Design has afforded us more convenience, more connectivity, and more beauty. But at the same time, it’s also threatening our civil liberties, manipulating our decisions, and spreading bias.
Related: Announcing The Winners Of The 2017 Innovation By Design Awards
The scale of today’s design challenges has expanded from individual objects to entire systems. Tackling the problems in those systems–like the environmental crisis, economic inequality, and racism–requires a more sensitive and nuanced view of how those systems are constructed. To do that effectively, designers need to be equipped with knowledge that typically falls outside of their bubble.
So, in the spirit of going back to school, we asked experts working at the intersection of design, ethics, and social justice to share their favorite books to help designers achieve a deeper understanding of the complex, systemic issues of today.
Rachel Goodman, ACLU
“In his engaging book, Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Democracy, Frank Pasquale makes the bold claim that the opaque nature of algorithms is the defining feature of contemporary life. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and law enforcement surveillance systems are, he argues, both well-hidden and complex precisely so that they can avoid public scrutiny. The book makes clear that we need transparency so we can understand how it all works, and so that we can demand systems that treat all of us fairly.
“If you want to understand why big data-driven sorting treats people of different races differently, it helps to look at where all this separation came from. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton’s book, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, is the definitive text on American racial segregation and the policies that created it. From there, it’s not much of a leap to see that big data inevitably reflects that separation, and that algorithms based on analysis of big data perpetuate it. It also reminds us that the sorting these tools do today can have ramifications far into the future.”—Rachel Goodman, staff attorney in the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU
Antionette D. Carroll, Creative Reaction Lab
“Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation discusses the importance of co-creation and how everyone has the ability to be a designer–technically trained or not.”––Antionette D. Carroll, president and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab
Caroline Sinders, Activist and Artist
“Reading these books can set a great ground work for thinking about intentionality and how small decisions exist inside of larger systems, and each of these books creates so many uses cases. These use cases can be used to analyze and question larger design systems: How, if we create an app that does ‘x,’ could it harm users based off the parameters that these books explore? Those harm cases are not so outside of bounds, not so outside of norms. We should use them as parameters for testing our apps, products, and systems.”—Caroline Sinders, digital anthropologist, machine-learning designer, and activist
Bryan C. Lee, Architect
“The Endless City–and as a bonus Living in the Endless City–has an endless amount of critical analysis about the workings of cities from a details and nuance rarely seen. The books visually represent the scope and scale of iniquity to a point of utter beauty and clarity.”–Bryan C. Lee, architect and founder of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit studio that combats racism embedded in urban design
Mabel O. Wilson, Architect
After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit is an important collection of projects and essays from architects and thinkers probing the complicated landscapes of transit and transition. It reveals architecture’s power as a medium whose boundaries characterize difference–national, social, racial, and others. But also this rich volume demonstrates the myriad of forces that propel people, ideas, and things to transgress the material and ideological boundaries that architecture reinforces.”—Mabel O. Wilson, architectural historian at Columbia University
Sarah Lewis, Art Historian
Nothing Personal by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon
On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination by Nicole Fleetwood
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks
On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century by Sherrilyn A. Ifill
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
“Whose Heritage: Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” a special report from the Southern Poverty Law Center
For more required reading, see Co.Design’s lists of books for designers who want to write, books on the future of design, and 35 essentials for all designers.