The Stuff of Bits

"The central topic of 'The Stuff of Bits' is the materialities of information. This term often brings to mind the materiality of information infrastructures - server farms, air conditioning, fiber optic cable routes, and distributed storage. By contrast, 'The Stuff of Bits' focuses on digital information itself as something with which we - as designers, as users, as citizens, as customers, and as human beings - have a material engagement. The book is anchored by four case studies - one on computer emulation, one on spreadsheets, one on databases, and one on network architectures - organized in terms of the scopes of engagement. Through these cases, a common analytic strategy is to identify not just their materiality but their materialities, that is, not just the brute fact of their material forms but the specific material properties that they display and the consequences of those properties - properties like granularity, transparency, directness, weight, and malleability. The idea is that, in the realm of the digital, everything may be reduced to 'bits' but those bits are not all of equal significance; particular encodings reflect particular needs and expectations of change, adaptation, and evolution. To a certain extent this is similar to 'constraints' and 'affordances' in Don Norman's Six Principles of Design and the driving force behind the Platform Studies series, in that different mediums, or materialities, promote distinct use and reception. As Paul Dourish writes in the Introduction to this book, 'material arrangements of information--how it is represented and how that shapes how it can be put to work--matters significantly for our experience of information and information systems'"--Provided by publisher.