Invited designers and commentators have chosen these as the books that inspire them and that have shaped their worldview or their ideas about design.
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52 books
Wiener Werkstätte: Kunst und Handwerk, 1903–1932
Werner Schweiger
On Carin Goldberg’s Book List
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Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart Brand
On Norman Foster’s Book List
On Richard Saul Wurman’s Book List
On Peter Pennoyer’s Book List
On Michael Manfredi’s Book List
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The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
On Carin Goldberg’s Book List
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Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows et al.
On John Maeda’s Book List
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The System of Objects
Jean Baudrillard
On Neil Denari’s Book List
On Stefano Giovannoni’s Book List
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The Substance of Style
Virginia Postrel
On Adam Tihany’s Book List
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Stone and Steel
Guy Billout
On Kit Hinrichs’s Book List
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Shaping Things
Bruce Sterling
On Tucker Viemeister’s Book List
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The Shape of Things
Vilém Flusser
On James Biber’s Book List
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The Rise of the Creative Class
Richard Florida
On Carola Zwick’s Book List
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The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
On Nathalie de Vries’s Book List
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The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
On Niels Diffrient’s Book List
On Juhani Pallasmaa’s Book List
On Paul Marantz’s Book List
On Stanley Abercrombie’s Book List
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The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (vols. 1–3)
Ernst Cassirer
On Michael Graves’s Book List
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Personal Space
Robert Sommer
On Niels Diffrient’s Book List
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Pedagogical Sketchbook
Paul Klee
On Jürgen Mayer H.’s Book List
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Pasta by Design
George L. Legendre et al.
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Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell
On Gail Anderson’s Book List
On Lisa Jenks’s Book List
On Jeffrey Bernett’s Book List
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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
R. Buckminster Fuller
On Norman Foster’s Book List
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Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Christopher Alexander
On Niels Diffrient’s Book List
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Nature Design
Angeli Sachs
On Zoë Ryan’s Book List
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Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (Vision + Value Series)
György Kepes
On Niels Diffrient’s Book List
On Stanley Abercrombie’s Book List
On James Biber’s Book List
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The Modern Ideal
Paul Greenhalgh
On Gijs Bakker’s Book List
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Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise, The Interface Model
Ray C. Anderson
On Susan S. Szenasy’s Book List
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Meine Lieblings-Flops, gefolgt von einem Ideen-Magazin
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
On Alberto Alessi’s Book List
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McMaster-Carr Catalog
McMaster-Carr
On Craig Hodgetts’s Book List
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Le système des objets (The System of Objects)
Jean Baudrillard
On Alberto Alessi’s Book List
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The Laws of Simplicity
John Maeda
On Tim Brown’s Book List
On list of Books by John Maeda
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The Laws of Form
G. Spencer-Brown
On Neil Denari’s Book List
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Language of Vision
György Kepes
On Massimo Vignelli’s Book List
On Stanley Abercrombie’s Book List
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The Kimono Mind
Bernard Rudofsky
On Tom Geismar’s Book List
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Interface Culture
Steven A. Johnson
On Zoë Ryan’s Book List
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Image/Music/Text
Roland Barthes
On Ellen Lupton’s Book List
On Alexa Hampton’s Book List
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I Seem To Be a Verb
R. Buckminster Fuller
On Jennifer Morla’s Book List
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How to See: A Guide to Reading Our Manmade Environment
George Nelson
On Amanda Dameron’s Book List
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How to See
George Nelson
On Stanley Abercrombie’s Book List
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How Brands Become Icons
Douglas B. Holt
On Jens Martin Skibsted’s Book List
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The Hidden Dimension
Edward T. Hall
On Nancye Green’s Book List
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Heraldry
Ottfried Neubecker
On Kit Hinrichs’s Book List
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Grammatica della Fantasia (The Grammar of Fantasy)
Gianni Rodari
On Giuseppe Lignano’s Book List
On Ada Tolla’s Book List
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Fantasia
Bruno Munari
On Giuseppe Lignano’s Book List
On Ada Tolla’s Book List
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Building Seagram
Phyllis Lambert
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Clog 6: Brutalism
Kyle May et al., eds.
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Project Journal Issue 1
Project
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Matteo Thun
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Katsuji Wakisaka
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Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro
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Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
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Contributors Who Chose...

Delirious New York
Rem Koolhaas
On 8 lists
Jeanne Gang
Architect; United States
Mohsen Mostafavi
Designer; Educator; United States
Galia Solomonoff
Architect; United States
Adam Tihany
Architect, Interior Designer, Product/Industrial Designer; United States
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