Social Design

A delightful adventure is waiting for you in the enchanted Hundred Acre Forest. Come meet Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin, and their woodland friends Piglet, Rabbit, Owl, Eeyore, Kanga, and Baby Roo as they encounter a Woozle search for Eeyore’s lost tail, meet a Heffalump, and mount an expedition to the North Pole! Along the way, these companions will get into and out of trouble with hilarious results. Winnie-the-Pooh will appeal to children and adults of all ages!

Intuition is not some magical property that arises unbidden from the depths of our mind. It is a product of long hours and intelligent design, of meaningful work environments, and particular rules and principles. This audiobook shows us how we can hone our instinctive ability to know in an instant, helping us to bring out the best in our thinking and become better decision-makers in our homes, offices, and in everyday life.

How often do you walk away from a conversation feeling really heard? That it moved the people in it forward in some important way? You’re not alone. In his practice as a designer, Fred Dust began to approach conversations differently. After years of trying to broker communication between colleagues and clients, he came to believe there had to a way to design the art of conversation itself with intention and purpose, but still artful and playful.

The Black Experience in Design spotlights teaching practices, research, stories, and conversations from a Black/African diasporic lens.

In this wide-ranging, character-driven audiobook, science-journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound and sometimes unexpected ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the painkilling power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks.

Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion.

Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. In these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, and memoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods.

Dawnn Karen is a pioneer in the field of fashion psychology, and she has spent years studying the relationship between attire and attitude. In Dress Your Best Life she goes far beyond well-known makeover advice, pushing you to ask yourself: Are my clothing choices hurting me or helping me to achieve my life goals? Her book will help you discover your unique style story, become a smarter shopper, use color to your advantage, match moods to clothing choices, and embrace new or different standards of beauty.

Oxford mathematician and author John Lennox takes a closer look at Hawking's logic regarding what brought the universe into being. In lively, layman's terms, Lennox guides us through the key points in Hawking's arguments - with clear explanations of the latest scientific and philosophical methods and theories - and demonstrates that far from disproving a creator God, they make his existence seem all the more probable.

How do you respond to anger - in yourself or others? Do you fight fire with fire, or run for cover? Dr. Christian Conte created Yield Theory™ as a way to meet conflict without aggression or submissiveness through the practice of compassionate listening, de-escalation, and genuine communication. With Walking Through Anger, he shares this revolutionary model for dealing with inflamed emotions in even the most difficult and charged situations.

In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this audiobook unpacks the ways in which the world has been - and continues to be - remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.

Frances Hodgson Burnett introduces us to Mary Lennox, a spoiled and headstrong young girl sent to live with her uncle Archibald Craven at Misselthwaite Manor after her parents die from a cholera outbreak in India. At first, Mary is as sour and rude as ever. She dislikes her new home, the people living in it, and, most of all, the bleak moor on which it sits.

When planes crash, bridges collapse, and automobile gas tanks explode, we are quick to blame poor design. But Henry Petroski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections. Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and failures, Petroski here takes his analysis a step further, to consider the larger context in which accidents occur. In To Forgive Design he surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time.

A new way of understanding language provides a powerful new foundation and a new set of tools for designing and re-designing your life, at home and at work, and everywhere in between. This is especially relevant for everyone seeking meaningful change in their lives, as well as those for whom building and maintaining mutually-beneficial relationships is important. And it's particularly useful for leaders, managers, salespeople and anyone else who "gets paid to have effective conversations"!

A book unlike any other, Women in Clothes is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities - famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old - on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than 50 questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style.

Stitched Up delves into the alluring world of fashion to reveal what is behind the clothes we wear. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, the book explores consumerism, class, and advertising to reveal the interests which benefit from exploitation. Tansy E. Hoskins dissects fashion’s vampiric relationship with the planet and with our bodies to uncover what makes it so damaging.

It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? In her captivating book, Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, shows us how we tuck gender politics, security, sexuality, and privilege inside our pockets. Pockets is a perfect gift for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.

This book invites readers to reimagine what is possible for small businesses in a rapidly changing world. It begins by challenging entrepreneurs to dream bigger than ever before, laying the groundwork for bold ambition. The book then reveals how profits can grow as costs shrink, showing practical strategies for financial health. Readers learn why cash flow is the business’s lifeline and how to manage it for stability and growth. The focus shifts to customers, emphasizing that exceptional service is the secret to lasting loyalty. Next, the power of brand storytelling is explored, ...

A powerful guide to why even the most well-intentioned innovations go haywire, and the surprising ways we can change course to create a more positive future, by two celebrated experts working at the intersection of design, technology, and learning at Stanford University’s acclaimed d.school.