This post is a compilation of a few of my weekly newsletters. I wanted to compile these book recommendations into a single post. Sign up there for weekly posts from me.
The books in this post:
- Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-Design for Real Mindsets, Methods, and Movements by Kelly Ann McKercher
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
- Things that make us smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine by Don Norman
- Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed by Men by Caroline Criado-Perez
- Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec
- The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi
- The Object by Anthony Hudek
- Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté
- Souvenir by Rolf Potts
- The World In A Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization by Vince Beiser
- In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
- White by Kenya Hara
These past months I’ve been diving deep into books. In this past year when I haven’t been able to fully explore places or physical creation, I’ve found that reading scratches curiosity, helps me find new questions of inquiry, and helps me consider new conclusions that I haven’t yet considered. Here are some of my favorite books on design approaches and processes.
Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-Design for Real Mindsets, Methods, and Movements
Kelly Ann McKercher
The brilliant senior designer on my last project recommended this book to me. There were so many nuggets, tips, processes, and flags on carrying out a truly inclusive design process. Ever since I’ve gotten into design, I’ve been taught that it is inherently for everyone. A general impression I gathered through 4 years of design school is that ‘Human centered’ design is enough on its own and can solve a huge number of problems. While we did discuss shortcomings of design and had many theoretical conversations and lectures on the larger systemic issues, we did not put much of that thought into practice. There’s only so much you can put into practice within the bubble of theoretical projects in school. Even so, I feel like this book should be required reading for every designer engaging in research and creation.
What makes a design process inclusive? Noticeably absent from my original design education were terms like ‘redistribution of power,’ ‘colonizing design,’ and ‘lived experience’ which this book goes deeply into. While there are a number of tools and frameworks to facilitate real co-design, the biggest takeaway from this book was the need for broader conditions and organizational structures to keep us from falling into what we’ve always done. Moving at the speed of connection and no faster, prioritizing relationships rather than outputs, and shifting from designing for to designing with and designing by. My hope is that the field of design continues to evolve and reexamine itself to champion equity.
“Codesign is an approach to designing with, not for, people. It involves power sharing, prioritizing relationships, using participatory means, and building capability….Codesign “initiative” is used deliberately in place of ‘project’ to stress that co-design is not merely a project, but a long term commitment to changing organizational culture and sharing power.” (8)
“When we make decisions on behalf of other people, we assume we understand their dreams, needs, experiences and capacities, or lack thereof. I doing that, we overlook their knowledge and their skills. I believe that in order to improve systems and services we need to build the capability of communities. Codesign is one way of doing that” (10)
“Build the conditions is the first phase of the co-design process. It’s about sharing power, prioritizing relationships, building trust, and establishing the right conditions for the meaningful and safe participation of people with lived experience. While you might be tempted to skip straight to Discover or Design, start here (75)
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford
I learned about this book from Van Neistat, one of my favorite makers and storytellers (I highly recommend his YouTube channel for some highly crafted and honest videos). This book harkened me back to my high school days; I was lucky enough to go to a school that deeply incorporated shop class and emphasized the value of learning through one’s hands. The topics of reality, manual work, devices vs things, form giving, and our abilities to form good judgements kept me stuck to the pages of this book.
“The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of information is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how.” This corresponds roughly to universal knowledge versus the kind that comes from individual experience. If you know that something is the case, then this proposition can be stated from anywhere. In fact, such knowledge aspires to a view from nowhere.” (162)
Things that make us smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
Don Norman
I read this book for a product design studio class back in college. This book served as a backdrop for a number of great class discussions. I found this book more practical and educational than Don Norman’s other more famous book “The Design of Everyday Things.” Our discussions in class revolved around what it means for something to be intuitive, designing systems, hard vs soft technology, and fitting artifacts to people instead of the other way around.
“Humans need a meaningful, accessible representation: sounds, sights, touch, organized in meaningful, interpretable ways. The result, however, is that we are ever more dependent upon the design of our devices to make the information visible and to make the artifact usable.”
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed by Men
Caroline Criado-Perez
This book dives deep into our societal bias to favor men in all of our designs from the expected and unexpected; traffic patterns, to crash tests dummy’s, medicine, and taxes. How can we claim to be creating ‘for everyone’ when our scientific and medical testing, product development, and policy creation omit factors of gender and sex? Our cultural default to not disaggregate data based on sex and instead think of males as representative for the entirety of humanity masks needs, narratives, and violence against half of the world’s population. This informative book is deeply frustrating. Reading the overt (and covert) ways in which women are overlooked in designs illuminates the vital need to close the representation gap.
“Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start. And the existence of sex-disaggregated data would certainly make it much harder to keep insisting, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that women’s needs can safely be ignored in pursuit of a greater good (309).”
Dear Data
Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec
I’ve had this book on my wish-list since college and am excited to have finally gotten around to it. I had seen a recording from a talk with the authors before; two informational designers living in New York and London respectively decided to exchange weekly postcards. Each week would have a topic that each designer would collect human data on and then painstakingly transcribe a visualization of the data by hand, using simple pens and pencils. While this hand made process takes longer to make, the removal of a computer instills a whole new element to a normally synthetic process. In the age of big data, this book shows what happens when a human draws every single data point by hand; a remarkable human story emerges, revealing deeper our deeper humanities. The imperfect nature of ordering information elegantly shows the human and a deeper story, untinged by computation.
I do not have a good set of quotes for this book but I will link to the book’s website where you can explore their visual studies.
The Beauty of Everyday Things
Soetsu Yanagi
I stumbled upon this book completely by chance while I was waiting for a friend who was running late. I love how I found this little unassuming book by chance when I decided to pass the time browsing a local bookshop. I quickly consumed this first 15 pages before spontaneously deciding to buy it. What initially struck me was the description for the need of folk craft and beautiful descriptions of the ordinary, useful, and everyday.
“If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. I earnestly believe that in order for beauty to prosper in this world, and in order for use to gain a deeper appreciation of beauty, it is necessary for the utilitarian to also be the beautiful.“(12)
The Object
Anthony Hudek
This book is a collection of essays and papers from various artists on objects in contemporary art. While it was a difficult and dense read, there were many nuggets of thought throughout. Without this book, I wouldn’t have absorbed questions about the relationship of objects to subjects, the internalization of definitions, the autonomy and agency of objects, and the irreducibility of ‘thingness.’ I don’t have a single takeaway from this book. Rather, an array of reframed ideas and intriguing topics that I want to continue exploring.
“Because a thing is usually not a shiny new Boeing taking off on its virgin flight. Rather, it might be its wreck, painstakingly pierced together from scrap inside a hangar after its unexpected nosedive into catastrophe. A thing is the ruin of a house in Gaza. A film reel lost or destroyed in civil war. A female body tied up with ropes, fixed in obscene positions. Things condense power and violence. Just as a thing accumulates productive forces and desires, so does it also accumulate destruction and decay.” (48) — Hito Steyerl, A Thing Like You and Me
Rust
Jean-Michel Rabaté
What could be so interesting about rust? I read this book in my last semester of college for a sculpture class on objects. This Bloomsbury series of books is described as “a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.” This book in particular, is about rust. My favorite parts of this book dive into how rust is uniquely American; shamelessly displayed everywhere whereas Europeans tend to cover their rust. I am glad that I read this book before I left Pittsburgh; a place steeped in literal rustic history. While a common perspective is to think that rust is useless and a nuance that one needs to take care of, this book fantastically reframes the scientific oxidation process as a poignant narration of manufacturing culture as well as made, living, and decaying things.
“The distinguishing feature of iron is that iron is not stable enough to be identical with itself.”
“We may say that iron rusted is living; but when pure or polished dead” (51).
“In Western culture we’re always striving to see how close the hand can get to the precision of the machine, but once you create something immaculate, where do you go from there? Imperfection, on the other hand, has no limits” (101).
Souvenir
Rolf Potts
This little 100 page book is also a part of the Bloomsbury series on objects and was one of my favorite books this whole year. From the phenomena of seizing tons of counterfeit Eiffel Tower souvenirs, to the practice of collecting objects, this book examines these ‘useless’ objects. I’ve always been taught in design that things must be functional; everything has to fulfill an unmet need. Yet, this book dives into objects that fulfill a different type of need; the need to actualize oneself in the world through objects and physical matter. The book also dives into the dark side of objects; the way objects and souvenirs have rendered the humanity out of people. The way that objects tell stories more about ourselves than they do about themselves. This book changed how I think about the objects that I collect in my life, why I do so, and the role they play in narrating myself in the world.
“Indeed, the process of collecting personal souvenirs invariably serves what sociologist Ning Wang calls “existential authenticity” — a sense that the object reflects a more genuine sense of selfhood in the person who acquired it. “Tourists are not merely searching for authenticity of the Other,” Wang notes. “They also search for the authenticity of and between, themselves… In such a liminal experience people feel they themselves are much more authentic and more freely self-expressed than in everyday life, not because they find the toured objects are authentic but simply because they are engaging in non-ordinary activities, free from the constraints of the daily…Existential authenticity is underscored by the fact that, as travelers, we are by definition itinerant outsiders — strangers in strange lands — who don’t possess the experience or knowledge to objectively evaluate the things we see along the way. When we collect souvenirs, we do so not to evaluate the world, but to narrate the self (94).”
The World In A Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization
Vince Beiser
This fascinating book illuminates how we all rely on an overlooked material: sand. It is the foundation of our cities, our concrete, our glass, our technology, and our science innovation. From phones to fracking (and our low gas prices), sand is a crucial ingredient that we are shockingly running out of. Spurred on by climate change, the pervasiveness of desert sand only stands to increase. Yet this type of desert sand grain remain unusable due to its shape. The valuable sand; beach and ocean sand, is running low, causing us to dredge it up from the ocean floor, exploit poorer countries to export their beaches, and even begin a black market for sand. This book unravels an immensely interconnected and unseen world built upon the simplest unassuming material: sand.
“The beach thus began as a non-place, a void, and it has remained so ever since. From the start its emptiness, its artificial desertification, has been part of its appeal,” writes Gillis. “The appeal of the beach lies in the fact that it excludes all that is ‘workful.’ Its true relation to nature and history must always be concealed, for it functions in modern culture as a primary place of getting away, of oblivion and forgetting.”
In Praise of Shadows
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
While I didn’t love this book as much as I expected, the beautiful poetic writing illuminated new ways of thinking about aesthetics.
“We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity. . . . we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them”
White
Kenya Hara
A final book on Japanese aesthetics; White dives beyond color to get to the essence of what white is: a void, a possibility, a simplicity. I loved reading about white symbolizing such abstract concepts. I also highly recommend “Designing Design” also by Kenya Hara.
“White exists on the periphery of life. Bleached bones connect us to death, but the white of milk and eggs, for example, speaks to us of life.”
“It is easy to think that beauty resides in the realm of creativity. Yet beauty hardly “appears” from nowhere. Recently, I have come to believe that we “discover” it through the cleaning and polishing we do to preserve things as they are… The beauty of a temple garden rests not in the splendid features that were created by a talented designer; rather, its beauty is uncovered through the continual process of cleaning.”
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