Design research books

What is a designer: things, places, messages

Norman Potter.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Models and Constructs

Norman Potter.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives

Brenda Laurel Ed.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Design Writing Research

Abbott Miller, Ellen Lupton.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Screen

Jessica Helfand.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Adaptive design, Graphic design, Reading, Research

Interaction design books

Pink = highly recommended!

Information Appliances and Beyond

Eric Bergman ed. One of the best interaction design books to date. With case-studies on various design problems from Palm OS usability to Nokia contextual design issues. Just enough detail and anecdotes to get a good sense of design process.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Humane Interface

Jef Raskin. An absolutely essential book for anyone developing an interactive product. Raskin explains some excellent ideas for usable interfaces that are better suited to large file systems and the internet.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Designing Visual Interfaces

Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano. A useful book with plenty of visual examples on how to simplify and enhance desktop interfaces.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design

Bob Hughes. Somehow forgotten, this book gives a great overview for successfully designing rich multimedia interfaces.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Reinventing the Wheel

Jessica Helfand. Plotting the history and design of information wheels, those interactive tools that can tell you the cooking time of an egg to the blast radius of a nuclear bomb.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design

Brenda Laurel ed. A collection of dated (early 80s) essays that begin to see interface as a design discipline. Complex and theoretical.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Designing the User Interface

Ben Shneiderman. Really thorough book, concentrating heavily on software interface design from a programming perspective.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Bringing Design to Software

Terry Winograd. A dialogue around the design process in software development.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Plans and Situated Actions

Lucy A. Suchman. A new approach to interaction design using new social science models.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

GUI Bloopers

Jeff Johnson. A lighthearted book highlighting common interface mistakes.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Alan Cooper. Really good ideas to solve common interface design issues. Cooper shows that the biggest problem in interaction design is that it is controlled by the developers and programmers, and advocates the need for interaction designers at every level of software production.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Apple Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface

Apple Computer. The original guidelines for developing MacOS GUI interfaces. The version for MacOS X can be downloaded from apple.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Adaptive design, Interaction design, Reading

Adaptive design books

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Nature of Order

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.com

The Oregon Experiment

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Timeless Way of Building

Christopher Alexander.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

How Buildings Learn

Stewart Brand.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

Mitchel Resnick.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Steven Johnson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

David Weinberger.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Howard Rheingold.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo

Vanessa Colella, Eric Klopfer, Mitchel Resnick.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

A New Kind of Science

Stephen Wolfram.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Control Revolution

Andrew L. Shapiro.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Society of Mind

Marvin Minsky.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Electric Meme

Robert Aunger.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Sherry Turkle.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Virtual Community

Howard Rheingold.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Design for Community

Derek M. Powazek.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Community Building on the Web

Amy Jo Kim.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Online Communities

Jenny Preece.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Adaptive design, Interaction design, Reading, Research, Social

Architecture theory books

City of Collective Memory

M. Christine Boyer.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Breathing Cities: Visualizing Urban Movement

Nick Barley.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture

Manuel Gausa.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Rebuilding the Reichstag

Norman Foster.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Towards a New Architecture

Le Corbusier.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Architecture and Disjunction

Bernard Tschumi.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Manhattan Transcripts

Bernard Tschumi.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Logic of Architecture

William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Mobile: The Art of Portable Architecture

Jennifer Siegal ed.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

City of Bits

William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

E-topia

William J. Mitchell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Strangely Familiar

Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, Jane Rendell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard, Etienne Gilson, John Stilgoe.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

De Stijl

Paul Overy.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Fragments of Utopia

David Wild.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Architects in Cyberspace

Neil Spiller, Martin Pearce.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Architecture, Place, Reading, Research, Urbanism

Design management books

Mastering the Requirements Process

Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Software Requirements

Karl E. Wiegers.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Collaborative Web Development

Jessica Burdman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Web Redesign: Workflow that Works

Kelly Goto, Emily Cotler.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Rapid Application Development

Steve McConnell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Adaptive design, Interaction design, Reading, Research

Information design books

Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design

Paul Mijksenaar. A small, beautiful and polemical book full of fine examples of good information design, read this before tackling Tufte.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Edward Tufte.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Envisioning Information

Edward Tufte.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Visual Explanations

Edward Tufte.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Nicholson Baker.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Digital Diagrams

Trevor Bounford, Alastair Campbell.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Open Here

Paul Mijksenaar and Piet Westendorp.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference

Robert L. Harris.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Information Design

Robert E. Jacobsen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

How to Lie With Statistics

Darrel Huff, Irving Geis.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Information Visualization

Colin Ware.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Readings in Information Visualization

Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, Ben Schneiderman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Global Media Atlas

Mark Balnaves, James Donald, Donald Stephanie Hemelryk.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com / myriad editions

The Atlas of the Future

Ian Pearson.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com / myriad editions

The State of the World Atlas

Dan Smith.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com / myriad editions

How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization and Design

Alan M. MacEachren.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Graphic design, Information design, Reading

Usability books

The Design of Everyday Things

Donald Norman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Things That Make Us Smart

Donald Norman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience

Douglas K. Van Duyne, James Landay, Jason I. Hong.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

User-Centred Web Design

John Cato.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs

Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design

Joann Hackos, Janice Redish.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context

Albert N. Badre.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites

Andrew Chak.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Handheld Usability

Scott Weiss.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities

Michael G. Paciello.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Design by People for People: Essays on Usability

Russell Branaghan.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Designing Web Usability

Jakob Nielsen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Usability Engineering

Jakob Neilsen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Web Site Usability

Jared M. Spool.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Steve Krug.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Interaction design, Reading, Research, Usability

Game design books

Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals

Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Game Design

Bob Bates.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Andrew Rollings, Ernest Adams.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Game Architecture and Design

Andrew Rollings, Dave Morris.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Game On

Lucien King.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

RE:Play

Liz Faber.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Electronic Plastic

Jaro Gielens, Robert Klanten.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Trigger Happy

Steven Poole.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Experience design, Interaction design, Play, Reading, Research

Brand and communication books

No Logo

Naomi Klein.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Guide to Identity

Wally Olins.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Principles of Corporate Communication

Cees van Riel, Wally Olins.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Brand New

Jane Pavitt ed.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Strategic Brand Management

Jean-Noel Kapferer.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Brand Manners

Hamish Pringle, William Gordon.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Experience design, Graphic design, Reading

Business and strategy books

The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from Ideo

Tom Kelley.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Clayton M. Christensen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Dream Society

Rolf Jensen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Experience Economy

B. Joseph Pine.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Experiential Marketing

Bernd H. Schmitt.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Posted in Experience design, Reading, Research