Products of Design’s READING LIST FAVORITES!
Apart from the books that faculty assign in their individual classes, the department has a recommended list of books for students and design enthusiasts alike. (We have close to 1,300 books on our department bookshelves for students to use—you can check out all the titles at our LibraryThing Page), but below is a much shorter list of some of our favorite essentials. Dig in and enjoy!
Delightful Reads
I Wonder
Marian Bantjes
Quirky, poignant, astute, funny—this beautiful book presents a compelling collection of observations on visual culture and design, written and illuminated by world-renowned typographic illustrator Marian Bantjes. In Stefan Sagmeister's telling words, Bantjes's work is his"favorite example of beauty facilitating the communication of meaning."
Girls Garage: How to Use Any Tool, Tackle Any Project, and Build the World You Want to See (Teenage Trailblazers, STEM Building Projects for Girls)
Emily Pilloton
With a background in architecture and construction, Emily Pilloton started the nonprofit Girls Garage to give girls the tools to build the world they want to see. Since 2013, girls ages 9-18 have come to Girls Garage's workshop eager to use power tools and build real-world projects for their community. The Girls Garage book puts that same power into girls' hands around the world, inviting them to join a thriving, diverse, and fierce movement of fearless builder girls.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Dear Data
Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec
Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical.
Design Fundamentals
How Design Makes the World
Scott Berkun
Everything you use, from your home to your smartphone, from highways to supermarkets, was designed by someone. What did they get right? Where did they go wrong? And what can we learn from how these experts think that can help us improve our own lives? In How Design Makes the World, best-selling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook “like” button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you.
User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play
Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant
In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change―an underappreciated but essential history that’s pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time―and you’ll never interact with technology the same way again.
Why Design Matters
Debbie Millman
Over the course of her popular podcast’s fifteen-year reign, Debbie Millman has interviewed more than 400 creative minds. In those conversations, she has not only explored what it means to design a creative life, but has, as Millman’s wife, Roxane Gay, assesses in her foreword, “created a gloriously interesting and ongoing conversation about what it means to live well, overcome trauma, face rejection, learn to love and be loved, and thrive both personally and professional.” In this illustrated, curated anthology, Millman includes approximately 80 of her best interviews with visionaries from across diverse fields. Grouped by category—Legends, Truth Tellers, Culture Makers, Trendsetters, and Visionaries—these eye-opening, entertaining, and enlightening conversations—offer insights into new ways of being and living.
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
Tim Brown
The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This book introduces the idea of design thinking‚ the collaborative process by which the designer′s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people′s needs not only with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy.
How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody
Abby Covert
Everything is getting more complex. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information we encounter each day. Who doesn’t bump up against messes made of information and people every day? This book provides a seven-step process for making sense of any mess. Each chapter contains a set of lessons as well as workbook exercises architected to help you to work through your own mess.
The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman
First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came service. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new competitive frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how--and why--some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
The Sketchnote Handbook: the illustrated guide to visual note taking
Mike Rohde
This gorgeous, fully illustrated handbook tells the story of sketchnotes--why and how you can use them to capture your thinking visually, remember key information more clearly, and share what you've captured with others. Author Mike Rohde shows you how to incorporate sketchnoting techniques into your note-taking process--regardless of your artistic abilities--to help you better process the information that you are hearing and seeing through drawing, and to actually have fun taking notes.
Brutally Honest: No Bullshit Strategies To Evolve Your Creative Business
Emily Cohen
From a Products of Design guest speaker! Brutally Honest is chock full of advice, insights, best business practices, and actionable strategies as well as 20 compelling, real-world case studies from other creative professionals. Critical business challenges explored and addressed in this book include: positioning & specialization, marketing, case studies, new business development, strategies for qualifying new clients, pricing, retainers, proposals, contracts, organizational structures, staff management, client & project management, creative briefs, and industry trends.
Prototyping for Designers: Developing the Best Digital and Physical Products
Kathryn McElroy
Prototyping and user testing is the best way to create successful products, but many designers skip this important step and use gut instinct instead. By explaining the goals and methodologies behind prototyping—and demonstrating how to prototype for both physical and digital products—this practical guide helps beginning and intermediate designers become more comfortable with creating and testing prototypes early and often in the process.
Futuring
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Kevin Kelly
Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends—interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another.
No One is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
This is a story about a life lived in two halves. It's about what happens when real life collides with the world accessed through a screen. It's about where we go when existential threats loom and high-stakes reality claims us back. It's about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.
How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World
Michael Bierut
The first monograph, design manual, and manifesto by Michael Bierut, one of the world’s most renowned graphic designers—a career retrospective that showcases more than thirty-five of his most noteworthy projects for clients as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Yale School of Architecture, the New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the New York Jets, and reflects eclectic enthusiasm and accessibility that has been the hallmark of his career.
How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow's World Today
John Thackara
Are there practical solutions to the many global challenges―climate change, poverty, insufficient healthcare―that threaten our way of life? Author John Thackara has spent a lifetime roving the globe in search of design that serves human needs. In this clear-eyed but ultimately optimistic book, he argues that, in our eagerness to find big technological solutions, we have all too often ignored the astonishing creativity generated when people work together and in harmony with the world around them.
Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects
Paola Antonelli
Since the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s, many objects have been designed to have capabilities well beyond their immediate use or appearance. Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, these objects talk to us, and we have come to expect interaction with them. Contemporary designers, besides giving objects form and function, write their initial scripts--the foundation for useful and satisfying conversations. Talk to Me focuses on projects that involve such direct interaction--including interfaces, websites, video games, devices and tools, and information systems--as well as installations that establish practical, emotional, or even sensual connections to cities, companies, governmental institutions, or other individuals.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Douglas Rushkoff
People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed. Well, the future's arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this "now" is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari
For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.
Inclusiveness
What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
Sara Hendren
A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with.
Designing For Social Change: Strategies for Community-Based Graphic Design
Andrew Shea
Some call it design for the greater good. Others call it social design. Whatever you call it, it's clear that an altruistic impulse is on the rise in the design community. The latest addition to our Design Briefs series, Designing for Social Change, is a compact, hands-on primer for graphic designers who want to use their unique problem-solving skills to help others. Author Andrew Shea presents ten proven strategies for working effectively with community organizations. These strategies can frame the design challenge and create a checklist to keep a project on track. Twenty case studies illustrate how design professionals and students approach unique challenges when working on a social agenda.
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.
There There
Tommy Orange
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering bestselling novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.
Trans Care
Hil Malatino
What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? Trans Care is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates.
Easy Beauty - A Memoir
Chloé Cooper Jones
“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins ChloéCooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life.
Design Philosophy
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
Today, designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).
Designing Design
Kenya Hara
Representing a new generation of designers in Japan, Kenya Hara (born 1958) pays tribute to his mentors, using long overlooked Japanese icons and images in much of his work. In Designing Design , he impresses upon the reader the importance of emptiness in both the visual and philosophical traditions of Japan, and its application to design, made visible by means of numerous examples from his own work.
The Art of Noticing
Rob Walker
From a Products of Design Faculty! Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen. Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing. This gorgeously illustrated volume will spark your creativity--and most importantly, help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises--131 of them--Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague and finally, to rediscover your sense of passion and to notice what really matters to you.
Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible
Jamer Hunt
In Not to Scale, Jamer Hunt investigates the complications of scale in the digital age, highlighting an interesting paradox: We now have a world of information at our fingertips, yet ironically the more informed we have become, the more overwhelmed we feel. The global effects of our daily choices (Paper or plastic? Own or lease? Shop local or buy online?) remain difficult for us to comprehend, and solutions to large-scale national and international issues feel inconceivable. Hunt explains how these challenges are intimately tied to a new logic of scale and provides readers with survival skills for the twenty-first century.
Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary
Dan Hill
In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics - the dark matter" - taking place above the designer's head."
Design Emergency
Paola Antonelli & Alice Rawsthorn
Design Emergency tells the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists, who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes - Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology - Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
Design for Dasein: Understanding the Design of Experiences
Thomas Wendt
The rise of experience design and service design is familiar to anyone involved in design practice. This shift from the design of artifacts to the design of intangible services and experiences calls for a new understanding of design's place in the world. If experience designers are unique in their ability to "design an experience," then understanding the nature of experience should be a priority. This book aims to build on our current understanding of experience design through the lens of phenomenology, a practical philosophy of human existence, interaction, and experience.
A Whole New Strategy
Nathan Shedroff
Traditional business strategy is in crisis, rife with mistakes, misunderstand- ings, and poor assumptions. It mixes market and operational concerns in ways that confuses priorities, ignores customer insights, and hides opportunities. The two most popular strategy tools, the SWOT and Positioning Statement are so poorly used as to make them ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. This book clarifies the different aspects of strategy, offering a process that highlights better opportunities and ties togerther the various components in a new, integrated, and holistic approach to strategy. It integrates systems thinking, stakeholder engagement, trends analysis, and impact so that information, insights, and conclusions are unified across the various contexts of business. This allows leaders to follow the state-of-the- art approaches and tools consistently across teams, perspectives, and initiatives.
Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It
Mike Monteiro
This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we’ve excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we’ve made as a society. If you’re a designer, this book might make you angry. It should make you angry. But it will also give you the tools you need to make better decisions.
The Revolt of the Public
Martin Gurri
In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world.
Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson & Jessica Helfand
A beautifully designed new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” bringing his timeless classic to a contemporary audience. Emerson’s text is widely available to read online, but this new, graphically reimagined edition, produced with Design Observer, elevates his wisdom through the printed word and includes twelve contemporary essays by Jessica Helfand. To suggest, as Emerson’s text does, that the richest lives are lived with an independent mind, spirit, and creativity surely deserves to be celebrated.