Product & interaction designerBuilding products from 0 to 1, with care for how they work and how they make people feel.
Library.
An ongoing shelf of the books the work is argued out of — novels mostly, and whatever else is being read at the time. Open a spine to read why it is here.
6 on the shelf · reading 1
Design as Art
Bruno Munari
Short pieces on lamps, forks, oranges and the shape of a letter, written in 1966 and still the least precious thing anyone has said about the job. Munari's argument is that design is ordinary work done attentively.
Published
2008
Publisher
Penguin Modern Classics
Format
Paperback
Extent
224 pages
After Dark
Haruki Murakami
One night in Tokyo, told almost in camera directions. The whole book runs between midnight and dawn and keeps checking the clock, which is what makes the hours feel as long as they do.
Published
2008
Publisher
Vintage
Format
Paperback
Extent
256 pages
The Employees
Olga Ravn
A workplace novel told entirely in employee statements aboard a ship, half the crew human and half not. It is a book about objects and what people need from them, which is a strange and useful thing to read as a designer.
Published
2020
Publisher
Lolli Editions
Format
Paperback
Extent
136 pages
The Door
Magda Szabó
A writer and the housekeeper who will not be known by her. Twenty years of two people getting each other wrong, and the only novel I can think of where a locked door carries the whole argument.
Published
2005
Publisher
Vintage Classics
Format
Paperback
Extent
272 pages
I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman
Forty women in a cage underground, and a narrator who has no memory of anything before it. Written in 1995 and almost unbearably patient about how a person builds a world out of nothing to go on.
Published
2019
Publisher
Vintage Classics
Format
Paperback
Extent
208 pages
A Quiet Place
Seichō Matsumoto
A civil servant's wife dies in a backstreet a long way from anywhere she should have been, and the case is really his slow reconstruction of a marriage. Matsumoto is better on salarymen than on the crime.