Seth Keen

Interactive TV conference in March 2010 in San Francisco.

Clay Shirky, professor in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is at the forefront of thought and discussion on the future of the Internet and communication technology. From the "Twitter revolution" in Iran and GitHub's collaborative coding process to the death of newspapers and the rise of the Pirate Party in Europe, Shirky has traced the way new and social media have changed the way the world works.

Quote: 'While UK-based pop singer Lily Allen might not immediately come to mind as an anti-piracy evangelist, that’s exactly the mantle she took upon herself for a few weeks in September as she decried the plight of emerging UK artists and got behind proposed harsh anti-file sharing laws.'

From the description: 'A lot of what I read in those days served a similar purpose. A narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.'

A Guide to suggested databases and resources for design research.