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.

2 books
Edward de Bono

Reading Eureka was the first time I understood the effect ideas and inventions could have on humanity. It catalogues the greatest inventions in categories such as materials, mental aids, and key devices—inventions that seem completely logical and at the same time aren't. On the pages devoted to geometry there is a Chinese proof for the Pythagorean theorem that predates Pythagoras. This one bit of information changed how I look at the world.

John McPhee

Reporting is something all designers should learn to do. John McPhee’s story of Henri Vaillancourt, one of the few people today who can build a bark canoe, is about the irony of craft and the survival of just about everything related to it. This is required reading in my design classes, not just because of the brilliant writing, but also because of the connections between design and craft. The history lessons are an added bonus.

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