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Suggested reading from The Design Of Everyday Things

Thought it would be useful to put Don Norman’s list of suggested reading from his book The Design Of Everyday Things in a post with links to each book on Amazon (sadly not all the books are readily available but at least one has reference to them and a way of keeping an eye on them whether they become readily available in the future).

Everyday Things

Fernand Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life
Charles Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

Architectural Design

Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House
Peter Blake’s Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked

Industrial Design

Henry Dreyfuss’ Designing for People
Raymond Loewy’s Never Leave Well Enough Alone
Ralph Caplan’s By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons
Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City
Kevin Lynch’s What Time is This Place?
Adrian Forty’s Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750
Witold Rybczynski’s Home – A Short History of an Idea
Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality

General Issues in Design

Henry Petroski’s To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies
Robert Sommer’s Social design: Creating buildings with people in mind
Herbert A. Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial
Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores
Lucy A. Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication


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