If you have recommendations for new books to add to this list, let us know!
Climate Change and Sustainability
There Is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee
A great introduction to the ongoing climate crisis, encompassing pretty much every topic you could think of. Highly recommended to start here.
Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee
A more in-depth investigation into what the actual carbon cost of our everyday lives are. One part encyclopedia and one part lifestyle guide, there’s plenty of great information in here to help you make better decisions for the environment.
Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith
This book looks at how we can solve the climate crisis at the levels of policy and infrastructure. This serves as a blueprint for what a realistic decarbonized future will look like, and a list of demands that we must make of our governments to get there.
Racial and Social Justice
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The history of our country from 1492 to present from the perspective of the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed. A great example of what an inclusive national history could look like, and one we should strive to learn from. Far too many institutions still fail to tell our history with this much honesty and clarity.
Inventing Latinos by Laura Gomez
In order to work towards a more equitable society, we need to understand how we got here. Inventing Latinos is the history of the Latino identity, describing how foreign and immigration policy in the United States was directly responsible for the creation of a Latino identity and the state of the current migrant crisis.
How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
The thesis of Ibram X. Kendi’s work is that not being racist isn’t enough — racism is so deeply entrenched in American institutions that we must actively be anti-racist to change the system. This book is a primer of sorts as to the difference between being neutral (not-racist) versus actively improving racial equality in our society (anti-racist).
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
To say that gun violence is a contentious issue in America is an understatement — but to understand why, we need to delve into America’s complex history of race relations. America’s gun culture is deeply rooted in racialized fear, effectively deputizing citizens to enforce racial hierarchies by force. A super eye-opening book on the role that guns play in institutional racism in America.
A Line in the Sand by James Barr
The West’s relationships with Arabs and Islam are deeply rooted in — you guessed it, colonialism. To understand why the Middle East is such a complex region and the roots of Islamophobia, you need to understand the history. This book covers the history from World War I to the formation of Israel in the Middle East, showing how imperial powers used Islamophobia as a tool to carve up the region and how these modern borders define nearly all conflicts there.
Artificial Intelligence
The New Breed by Kate Darling
While artificial intelligence has capabilities that are novel, the questions that it raises about automation, labor, and social hierarchy are not. Kate Darling dissects our millennia-old relationship with animals to help draw parallels to how our current questions about artificial intelligence are anything but new.
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
A book about how the mass adoption of artificial intelligence is creating hidden risks that threaten to further entrench race, class, and social disparities. A well-argued call for regulation of a completely opaque industry.
Social Media & Technology
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
History, Disrupted by Jason Steinhauer
We think of history as static, as a recollection of the past — but historians know that history is a constantly evolving field. In this book Jason Steinhauer covers how social media and modern technologies have put this process into overdrive, and history is as subjective and mutable as it’s ever been. A super interesting read on the past, present, and future of the field of history.
Future Thinking
The Optimist’s Telescope by Bina Venkataraman
It’s a bit of a trope to say that humans are too short-sighted to be able to think about future generations and save the planet. Bina Venkataraman turns this trope on its head by chronicling communities around the world that have successfully worked together to preserve resources and sustain their future, and investigating how they do it.
The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz
A training guide for scenario planning, a tool that was developed to help businesses think outside of tunnel vision by developing stories about the future. There’s a lot to learn here for how to communicate about the future effectively, tested through decades of research in getting decision-makers to make smarter decisions about the future.
The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
A firsthand report chronicling the disastrous impacts of climate change on eight different climate hotspots around the world. This book is thought-provoking in how it asks how we should emotionally cope with a changing planet.
Video Game Design
Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
A deep dive into the design influences that underlie modern games — focusing a lot on fun and why it’s the most vital element in games. There’s so much to learn from in games, and this is a great intro.
Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle
One of the original reference books for how to design virtual worlds. Super in-depth analysis of players, game types, and how to engage different kinds of players and make immersive worlds. Richard Bartle himself says that, while the book hasn’t been updated since 2003, Chapters 3–5 and 7–8 are the most relevant today.
Design for Museums
What Makes Learning Fun: Principles for the Design of Intrinsically Motivating Museum Exhibits by Deborah Perry
Primarily about exhibition design, this book summarizes a number of great points about what intrinsically makes people want to learn and how to design exhibits that support this.
Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience by John Falk
A summary of why people go to museums by one of the world’s leading museum experts. John Falk has spent decades researching museum visitors and creating population segments (i.e. user personas) that explain the desires of different types of visitors. His work is seminal in the field of museum experience design and a must-read.
User Experience Design
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Don Norman’s influence on user experience design cannot be overstated; he coined the term user-centered design and has been an advocate for user-centered thinking in design for nearly 40 years now. His first book is both an extremely easy and unpretentious read, but also clearly articulates the ideas of user-centered thinking more clearly than almost any other resource.
The Design of Future Things by Don Norman
In this book, Don Norman turns his eye towards human-computer interaction, with a specific emphasis on smart objects. While we’re not in the product-making business, many of his ideas about how to design effective human-machine interfaces translate well to the public space, where users often won’t have instruction manuals and need to learn how to interact with an object quickly.
Emotional Design by Don Norman
A deep dive into the emotional aspect of user-centered design, focusing on the question: why do we form emotional attachments to some objects but not others, and how can we replicate that in our designs? A fascinating look at how to design not just for functionality, but for emotional engagement with your users.
Psychology
Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
Process and Productivity
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
Learning Scrum from the source! Jeff Sutherland is one of the co-creators of Scrum, and this book does an excellent job of explaining why Scrum is organized the way it is, not just what the system is.