I scoured the Internet today for the best books about design, interaction design, digital media, and event planning.
My entrepreneurial path is leading me towards a combination of these industries, so I’m calling my particular niche experience design. To me, this term belies more emphasis on the felt experience of the event, rather than the UX aspect. I’m sort of completing a loop, starting with the low-tech aspects of experience design, like fundraising galas and theatrical performances, traveling over to high-tech design concepts like web accessibility and interaction design in digital and mixed media spaces, and then coming back to bring those principles into in-person, one-off events, or experiences.
I know, I know — I’m working on the pitch.
Here are the titles that appeared again and again in round-up articles for must-read books for designers. I did notice that many of these were authored by white men, so if anyone can recommend more titles by non-cis-white-men, please leave in the comments below.
- Chief Marketing Officers At Work, John Steimle
- Digital Sense, Travis Wright & Chris Snook
- Evil By Design, Chris Nodder
- Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, Indi Young
- Craft of Copywriting, Alastair Compton
- Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug
- Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide, Todd Zaki Worfel
- Badass: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra
- The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
- Hit Makers, Derek Thompson
- What Customers Crave, Nicholas J. Webb
- Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam Grant
- This Is Service Design Thinking, Mark Stickdom
- Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal
- *This one makes me feel a little gross, especially given what I’ve read about Eyal. Read more here.
- The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
- Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, Louis Rosenfeld
- A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, Sarah Horton
- Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf
- Event Planning: The Ultimate Guide To Successful Meetings, Corporate Events, Fundraising Galas, Conferences, Conventions, Incentives and Other Special Events, Judy Allen
- Into the Heart of Meetings: Basic Principles of Meeting Design, Mike van der Vijver
- Special Events: A New Generation and the Next Frontier, Joe Goldblatt
- Sustainable Event Management: A Practical Guide, Meegan Jones
- Window Shopping: Cinema and the Post-Modern, Anne Friedberg
- The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space, Reinhold Martin
- Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott
- Privacy and Publicity: Architecture as Mass Media, Beatriz Colomina
- Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Jean-Francois Augoyard
- Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Martin Campbell-Kelly
- Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Randall Packer
I usually get my books from the library. Are there any books on here (or not!) that you think are essential to own?