We asked interaction design students this season to name which book influenced their pursuit in interaction design. As a result, a holiday book list that instigated 32 paths:
- Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak; recommended by Stephanie Aaron
- Moral Animal, Robert Wright; recommended by Clint Beharry
- The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Mad-Made Landscape, James Howard Kunstler; recommended by David Bellona
- Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, Thor Heyerdahl; recommended by Kristin Breivik
- 1984, George Orwell; recommended by Christopher Cannon
- Information Architecture, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld; recommended by Derek Chan
- Innovation X, Adam Richardson; recommended by Carmen Dukes
- Beautiful Evidence, Edward R. Tufte; recommended by John Finley
- The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker; recommended by Benjamin Gadbaw
- Rain Makes Applesauce, Julian Scheer and Mavin Bileck; recommended by JoJo Glick
- Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein; recommended by Kristin Graefe
- Massive Change, Bruce Mau; recommended by Angela Huang
- Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan, Azby Brown; recommended by Michael Katayama
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs; recommended by Jeff Kirsch
- To Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, Debbie Millman; recommended by Katie Koch
- A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pinker; recommended by Sarah Koo
- Sounds of Color, Jimmy Liao; recommended by Chia-Wei Liu
- The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher; recommended by Gene Lu
- Understanding Media, Marshall McLuHan; recommended by Russ Maschmeyer
- The Education of an E-Designer, Steven Heller; recommended by Colleen Miller
- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino; recommended by Erin Moore
- Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, Michael Bierut; recommended by Katy Newton
- Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, Scott Belsky; recommended by Adjoa Opoku
- Thoughts on Interaction Design, Jon Kolko; recommended by Evinn Quinn
- How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Adrian Shaughnessy; recommended by Allison Shaw
- You Are Here Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, Katharine Harmon; recommended by Cooper Smith
- The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury recommended by Eric St. Onge
- Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely; recommended by Carrie Stiens
- The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman; recommended by Beatriz Vizcaino
- Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; recommended by Michael Yap
- Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan; recommended by Tina Ye
- A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges; recommended by Catherine Young
As for me, it could as easily be a book of careers, of drawing, or more likely, of philosophy. What I’ve read is where I’ve gone and where I’ll go. Best wishes today in whatever you’re reading, wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing.
