124 books and references
The books, reports and platforms the Academy recommends, with where to find each one.
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People
Susan M. Weinschenk · 2011
Susan Weinschenk translates research in psychology, from attention and memory to decision-making, into a hundred concrete guidelines for designers, covering questions from font size to what holds attention on a screen. It works as a compact handbook for the SDF's Humans component, treating design as an intrinsically human act.
101 Things I Learned in Product Design School
Sung Jang, Martin Thaler, Matthew Frederick · 2020
Sung Jang and Martin Thaler, with Matthew Frederick, distil product design into 101 short illustrated lessons covering everything from ergonomics and materials to storytelling and persuasion. It offers a friendly, concise introduction to how the discipline understands and teaches itself.
360 Industrial Design: Basics of the Analytical Product Design
Arman Emami · 2014
Arman Emami's 360° Industrial Design walks through the full development process from first idea to mass production in short, illustrated steps, addressing questions of form, function and feel along the way. It functions as a working compendium for the SDF's Procedures component, the discipline's methods for carrying a concept to a finished outcome.
A Book of Things
Jasper Morrison · 2015
Jasper Morrison's Lars Müller monograph gathers his products and projects with photographs, sketches and his own short texts, making a quiet case for the value of ordinary, well-made things. First published in 2015 and later revised and extended, it reads as a designer's own record of understated design outcomes.
A Handbook of Problems
Rasmus Koch, Gitte Lindeborg Holst · 2005
Rasmus Koch and Gitte Lindeborg Holst document a year of student project work at Designskolen Kolding, run alongside six other design schools worldwide under the Index: Design to Improve Life programme, tackling local and global problems across industrial, interactive and visual-communication design. It captures the SDF's Procedures and Outcomes at work inside design education itself.
A Labour of Love
Lidewij Edelkoort, Philip
Lidewij Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano profile more than seventy contemporary studios across twelve material themes, celebrating craftsmanship as an ethic that points toward responsible, circular and organic production. The book pairs the SDF's Technological and Procedures components under the idea of making as a labour of care.
African Generation: The Power of Design
Hicham Lahlou, Mugendi M’Rithaa · 2019
Fifty designers mapping the creative force of contemporary African design, made in collaboration with local artisans and framed by its authors as an act of solidarity connecting creation, industry and craft. Co-authored by Hicham Lahlou and Mugendi M'Rithaa and published in 2019, it also retraces the history of design across the continent.
Appledesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group
Paul Kunkel · 1997
A behind-the-scenes history of Apple's industrial design group in the years before it became world-famous, illustrating how a design culture produces a signature body of work. Published in 1997 to mark Apple's twentieth anniversary, it traces the group's formation and method through more than 400 illustrations and over 100 products, from Jerry Manock and Hartmut Esslinger to a young Jonathan Ive.
Architectures of Ageing in Place
Anuradha Chatterjee · 2026
Anuradha Chatterjee gathers practice-based critical perspectives on housing designed or refitted so older people can age in place within denser, integrated communities. This record could not be checked against an outside source, so the description here rests on this project's own framing alone.
Atlas of the Senseable City
Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti · 2023
Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti draw on twenty years of research from MIT's Senseable City Lab to argue that the sensor-saturated city needs new kinds of maps, tracking things like pollution, traffic and connectivity, and that who controls those maps is a question of power. Published by Yale University Press, it also points to open, collaborative mapping as a tool underserved communities can use to reclaim some of that power.
Big-Game: Everyday Objects: Industrial Design Works
Anniina Koivu · 2019
Anniina Koivu's monograph on the Swiss studio Big-Game gathers interviews with its three founders about fifteen years of industrial design work, told through the stories behind specific objects such as retail wine bottles, airline cutlery and an Ikea piece. It reads as a record of design outcomes built through a chain of collaborations with makers and brands.
Bio Design: Nature \] Science + Creativity
William Myers (Editor), Paola Antonelli (Foreword) · 2012
William Myers' Thames & Hudson survey, produced with MoMA and prefaced by Paola Antonelli, documents around seventy projects where designers work directly with living organisms and tissues, from architecture to bioengineering. First published in 2012 with a 2018 revised edition, it extends the SDF's Technological component into the living environment.