400032938

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