More design reading!

It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and read a bunch of design literature. Recently, I finished the following design books:

Design is a Job deals primarily with justifying the value of design to clients and stakeholders. Mike takes a strong stance on the importance of the design process and encourages design to not work for free. It’s about building confidence in yourself and to charge what you’re worth for your services. He addresses the common misconceptions of design being a creative dabble at art shrouded in mystery. He makes a valid case, through many real-life examples, for why design is an actual job and why designers should be treated with the same respect that other professions are. I would highly recommend this to anyone starting out in the industry or anyone who freelances in general. It’s quite an eye-opening exposition to the business of design, a very real facet of the skill that is rarely taught in design schools.

Design for Real Life is an excellent modern day take on all the shortcomings of well-intentioned design products that fell victim to unforeseen events. It deals with the lack of foresight in design teams that put out features without fully considering their social and emotional implications. In our present “fail fast and fail hard” culture, we tend to ship things and later refine based on how the market reacts to it. The authors use many examples from recent software products that tried this, only to realize that they marginalized and offended many different minority groups who created a PR nightmare for the product by speaking out about their negative experiences. The authors argue for the necessity of emotional QA in software and fight for inclusive design to play a role in the creation of every product that’s put out. It’s a very relatable book written with plenty of recent examples that I believe will be valuable for any designer to read and learn from.

Design for the Real World is one of those must-read design classics. Originally written in 1970, the author makes a strong case for why designers should be designing for real, actual human needs and not for the artificially created wants of society. He shoots down the evolution of manipulative advertising and unnecessarily short product lifecycles for deluding American consumers into a sense of false expectations from products. Instead of looking for meaningful changes in the next version of things we buy, we’re impressed with a new coat of paint or a slightly faster operating time. He encourages designers to solve real problems for the third world — those of food shortages and storage, of designing for agriculture and waste removal, and of clean water. He also stresses the huge need for design work to be done in making products for the handicapped, elderly, or the disabled. He provides designers with strategies on how to sidestep the profit-driven one percent of the world iterating on incremental changes for a market that already has everything and instead focus on true human needs outside of the consumerist hellhole that is America. It’s a very dense book covering a wide range of topics, but I highly recommend this to designers to get a sense of what real design problems are like.

I wish I made more time to read up on design books. I’m glad I made some to read the three above because they were all fascinating and extremely insightful. It’s fantastic to see that there are people out there like Monteiro who are showing designers how to avoid being ripped off and get their money’s worth in Design is a Job. It’s humbling to realize that web professionals like Meyer & Watcher-Boettcher were willing enough to point out mistakes made by large design agencies in Design for Real Life and offer advice to designers on how not to make those mistakes with the right amount of forethought. It’s amazing how many of Papanek’s predictions in Design for the Real World, made in 1970, have come eerily true by 2015 and how much we need strategies to combat the human scale effects of pollution, overpopulation, world hunger, and mass consumerism now more than ever.

Most of us in the design industry are more or less self-taught and tend to be keenly aware of problems not just in design, but in design education as well. This is why we braindump all of our thoughts into books or blog posts. It’s refreshing to know that there are other design professionals in the world who are not only aware of these problems, but are actively fighting to be heard and enforce societal change over it. They can’t do it alone, so they’re calling upon the worker bees of their own profession — young designers. I guarantee that you’ll have a new mindset on the industry if you read at least one of these books, so please make some time to educate yourself. You won’t regret it.