O Danny Boy

On a tip from Joel Spolsky, I picked up the informative and entertaining Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp. Not that I have read many of them, but Managing Humans is probably one of the best no-bullshit books on managers, staff, and office life in general for those of us who work in the software/web/engineering/design world.

I don’t usually review non-design books here–unless of course, I can somehow relate them to design. But I won’t do that to Book 7 of the Harry Potter series. And No Spoilers for those who are still reading or will wait to see the movies. I finished the book in about 13 hours of solid [...]

Anyone who has ever worked on a large software project that has gone seriously awry and is behind schedule will do as I did: wince their way through Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code. Dreaming in Code is an account of the three years (and counting) spent designing and developing Chandler, a Personal Information Management (PIM) system, led by Mitch Kapor.

Donald G. Reinertsen’s Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developer’s Toolkit isn’t the type of book I typically read or review. But that’s fine; sometimes you need to look at the same thing through a different lens, and Reinertsen provides that: taking a cold, hard look at the design process and its outcomes. Despite the [...]

I was fortunate to get an advance copy of Barbara Ballard’s Designing the Mobile User Experience. In general, it is well-written, authoritative, and a boon to interaction designers working (or better, starting to work) in mobile. While I’m not sure this book alone will really enable you to design mobile user experience, it is a good introduction and overview of the mobile space.

I seldom read books on creativity. Which is kind of stupid, I suppose, since my livelihood depends upon my being creative. But for some reason, perhaps because he is one person in film who really follows his own vision, I was interested to hear what David Lynch (of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks fame) had to say about it in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.

This is the seventh and final installment of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design.

This is part six of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design.

This is part five of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design.

This is part four of a review of the book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. Read part 1 for the overview.