A Reading List for Human Centered Design

One question I often get asked a lot is: what books would you recommend to read about (some particular aspect of) Service / Strategic / Human Centred Design / design-led innovation? Of course there are heaps of great books you could read, but most likely you have a current interest or topic you’re wanting to learn more about. Plus you’ll want to focus your precious reading time on books that will add the most value.

Below is a list of some of my favourite and most used design resources. I’ve attempted to sort them such a way for you to find what’s most interesting or useful to you right now.

Theory: Design History & Philosophy of Design

Andrew Blauvelt, “Design’s Ethnographic Turn”
Blauvelt explains his view that we have entered the third phase of Modern design.
https://designobserver.com/article.php?id=5467

Kees Dorst, Frame Innovation
This book is about high-level redesign of social systems — in other words, it concerns itself with design a level or two above services, at the level of intersection between governments, public and community bodies. It starts with a wonderful introduction that suggests that “design, in the most generic sense of the word, is about 250 million years old”. I’ve found this to be a text that I repeatedly return to, and Dorst’s treatment of themes and narratives has been particularly useful to me in deepending my understanding of the process of synthesis.

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969
Simon was an American polymath, social scientist, and nobel prize winner. This text includes the famous and often cited definition of design:
“Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state”

Harold Nelson, The Design Way
A dense and thorough philosophy of design which has been strongly influential in my understanding of design history, as well as Huddle’s practice.

Jon Kolko — Abductive Reasoning
Jon Kolko is a well esteemed voice on design research and synthesis. He is a well published author through blogging and publications. I’ve not read any of his books, but this is his succinct definition of adductive thinking, one of the key distinguishing factors between design research and other approaches. I’ve used this to inform my work when explaining design to people from an engineering backgrond.
http://www.jonkolko.com/writingAbductiveThinking.php

How to…

Create New Practices

Some would say (and I would be one of them) that the ultimate measure of success for any service design project is the creation of new practices; new ways of working. Here are a couple of resources to help to this end.

The Innovation Way, Peter Denning and Robert Dunham.
This is another text which I have, for periods of time, carried around with me everywhere I go. It’s an endlessly useful bible of the creation of new practices. While it draws heavily on the Ontological approach, it would provide useful reading to anyone seeking to transform practices who is not well versed with this approach.

The League of Intrapreneurs
leagueofintrapreneurs.com
The League of Intrapreneurs wasn’t sustaining a terribly active presence in Melbourne last time I checked. It’s a global organisation and publishes The Intrapreneur’s Toolkit, a great resource for bottom up organisational change.

Understand Businesses and How They Work

The First 90 Days, Michael D Watkins
A must read for anyone considering, or entering a position of leadership inside a corporate environment, this book provides a useful overview for a designer seeking to get their head around stakeholder management or wanting to build empathy with leaders.

Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
A reference text on business design that provides a series of examples of different business models, then introduces the business model canvas. Highly readable.

The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
A useful reference text that provides a glossary for anyone seeking to gain a high level understanding of traditional terms relating to business, as well as a checklist for thinking about potential stakeholders / areas of impact when designing for large organisations.

Value Proposition Design, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
The Value Proposition Design canvas introduces key concepts such as customer jobs to be done, pain points and pain relievers. While these all feed into broader components of design, the tool can provide a useful overview when looking to develop a specific product. It also forms the basis for the Business Model Canvas. The Value Proposition canvas can be used in workshops to test (challenge) solution ideas that may not have sufficiently considered the end user and how they are served by the proposed solution.

Get Better at Design Research

The Service Innovation Handbook, Lucy Kimbell
A thorough and thoughtful reference text on service design. In my opinion, this is a far more useful text than This Is Service Design, and a text that I have repeatedly come back to.

Convivial Toolbox — Generative Research for the Front End of Design, Elizabeth B. N. Sanders & Pieter Jan Stappers
A simplistic approach to design research may make the distinction between Ethnographic and Participatory and/or Evaluative research. This book is all about participatory research, and provides a useful, simple and clear reference text for research design that generates user feedback, including many suggestions for research methods.

As Little Research As Possible, Erika Hall
https://vimeo.com/129039134
Erika Hall is a design treasure, founder of Mule Design and top of my list when it comes to thought content. Quirky and articulate, this is her brilliant lecture on design research, sharing a careful explanation of why design research matters, and how we should approach design. She has a habit of making complex things very straightforward and applied. Based around her book by the same name. You can (and would be well advised to) check out more of her brilliant writings here.

Jon Kolko– Synthesis
An rigorous approach that details every step of Kolko’s primary research data collection and synthesis workflow: http://www.themoderniststudio.com/2019/01/07/the-mechanics-of-strategic-storytelling/

Understand who we are and how we behave when designing

The Uncomfortable Secret To Creative Success is Disequilibrium, Sandy Speicher
Speicher describes why thorough design synthesis can be so uncomfortable and confusing. 
https://qz.com/1118085/the-uncomfortable-secret-to-creative-success-is-disequilibrium

Think about the future

The World That We Made, Jonathan Porritt
If only there was more futures thinking as inspired, provocative and balanced as this. Porritt offers a fictional retrospective through protagonist, Alex McKay, who lives in the year 2050 and reflects on how the events of the past century created a new world.

I’d love to hear from you —how  was this useful? What your favourite and most used design resources are? Sign up to the mailing list or drop me a line.