Adaptive design books

This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design, building out a personal canon from books I was buying, borrowing from libraries, or lending to students. The lists are grouped by topic. This one is on adaptive design: emergence, pattern languages, the design of things that learn or evolve, and the classics on how cities and communities organise themselves.
Christopher Alexander is the spine of this shelf, from Notes on the Synthesis of Form through A Pattern Language to The Nature of Order. Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn is the architectural companion. Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities is the urban-planning foundation. Steven Johnson’s Emergence and Mitchel Resnick’s Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams are the approachable modern introductions to complex adaptive systems. Rheingold’s Smart Mobs is the early-2000s prediction of networked collective behaviour that mostly came true.
The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Nature of Order

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.com

The Oregon Experiment

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Timeless Way of Building

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

How Buildings Learn

Stewart Brand.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

Mitchel Resnick.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Steven Johnson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

David Weinberger.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Howard Rheingold.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo

Vanessa Colella, Eric Klopfer, Mitchel Resnick.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

A New Kind of Science

Stephen Wolfram.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Control Revolution

Andrew L. Shapiro.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Society of Mind

Marvin Minsky.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Electric Meme

Robert Aunger.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Sherry Turkle.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Virtual Community

Howard Rheingold.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Design for Community

Derek M. Powazek.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Community Building on the Web

Amy Jo Kim.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Online Communities

Jenny Preece.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com