Reading list for the end of 2009

Posted by Fred Oliveira on December 22, 2009 | Comments (2)

I’ve been slowly but steadily getting my reading habit back and have been amassing books to read during the next few weeks. I thought I’d share my current reading list for those interested, and take the chance to ask you what you’re reading right now – as one can never have too many books lined up.

Glimmer, that I referred to in the last post on Design Research, is a great book by Warren Berger on research, process, inspiration and design as a potential solution for the world’s pressing problems. It covers this material with perspectives from designers such as Bruce Mau and Yves Behar, which makes for an interesting read.

Design As Art, by Bruno Munari, is an inspiring voyage into design as a whole and as an art (as the name would imply). I’ve refered to this book in particular in a recent post. It’s worth the purchase for the feel of a well bound Penguin Book alone. And then there’s the content, but it being a Bruno Munari book you know you’re covered.

I got Change by Design by Tim Brown in the mail last week and I can’t tell you how excited I was – I had been waiting for the book to be released for quite a while now. Change by Design is a book on innovation and design thinking. Haven’t gone through it yet, but it is definitely next on the list.

I’m also reading A Week At The Airport by Alain de Botton, that I’ve heard about (if I recall correctly – apologies for the uncertainty) from a post by Dan Hill over at City of Sound. It is a book that tells the experience Alain went through as Writer in Residence for a week at the Heathrow Airport in London.

There’s a bunch more books either in the queue or that I’ve just finished but in order to stop myself from boring you to death with this post, I’ll just briefly list some of their titles:

Curiously all the books I mentioned are hard copies, and while I have a Kindle I seem to have never really picked up on the habit of substituting real books by their digital counterparts. However, the fact that the Kindle now supports native PDF reading is making me use it more often for papers and smaller publication reading. The Kindle DX, however, might make me want to leave more books at home when I travel.

What have you been reading? Anything I should be picking up?

Comments on this post

Nice list! I’ve had someone of those in my wishlists. The last 2 books I read and highly recommend are:

Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, by Andy Hunt
Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.

I’m passionate about how the brain works and the best way to use it so these were amazing books, filled with research and theory yet incredibly practical.

And yes, I want a Kindle DX too… ^^,
Happy Holidays Fred. :)

[...] to talk about and publish soon. Finding more time to read (a list of what I’ve been reading is on my blog) and write has been a blessing. Inspiration is on a local high (it seems like the all time high is [...]

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