“What book made you a better designer?”

We reached out to the Design Observer community with a simple question: what book made you a better designer?

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Design as Art by Bruno Munari

It was Munari’s way of seeing — curious, playful, visionary, systematic, and human all at once — that shaped Giorgia Lupi more than any other book, she tells Design Observer. The information designer and Pentagram partner keeps returning to Bruno Munari’s Da cosa nasce cosa — published in English as Design as Art — because, as she puts it, “design is not only about solving problems, but about opening up new ways of seeing.”

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

For Alix Pollack, Catalyst’s Head of Knowledge Transformation and Solution Development, the pick is less about tactics than orientation. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point  taught her not to underestimate the slow work of chipping away at progress. “Change happens slowly, and all at once,” she says, and the book reminds her that the long game is the work.

Lo–Tek. Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson

Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, Julia Watson’s survey of Indigenous design intelligence, opened Ari Melenciano to international, deeply imaginative ways of solving human problems. The artist, designer, and educator — founder of Afrotectopia and a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program — found in it solutions that are “incredibly eco-friendly and sustainable,” she says, “while always considering the health of the Earth.”

The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi

What makes something beautiful? It’s a quiet, internal question that keeps resounding for Jonsara Ruth, co-founder and design director of Parsons’ Healthy Materials Lab — and the one Soetsu Yanagi’s The Unknown Craftsman keeps answering from the perspective of craft, clay, and the human interaction with materials. “I feel filled when I read these insights,” she says of the book, a Japanese meditation on beauty she’s returned to across several decades.

The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin

The one book Ethan Marcotte wishes he’d read at the very beginning of his career is Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology. The web designer who coined “responsive web design” credits Franklin with rewiring how he thinks about his practice — her argument that technology is a social force “capable of reshaping, and if we’re not careful, harming people’s lives,” he says. It’s a book he wishes every designer would read.

Children Solve Problems by Edward de Bono

Rachael Dietkus found her copy of Edward de Bono’s Children Solve Problems secondhand at a campus bookstore in the early 1990s, caught between studying design and switching to sociology — so “it resonated with me on many levels.” The social worker-designer and founder of Social Workers Who Design was intrigued by its short stories, illustrations, and de Bono’s analysis of how children addressed barriers; the 1972 book became her “unexpected introduction to public service design and systems thinking.”

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

Jamer Hunt admits he’s going to cheat and name an essay rather than a book: Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.” For the writer and Program Director for University Curriculum at The New School — and founding director of Parsons’ Transdisciplinary Design program — it’s a dazzling reminder that creative making can precede seeing and understanding, and that, as he puts it, “attunement to the cat’s shimmer is all you need to start.”

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

Without a doubt — and, she’d say, unsurprisingly — Dionna Dorsey names The Artist’s Way. The designer, creative director, and co-founder and CEO of The Creative Ladder has a standing instruction for any creative who hasn’t yet read Julia Cameron’s classic: “drop everything and read it now.”

Looking Closer by Michael Bierut

Dave Snyder offers a bit of a curveball. It was the ads in Thrasher and Transworld — skateboarding’s mid-90s typographic moment — that first piqued the Siberia partner and head of design’s interest in design, and in typography specifically. “And I liked it,” he says. But it was Michael Bierut’s Looking Closer series, which collected critical essays on design, that truly shifted his worldview about how we think, write, and explore the importance of the craft: design with the capital “D.”