My experience is mostly with highly complex large scale digital products and internal tools. I enjoy the mental challenges provided by having to design an application to fit into a process that touches many different business units, people, processes and media.
The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It
by: Joshua Cooper Ramo
Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History's grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction.
Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems
by: Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt
Contextual Design (CD) is a user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt. It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human-computer interfaces. In practice, this means that researchers aggregate data from customers in the field where people are living and applying these findings into a final product.[1] Contextual Design can be seen as an alternative to engineering and feature driven models of creating new systems.
Web Anotomy: Interaction Design Frameworks That Work
by: Jared Spool
What we need is a reuse strategy, coupled with a pathway to innovation. Patterns are part of the game. Components take us further. In Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks That Work, user experience experts Hoekman and Spool introduce “interaction design frameworks”, the third and final piece of what they call “The Reuse Trinity”, and resolve these issues once and for all. Frameworks are sets of design patterns and other elements that comprise entire systems, and in this game-changing book, Hoekman and Spool show you how to identify, document, share, use, and reap the benefits of frameworks.
The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist
by: Frederick P. Brooks
These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns likely to lead to excellence. Drawing on conversations with dozens of exceptional designers, as well as his own experiences in several design domains, Brooks observes that bold design decisions lead to better outcomes.
The Elements of User Experience
by: Jessie James Garrett
Smart organizations recognize that Web design is more than just creating clean code and sharp graphics. A site that really works fulfills your strategic objectives while meeting the needs of your users. Even the best content and the most sophisticated technology won't help you balance those goals without a cohesive, consistent user experience to support it.
Dont Make Me Think
by: Steve Krug
"The book's premise is that a good program or web site should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible. Krug points out that people are good at satisficing, or taking the first available solution to their problem, so design should take advantage of this."
About Face 3
by: Alan Cooper
"This presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites and mobile devices. This will teach you the principles of good product behavior and introduce you to Cooper's Goal-Directed Design, from conducting user research to defining your product's interaction using personas and scenarios...."
The Inmates Are Running The Aslym
by: Alan Cooper
"The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage."
Information Architecture - The Polar Bear Book
by: Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville
"Want to design distinctive, cohesive web sites that "work"? This bestseller teaches you how to blend aesthetics and mechanics for web sites and intranets that are easy to navigate and appealing to your users, scalable and simple to maintain. Most books on web development concentrate on either the graphics or the technical issues of a site."
Prioritizing Web Usability
by: Jakob Nielson
"After more than a decade of Web usability research, we literally have thousands of guidelines for making better websites. But what are the most important ones that all designers need to know? A second goal of the book is to update the early Web usability guidelines..."
Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love
by: Marty Cagan
Why do some products make the leap to greatness while others don’t? Creating inspiring products begins with discovering a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. If you can’t do this, then it’s not worth building anything.
Rework
by: Jason Fried & David Hansson
By the creators of 37 Signals, most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.
Poke the Box
by: Seth Godin
Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking-– in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)-– the person with the guts to say, “I want to start stuff.”
Build Fast Build Right
by: Andrew Sherman
"For companies of all sizes trying to navigate the challenges of a rapidly changing marketplace. This book takes readers through the three distinct stages of their entrepreneurial journey: starting out, building a company, and growing a successful business."
Wealth of Nations
by: Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The book was a landmark work in the history and economics as it was comprehensive and an accurate characterization of the economic mechanisms at work in modern economics. Smith believed in a Meritocracy.
Winning
by: Jack Welsh
Winning describes the management wisdom that Welch built up through four and a half decades of work at GE, as he transformed the industrial giant from a sleepy "Old Economy" company with a market capitalization of $4 billion to a dynamic new one worth nearly half a trillion dollars.
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
by: Robert Reich
In this compelling and important analysis of the triumph of capitalism and the decline of democracy, former labor secretary Reich urges us to rebalance the roles of business and government. Power, he writes, has shifted away from us in our capacities as citizens and toward us as consumers and investors. While praising the spread of global capitalism, he laments that supercapitalism has brought with it alienation from politics and community.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
by: John Perkins
Perkins writes that his economic projections cooked the books Enron-style to convince foreign governments to accept billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and other institutions to build dams, airports, electric grids, and other infrastructure he knew they couldn't afford.
The Online Advertising Playbook
by: Joe Plummer, Steve Rappaport, Taddy Hall, Robert Barocci
A great insightful book that uses case studies and true to live examples of what works and what doesn't in an online environment. Literally play-by-play.
Basic American Ideals: Our Public Schools, The Road to Freedom, Church and State, Our U.S.A., Communism Menaces Freedom, Free Enterprise
by: Willard E. Givens & Belmont M. Farley
The ideals that the founding fathers strived to inbed into the American consciousness and political mind were well though out and with explicit intention. This book lays out the rational and history for the thoughts and opinions that shaped the minds of the start of America.
What the Dog Saw
by: Malcom Gladwell
Gladwell's fourth book comprises various contributions to the New Yorker and makes for an intriguing and often hilarious look at the hidden extraordinary. He wonders what... hair dye tell[s] us about twentieth century history, and observes firsthand dog whisperer Cesar Millan's uncanny ability to understand and be understood by his pack.
Samuel Adams: A Life
by: Ira Stoll
Thomas Jefferson once declared, For depth of purpose, zeal, and sagacity, no man in Congress exceeded, if any equaled, Sam Adams. Yet the American revolutionary from Massachusetts (1722–1803, cousin of John Adams) has become the forgotten founding father, and Stoll attempts to pull Adams out of this oblivion. Rebellious Americans' passionate vision of themselves as an incarnation of the Israelites freeing themselves from Egyptian slavery was invoked by Adams, one of the most religious American revolutionaries. He called on Americans to fulfill their God-given freedom and was a radical who endured physical danger, poverty and the death at 37 of his only son.
The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future
by: Laurence C. Smith
Smith, a UCLA geography professor, explores megatrends through computer model projections to describe "with reasonable scientific credibility, what our world might look like in forty years' time, should things continue as they are now."
Art Institute of LA:
BS: Interactive Media Design
UC Irvine:
Certification Web Intelligence
Cooper U:
Interaction Design Practicum
Information Architecture Institute
Interaction Design Association
The Long Now Foundation
Freemasons Lodge #369
Blogging Platforms (Wordpress)
CMS (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone)
Online Videos (Ted, Fora)
Online Marketing
Data Mashups
Online News
Analytics
Usability
Philosophy / Understanding others
Astronomy and Universal Theory
Sensors and Electronics
Music: DJ and Drums
Snowboarding
Woodworking
Backpacking