The 30 Most Important Books for Product Designers
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What are the most important books for any product designer--or anyone hoping to crib some design thinking?
One of the most common questions at any student Q&A with a master of design is: Where do you get your inspiration from? And the only answer we've ever heard which makes any sense is: Books. Reading. Keeping your eyes open to ideas, rather than literal pieces of design. And that makes Design Sojourn's list of the 30 most important books for industrial designers particularly useful. That link has short descriptions of each book on the list, from Kenya Hara's Designing Design, a meditation on simplicity and haptic design to Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step, by Edward De Bono, which dissects academic research on creativity. Here's the entire list, with links to Amazon, and which Design Sojourn has helpfully organized into three sections: Thinking, Process, and Designer Skills. The first two will be particularly useful to anyone hoping to apply design thinking more broadly:
Thinking
1) The Design of Everyday Things
2) The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
3) Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication
4) Designing Design
5) Universal Principles of Design
6) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
7) It’s Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World’s Best Selling Book
8) The Lovemarks Effect: Winning in the Consumer Revolution
9) Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
10) Design (Tom Peters Essentials)
11) Journals from the Design Management Institute by DMI members.
12) The Creative Priority : Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business
13) Designing Interactions
14) Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step
15) What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School: Notes From A Street-Smart Executive
16) The 48 Laws of Power
17) The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm
Process
18) Design Secrets: Products 1
19) Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture
20) Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals
21) Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
22) Product Design and Development
23) Managing the Design Factory
Designer Skills
24) Presentation Techniques
25) Creative Marker Techniques: In Combination With Mixed Media
26) Sketching: Drawing Techniques for Product Designers
27) Architecture: Form, Space, & Order
28) Elements of Design: Rowena Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships
29) Basic Visual Concepts And Principles For Artists, Architects And Designers
30) Digital Lighting and Rendering (2nd Edition)
Read more on the list here. If you've already got all these books, you might be interested in Design Observer's summer reading list.
[Via Core 77]
