Book Reviews: Standards, Style Guides, and Guidelines
Mindful Design: A Survival Guide for Responsible Product Designers, 2nd ed.
Scott Riley. New York, NY: Apress. 2024. 342 pages, including index.
Index Terms—cognitive psychology, emotional manipulation, mindful design, neuroscience, product design
Reviewed by Lynne Cooke, Clinical Assistant Professor, Arizona State University.
When spring tippy toes across the northern hemisphere, slowly pulling off winter’s immodest mantle, the warming woodlands yield a gustatory treasure, morel mushrooms. Much like truffles, they are prized worldwide by chefs. And while morels are most often found popping up here and there on the forest floor, amongst other vernal delights, one occasionally stumbles into a true treasure trove packed with a shameful bounty. Oh, to be so lucky!
Reviewing books is in many ways like hunting the elusive morel; a slow, methodical exploration works best. It’s refreshingly common to uncover a new title with delightful qualities scattered through its hills and dales but to find a “shameful bounty” in any single volume is a rare treat indeed. And, as you may have guessed, that’s exactly the experience when reading Mindful Design: A Survival Guide for Responsible Product Designers by Scott Riley.
If you will sustain a forgiving heart toward the oppressive font used in the lengthy table of contents and the aggressive page layout required to house the significant volume of text, the rewards Riley offers constitute an intellectual feast.
His springboard introduction is brutally honest and discomfiting when he sharply asserts, “Design, in its most abstract sense, is emotional manipulation” (p. xx) and then succinctly delineates his aspiration for the following 335 pages: “To distill the often-saturated worlds of cognitive psychology and neuroscience down to concepts and knowledge that I feel can best inform a pursuit of empowering and positively impacting real humans”(p. xxi).
Riley’s challenge, and it is indeed formidable, might best be described as a post-graduate tag team, grudge match with Robert Sapolsky and Donald Norman as the towering superheroes battling against “conventional industry wisdom” (p. xxii). The expansive scope and tempered insight of his explorations from Chapter 1, “The Cognitive Miser Theory” into Chapter 10, “Facebook’s Celebration of Death” guides the reader from the heady revelations of modern cognitive neurobiology and perceptual psychology into the harsh realities of current design concepts and implementations.
Be advised this is not a light read, but often it is a sarcastically funny one. Riley wants you to develop an evolved mastery of both the how and why of successful, creative design. And while beautifully scaffolded through ten intense chapters, moving with impressive detail and coherence from concept to construct, Mindful Design reads more like an odyssey, an adventure at every turn of the page.
Riley succinctly defines his perspective, “As product designers we’re uniquely positioned between observation and execution” (p. 136). It’s in this “space between” that he has launched a masterly work; a demanding and worthy investment for anyone fascinated by the interface between mind and design. As with the delicate morels, take your time, savor the nuance and appreciate the repast.
The CSE Manual: Scientific Style and Format for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, 9th ed.
Council of Science Editors. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 2024. 816 pages, including index.
Index Terms—digital proofing, diversity and inclusion, format guidelines, publishing standards, scientific style
Reviewed by Avon Murphy, Principal, Murphy Editing and Writing Services.
The ninth edition of The CSE Manual: Scientific Style and Format for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (hereafter “CSE9”) is a triumph of in-depth detail, good sense, and an eye toward the future. It contains four sections: “Publishing Fundamentals,” “General Style Conventions,” “Special Scientific Conventions,” and “Technical Elements of Publications.”
Many users will focus on Part 3 (the longest in the manual), “Special Scientific Conventions.” This section comprises 12 mini style guides, each peculiar to a specific scientific discipline. Thus, we have deep details on electromagnetics, chemical formulas, drugs, genetics, taxonomy and nomenclature, macro-organisms, etc. The chapter “Earth,” for example, provides information on geological time units, soils, aquifers, water, and other topics. This Part is crammed with information-packed tables.
CSE9 contains many positive changes from the previous edition, including greater openness. For example, the Council of Science Editors made a major effort to assign writing and checking duties to non-U.S. professionals. Also, scores of recommendations have been added concerning diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI).
Other improvements include
- Details on three systems of in-text references: citation-sequence, name-year, and citation-name. The editors now prefer the citation-sequence system for the manual while noting that “all 3 systems are widely used and accepted” (p. 646).
- Addition of a welcome chapter, “Digital Standards of Scholarly Journal Publishing.” Of special note here are the table “Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing” and details on digital object identifiers (DOIs).
- Reduction/Elimination of advice on such office routines as making an en dash, the domain of a copyeditor.
- The recommendation to eliminate the place of publication and most access dates in end references.
CSE9 makes clear that most proofing is now done electronically: “Since publishers, printers, and journal offices moved to paperless workflows, it has been standard practice to send authors proofs in Portable Document Format (PDF) via email instead of mailing hard-copy galley proofs” (p. 748). Instructions on digitally marking PDFs provide all the details most of us would need. If you must still edit on paper, examples of handwritten proofing marks are provided.
You should take advantage of the online version of CSE9. The print manual is a huge book with an index of only 28 pages that often does not help. In my testing, for example, the printed index failed to locate discussions of the singular they and the practice of putting articles online before print publication. But the excellent search feature in the electronic edition located many relevant paragraphs. If you spend any time consulting the manual, you can save many hours if you have access to the online manual.My best advice is to get both versions. If you buy the book, you currently can get a one-year subscription to The CSE Manual Online for only an extra US$20.00. It’s definitely worth it.