So I might cheat a little bit, but I figured I'd post a list of books which I read in the last year which I enjoyed. This is a mini-reading list for an imaginary course I would teach to user experience designers who needed to brush up on product design for the internet world of 2007. To get a background in economics, and social dynamics, and industry change, and stuff like that. Enough, here is the list:
Clayton Christensen
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
(a classic of disruption)
Chris Anderson
The Long Tail
(a new classic about user-generated-content and catalogs and choice)
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life
(an interesting book on the economics or physics of networks and network effects; written by a physicist)
Barry Schwarz
The Paradox of Choice
(nice summary of how people choose stuff, and how strange this phenomenon is; nice complement to long tail)
Geoffrey Moore
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers
(a nice book to understand the way products path to becoming mainstream)
And a couple of fun reads. Historical novel-like stories of the beginning of computings. Particularly in product oriented computer companies. Both of them are either pulitzer prize winning or written by pulitzer prize winning authos. I forget.
Tracy Kidder
The Soul of a New Machine
(a nice story of how a team at data general built a new computer... the high energy creative teams and what they set out to do)
Michael Hiltzik
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age
(a wonderful story of PARC, and the invention of the Alto, which was the first personal computer, with GUI, with networking, and the word processor, and the laser printer, and so much more stuff it's amazing; the people who participated at PARC reads like a who's who of today's world...)
Comments