Expand Your Horizons: Recommended Reading
Unsurprisingly, the kind of people in the Labs are the same kind of people that like to read a lot. Recommendations fly every time you get more than two of us in a room at the same time and somewhere along the line, some clever person decided to compile a list of them all. So, without further ado, here are a few of the books that we think you might find enjoyable, enlightening or both.
You May Also Like: Taste in an Endless Age of Choice
by Tom Vanderbilt
Given an infinite number of options, you might think that it would be impossible for anyone to form a preference but as this book, and indeed this whole list of books, demonstrates: that isn’t quite the case. This books covers the gamut of psychology, marketing and neuroscience in its pursuit of an answer to the eternal question of why we like the things that we like.
Evil By Design
by Chris Nodder
As a design practice, we have often taken a long hard look into the abyss of Dark Patterns, and seen the Dark Patterns staring back, but nowhere else have we seen the exact methodologies of manipulative design laid out so succinctly and so neatly categorised as in this book. It is a masterclass in tricking people into doing what you want, and a helpful little guide to keep you from falling into the same traps.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
We love looking at the big picture when it comes to design, and you can’t get much bigger than a complete history of the human race. Covering every milestone in our species’ journey to world domination and delving into the role of imagination, religion, nationalism and economics in our development into the species we’ve become.
The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
by Mariana Mazzucato
How is the creation of value rewarded in the current economic system, and how does that central question explain every economic crisis in living memory? This intense book aims to answer this question, and to look at methods to redesign the processes and structures of capitalism with sustainability in mind.
The Green Collar Economy
by Van Jones
On the continuing theme of sustainability and economics, this book takes a look at how we can tackle environmental and economic problems simultaneously. A two birds with one stone solution to a pair of the most pressing problems of our time. Providing not only a big picture overview, but also outlining pragmatic and practical policies that could be introduced.
The Labs Team
