Carola Zwick

Product/Industrial Designer; Interaction Designer / Germany / Studio 7.5; Weissensee Academy of Art, Berlin

Carola Zwick’s Book List

As a designer you are concerned with observing and understanding change and solving emerging needs and problems. In addition, your concepts and ideas as well as the change you hope to trigger with your design intervention need to be communicated clearly.

My list of recommendations (many of which I also came across through recommendations) is therefore focused on nonfiction titles. Most of these books have accompanied me for quite some time: they don’t seem to have lost their impact or their relevance. For me, as a product and interaction designer, at least some enduring truth is comforting.

5 books
Marshall McLuhan
Quentin Fiore

This small paperback is the result of a typo at the printing house that McLuhan embraced and used to create a “reader’s digest” version of his “The Medium is the Message.” It uses visual means to support his idea that human artifacts serve as extensions of the human body and brain.

Edward R. Tufte

Tufte’s carefully printed “trilogy”—which includes Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations—presents milestones of visual communication, like the greatest of all: Charles Josef Minard’s graphic representation of Napoleon’s March on Moscow.

My all-time favorite and recommendation for students on how to cope with complexity. Wurman also respects his own advice in providing an abstract of the complete book as the first chapter to serve as an “instant” version for impatient minds.

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