Victor Lombardi — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 21:13:16 GMT

Thank you for such a review that goes beyond the book’s content to put the topic in context. I hope to see more reviews like this that strive to become educational vehicles themselves and not just product reports.

Andrew Otwell — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:11 GMT

I’m glad to see another critical review of Designing Interactions. You’ve hit on many of the points I made in my review of it last November.

But frankly, I think you’re being much too nice. Huge sections of this book are garbage—the section on Google is just recapitulating the Larry/Sergey PR myths. Much of it is very sloppily edited, and the interview format is a huge crutch to pad out the text. The best that can be said about the book is that it’s large, and has lots of great pictures.

I think Moggridge’s failure to be crystal clear about his relationship to IDEO and to the many people interviewed in the book is deeply unethical. He doesn’t mention he *founded IDEO* anywhere in the text, for pete’s sake! Come on. I’m ashamed of MIT Press for allowing that to pass.

That he works so hard to make everything here seem like the outcome of “natural” iterative processes is so biased, so much part of Silicon Valley culture of the 1970’s-1990’s that I’m sure he doesn’t even notice it. It’s naked mythologizing, not historical research.

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