Bruce Hannah

Product/Industrial Designer / United States / Hannah Design and Pratt Institute

Bruce Hannah’s Book List

I was introduced to reading in my junior year at Pratt by Rowena Reed Kostellow, my mentor and teacher. After reading something I’d written, she suggested that I start reading the profiles in The New Yorker. Her thinking went that if you read well-written stuff, you would write better. I suggest books to my students for that very reason.

I’ve come to understand that most books, in the end, are about design in some way or another. The plots of most novels are designed, and the people who inhabit them are all struggling with creativity in one way or another. Books are also touchstones that remind us of something (or someone) that moves us or challenges us. Reading is also just plain fun, which may be its greatest pleasure.

4 books
Thomas Armstrong

If you ever wondered why some kids tap their feet in class, this is the book for you. In Their Own Way is Armstrong’s take on Howard Gardner’s work with Project Zero on multiple intelligences. Word smart, number smart, picture smart, music smart, body smart, people smart, self smart, and nature smart are the ways we are all smart. Some of us tend to use some of the ways we learn and see the world more than we do others. A very helpful book if you profess to teach anything, and one that I find delightful, informative, and transformative. It helped me to understand that I can’t teach anyone anything, but I can show them what they don’t know, and perhaps might be interested in learning.

Dava Sobel

Who knew that longitude as a navigational aid didn’t exist until a “tinkerer,” John Harrison, perfected the “clock”?  Who knew there was a Longitude Act, passed by Parliament in 1714? These, along with a multitude of other facts and figures—including why there is Greenwich Mean Time—all become very clear once you read Longitude. One of those numbers that reads out on your iPhone telling you your location is longitude. Thank you, John Harrison.

Stephen Jay Gould

The Mismeasure of Man helps explain the insanity of trying to measure intelligence, from the beginnings of the “science” of testing to our contemporary dilemma of testing everyone all the time. It helped make me skeptical of just about any measurement humans develop, from actual measurement (which is only important if one has capital to invest abstractly) to “normal” anything.

Richard Feynman

The life and times of Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman, in his own words. Read it and learn why his playing the bongos may have been more important than his creating some of the first theoretical physics drawings. It taught me that creating stuff has common vectors, whether you’re writing theoretical physics or doing furniture design. There are also some very funny stories and some terrific advice about life.

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