Book List of the Week

Interaction and Information: Carola Zwick’s Book List

By Steve Kroeter January 22, 2013

Carola Zwick

Product/Industrial and Interaction Designer Carola Zwick: Studio 7.5 (Berlin)

“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,” says Carola Zwick, who along with Burkhard Schmitz and Claudia Plikat co-founded the Berlin-based industrial design firm Studio 7.5. The studio develops furniture and other product designs for an international array of companies, including Herman Miller, for which it created the Setu line of office chairs—winner in 2010 of the IDSA Design of the Decade Award for Best Sustainable Design Solution.

How to communicate with a product’s end user also informs Zwick’s work as an educator, which spans 18 years and has focused on the field of “interaction design,” a term the late Bill Moggridge introduced to describe designing for human behavior, particularly in relation to computer software and hardware. Zwick is the co-author or co-editor of four books on digital and interaction design, most recently The Digital Turn: Design in the Era of Interactive Technologies, scheduled for publication this February (Park Books).

Zane Berzina, Barbara Junge, Wim Westerveld, and Carola Zwick, eds., The Digital Turn, forthcoming February 2013 (Park Books)

On Zwick’s book list for Designers & Books is—of course—Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge, the designer of the first laptop computer and the founder of the firm IDEO. Zwick also selects Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (on the book lists of Chris Bangle, Peter Bohlin, Nancye Green, and three other Designers & Books contributors) and comments that the book “helps us to understand how hardware is influencing software—in this case, how the built environment is shaping the behavior of its inhabitants.” She includes Richard Saul Wurman’s Information Anxiety 2 as “my all-time favorite and recommendation for students on how to cope with complexity,” adding, “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.”

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett, says Zwick, “describes the intrinsic reward gained from working ‘hands on’ as well as the specific relationship between craftsmen and their tools, which in my view is a great inspiration for designers to create hardware and software that empower people.”

Most of these titles and others on her book list, Zwick notes in her introduction, “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.”

View Carola Zwick’s Profile View Carola Zwick’s Book List

See more product/industrial designers’ book lists

Richard Saul Wurman's Book List

The Book Lists of Tom and David Kelley: Creative Kids

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister

Now is Better

By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023

Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.

Order the book.

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli

Design Emergency: Building a Better Future

By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022

Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.

Order the book.

Love Letter to a Garden by Debbie Millman

Love Letter to a Garden

By Debbie Millman
Contributions by Roxane Gay
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: April 15, 2025

From the award-winning artist, designer, and the host of the podcast Design Matters, Debbie Millman, this book tells the visual story of falling in love with gardening—and the philosophies that work conjures. Spread throughout are simple recipes using the garden’s ingredients from Millman’s wife, best-selling author Roxane Gay.

Order the book.

The Picture Book Book: The Art of Seymour Chwast by Seymour Chwast; curated by Steven Heller

The Picture Book Book: The Art of Seymour Chwast

By Seymour Chwast, curated by Steven Heller
Publisher: Gestalten
Published: June 2026

Seymour Chwast, legendary co-founder of Push Pin Studios, reinvented how we see and read picture books. The Picture Book Book gathers over 40 of his works, curated by Steven Heller, and offers a rare look at his playful, incisive approach to visual storytelling. From bold graphics to sly wit, Chwast’s books expanded the boundaries of design and children’s literature alike.

Order the book.

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022

Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”

Order the book.

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)

By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023

This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.

Order the book.