Your summer reading list

During a recent reporting trip touring Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” I listened to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, published in 1999. It’s the second installment in a prescient trilogy, set in an America barely hanging on in 2032: environmental degradation, economic chaos, widespread violence, a wave of detentions, and a zealous tyrant running for President.

It turned out to be… an interesting choice.

“We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises,” said the narrator, as I drove past the sugar plantations and petrochemical plants.

Reading fiction for insight and pleasure is my lifeline, a practice I have been intentional about since a series of interlocking crises — from quarantine to the deaths of loved ones — showed me that my frantic soul was starved for inspiration. I now consume novels like the brain food they are — ping me if you’d like to see my list.

But your lists matter more.

We’re always curious about how you feed your soul, so for our most recent book list, deputy editor Rachel Paese reached out to the Design Observer community with a simple question: what book made you a better designer?

The answers below were varied and inspiring, and perfect fodder for anyone who wants to understand how things are and can be better. Who says your summer beach read can’t be good for the world?

What’s on your reading list? Let’s chat.

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This edition of The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.

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It was Munari’s way of seeing — curious, playful, visionary, systematic, and human all at once — that shaped Giorgia Lupi more than any other book, she tells Design Observer. The information designer and Pentagram partner keeps returning to Bruno Munari’s Da cosa nasce cosa — published in English as Design as Art — because, as she puts it, “design is not only about solving problems, but about opening up new ways of seeing.”

For Alix Pollack, Catalyst’s Head of Knowledge Transformation and Solution Development, the pick is less about tactics than orientation. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point taught her not to underestimate the slow work of chipping away at progress. “Change happens slowly, and all at once,” she says, and the book reminds her that the long game is the work.

Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, Julia Watson’s survey of Indigenous design intelligence, opened Ari Melenciano to international, deeply imaginative ways of solving human problems. The artist, designer, and educator — founder of Afrotectopia and a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program — found in it solutions that are “incredibly eco-friendly and sustainable,” she says, “while always considering the health of the Earth.”

What makes something beautiful? It’s a quiet, internal question that keeps resounding for Jonsara Ruth, co-founder and design director of Parsons’ Healthy Materials Lab — and the one Soetsu Yanagi’s The Unknown Craftsman keeps answering from the perspective of craft, clay, and the human interaction with materials. “I feel filled when I read these insights,” she says of the book, a Japanese meditation on beauty she’s returned to across several decades.

The one book Ethan Marcotte wishes he’d read at the very beginning of his career is Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology. The web designer who coined “responsive web design“ credits Franklin with rewiring how he thinks about his practice — her argument that technology is a social force “capable of reshaping, and if we’re not careful, harming people’s lives,” he says. It’s a book he wishes every designer would read.

Rachael Dietkus found her copy of Edward de Bono’s Children Solve Problems secondhand at a campus bookstore in the early 1990s, caught between studying design and switching to sociology — so “it resonated with me on many levels.” The social worker-designer and founder of Social Workers Who Design was intrigued by its short stories, illustrations, and de Bono’s analysis of how children addressed barriers; the 1972 book became her “unexpected introduction to public service design and systems thinking.”

Jamer Hunt admits he’s going to cheat and name an essay rather than a book: Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.“For the writer and Program Director for University Curriculum at The New School — and founding director of Parsons’ Transdisciplinary Design program — it’s a dazzling reminder that creative making can precede seeing and understanding, and that, as he puts it, “attunement to the cat’s shimmer is all you need to start.”

Without a doubt — and, she’d say, unsurprisingly — Dionna Dorsey names The Artist’s Way. The designer, creative director, and co-founder and CEO of The Creative Ladder has a standing instruction for any creative who hasn’t yet read Julia Cameron’s classic: “drop everything and read it now.“

Dave Snyder offers a bit of a curveball. It was the ads in Thrasher and Transworld — skateboarding’s mid-90s typographic moment — that first piqued the Siberia partner and head of design’s interest in design, and in typography specifically. “And I liked it,” he says. But it was Michael Bierut’s Looking Closer series, which collected critical essays on design, that truly shifted his worldview about how we think, write, and explore the importance of the craft: design with the capital “D.”