Reading List

As an organization that focuses on communicating big ideas to the public, we need to constantly be educating ourselves and learning new ways to talk about complex things. Below is a reading list of some books we recommend on a variety of topics that are relevant to our work.

If you have recommendations for new books to add to this list, let us know!

Climate Change and Sustainability

  • There Is No Planet B by Mike Berners-Lee

    A great introduction to the ongoing climate crisis, encompassing pretty much every topic you could view of. Highly recommended to start here.

  • Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

    A more in-depth investigation into what the actual carbon cost of our everyday lives our. One part encyclopedia and one part lifestyle guide, there’s plenty of great information in here to help you make better decisions for the environment.

  • Electrify: An Optimists Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith

    This book looks at how we can solve the climate crisis at the levels of policy and infrastructure. This serves as a blueprint for what a realistic decarbonized future will look like, and a list of demands that we must make of our governments to get there.

Racial and Social Justice

  • A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

    The history of our country from 1492 to present from the perspective of the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed. A great example of what an inclusive national history could look like, and one we should strive to learn from. Far too many institutions still fail to tell our history with this much honesty and clarity.

  • Inventing Latinos by Laura Gomez
    In order to work towards a more equitable society, we need to understand how we got here. Inventing Latinos is the history of the Latino identity, describing how foreign and immigration policy in the United States was directly responsible for the creation of a Latino identity and the state of the current migrant crisis.

  • How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
    The thesis of Ibram X. Kendi’s work is that not being racist isn’t enough — racism is so deeply entrenched in American institutions that we must actively be anti-racist to change the system. This book is a primer of sorts as to the difference between being neutral (not-racist) versus actively improving racial equality in our society (anti-racist).

  • Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
    To say that gun violence is a contentious issue in America is an understatement — but to understand why, we need to delve into America’s complex history of race relations. America’s gun culture is deeply rooted in racialized fear, effectively deputizing citizens to enforce racial hierarchies by force. A super eye-opening book on the role that guns play in institutional racism in America.

  • A Line in the Sand by James Barr
    The West’s relationships with Arabs and Islam are deeply rooted in — you guessed it, colonialism. To understand why the Middle East is such a complex region and the roots is Islamophobia, you need to understand the history. This book covers the history from World War I to the formation of Israel in the Middle East, showing how imperial powers used Islamophobia as a tool to carve up the region and how these modern borders define nearly all conflicts there.

Artificial Intelligence

  • The New Breed by Kate Darling
    While artificial intelligence has capabilities that are novel, the questions that it raises about automation, labor, and social hierarchy are not. Kate Darling dissects our millennia-old relationship with animals to help draw parallels to how our current questions about artificial intelligence are anything but new.

  • Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
    A book about how the mass adoption of artificial intelligence is creating hidden risks that threaten to further entrench race, class, and social disparities. A well-argued call for regulation of a completely opaque industry.

Social Media & Technology

  • The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

  • History, Disrupted by Jason Steinhauer

    We think of history as static, as a recollection of the past — but historians know that history is a constantly evolving field. In this book Jason Steinhauer covers how social media and modern technologies have put this process into overdrive, and history is as subjective and mutable as it’s ever been. A super interesting read on the past, present, and future of the field of history.

Future Thinking

  • The Optimist’s Telescope by Bina Venkataraman

    It’s a bit of a trope to say that humans are too short-sighted to be able to think about future generations and save the planet. Bina Venkataraman turns this trope on its head by chronicling communities around the world that have successfully worked together to preserve resources and sustain their future, and investigating how they do it.

  • The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz

    A training guide for scenario planning, a tool that was developed to help businesses think outside of tunnel vision by developing stories about the future. There’s a lot to learn here for how to communicate about the future effectively, tested through decades of research in getting decision-makers to make smarter decisions about the future.

  • The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
    A firsthand report chronicling the disasterous impacts of climate change on eight different climate hotspots around the world. This book is thought-provoking in how it asks how we should emotionally cope with a changing planet.

Video Game Design

  • Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

    A deep dive into the design influences that underlie modern games — focusing a lot on fun and why it’s the most vital element in games. There’s so much to learn from in games, and this is a great intro.

  • Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle

    One of the original reference books for how to design virtual worlds. Super in-depth analysis of players, game types, and how to engage different kinds of players and make immersive worlds. Richard Bartle himself says that, while the book hasn’t been updated since 2003, Chapters 3-5 and 7-8 are the most relevant today.

Design for Museums

User Experience Design

  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

    Don Norman’s influence on user experience design cannot be overstated; he coined the term user-centered design and has been an advocate for user-centered thinking in design for nearly 40 years now. His first book is both an extremely easy and unpretentious read, but also clearly articulates the ideas of user-centered thinking more clearly than almost any other resource.

  • The Design of Future Things by Don Norman

    In this book, Don Norman turns his eye towards human-computer interaction, with a specific emphasis on smart objects. While we’re not in the product-making business, many of his ideas about how to design effective human-machine interfaces translate well to the public space, where users often won’t have instruction manuals and need to learn how to interact with an object quickly.

  • Emotional Design by Don Norman
    A deep dive into the emotional aspect of user-centered design, focusing on the question: why do we form emotional attachments to some objects but not others, and how can we replicate that in our designs? A fascinating look at how to design not just for functionality, but for emotional engagement with your users.

Information Design

Psychology

Process and Productivity