Decolonizing Design

A Cultural Justice Guidebook

Elizabeth (Dori) TUNSTALL
The MIT Press
Available through MIT Libraries

A guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.

From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.

The Design of Everyday Things

Don NORMAN
Basic Books
Available through MIT Libraries

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we try to figure out the shower control in a hotel or attempt to navigate an unfamiliar television set or stove. When The Design of Everyday Things was published in 1988, cognitive scientist Don Norman provocatively proposed that the fault lies not in ourselves, but in design that ignores the needs and psychology of people.

Extra Bold

A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers

Ellen LUPTON, Farah KAFEI, Jennifer TOBIAS, Josh A. HALSTEAD, Kaleena SALES, Leslie XIA, Valentina VERGARA
Princeton Architectural Press

Extra Bold is the inclusive, practical, and informative (design) career guide for everyone! Part textbook and part comic book, zine, manifesto, survival guide, and self-help manual, Extra Bold is filled with stories and ideas that don't show up in other career books or design overviews.

What Can a Body Do?

How We Meet the Built World

Sara HENDREN
Penguin Random House
Available through MIT Libraries

A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.

Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built.

101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School

Matthew FREDERICK & Vikas MEHTA
Crown Publishing Group
Available through MIT Libraries

This book is perfect for the student fascinated, and perhaps overwhelmed, by the complexities of urbanism. Thought-provoking, illustrated lessons illuminate such questions as:

• What's the difference between city and urban?
• How can minor design decisions have major social and economic impacts?
• Why are some trees more urban than others?
• What can the suburban mall teach us about activating urban streets?
• How is drawing badly useful to the design process?