5 Books to Help Designers to Think Differently

From entrepreneurship, creative culture, biographies and more

Starts and stops are the most difficult part of starting anything new.

Here’s some books that can help you in your role, whether you’re leading a team, defining strategy, navigating collaboration in a hybrid world or simply looking for inspiration:

1. Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making (Tony Fadell)
Building great products through the failures and successes of a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur.

2. Why Design Matters (Debbie Millman)
Highlights from interesting conversations with creative people from Millman’s Design Matters’ podcast.

3. Difficult Conversations (Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen)
Practical negotiation and relationship management, authors from the Harvard Negotiation Project.

The point is this: difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values.
— Patton, Stone and Heen

4. Laws of Human Nature (Robert Greene)
Practical psychology such as common fallacies and distilled business advice.

5. Humans Are Underrated (Geoff Colvin)
Habits of effective teams and how they operate effectively: through dense, quick interactions with lots of feedback.

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Feel free to check out my design work or my handbook on UX design, upgrading your portfolio and understanding design thinking.