The Age of the Image: Literacy in a World of Screens by Stephen Apkon is the first. This should be required reading for the folks at ASCE that publish our national infrastructure report card. In the unthinking age of the image, we engineers constantly forget that we are in an era with a new literacy. We make our infrastructure report cards dense and deep with words and the occasional high school level graphic that are perfect for an age of logic and verbal argument.
Engineering still relies too much on words (and we are not a words profession), where our declining infrastructure must also be wrapped with images (and we are a truly great images profession). From highways to dams to airports, our most trusted collective sense is eyesight. YouTube "uploads" can help craft our new infrastructure message (the word "upload" needs to be strongly embedded in engineering, technology, and innovation).
Policy makers and the public need to understand visually - - the perceiving, absorbing, and interpreting of our physical decline on a screen. If some portion of our national infrastructure is graded D+ (and it has been for five straight years)), show the public what this means in terms of a screen in the Age of Images.
The second book is The Great Indian Phone Book by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey. In 1947, India had only 100,000 phones. India currently has more than 900 million telephone subscribers, 96% of which are mobile users. In the context of either new technology or innovation with old technology, engineers must be interested in the "what it all means" question.
The social, cultural, environmental, and economic impacts must become part of the engineering equation of technological change. How does a single cell phone transform a individual, family, or village? How does technology make it easier and cheaper to do business while improving the quality of life for residents in the megacities of the developing world?
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