Architecture school dean Alan Balfour: College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta)
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Dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture Alan Balfour divides his book list for Designers & Books in a way that reflects his distinguished career as a scholar, author, and educator. The list contains, he states in his introduction, “first, books that have touched me in the last year or so, most related to supporting and stimulating my own writing; second, writers whose imaginations I can enter, whose books I can get lost within; and third, books that I often return to and continue to value.”

Graphic designer Massimo Pitis: Studio Pitis (Milan)
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“My selection of books reflects my interests in history, sociology, design, and education,” Italian graphic designer and art director Massimo Pitis explains in the introduction to his Designers & Books book list. “What I propose here is a dive into the depths of design thinking—a sea where letters and ornaments, thoughts and words, passions and theories fluctuate constantly, producing new ideas and new words.”

Architect Florian Idenburg: Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (Brooklyn, New York)
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In a comment he makes for Designers & Books about Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book he calls “pretty essential for anyone who ‘designs’ for the future,” architect Florian Idenburg notes that it “tells us we cannot predict, thus depict, what the future will be—all we can do is anticipate.”

Landscape designer Margie Ruddick: Margie Ruddick Landscape (Philadelphia)
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“Novels and poetry have more power than textbooks to convey landscape ideas,” asserts landscape designer Margie Ruddick, whose work includes New York’s Queens Plaza; which has won awards for promoting a new idea of nature in the city, and the Living Water Park in Chengdu, the first ecological park in China, which cleans polluted river water biologically.