2025 Reading List
Reading has long been a reliable source of insight and inspiration. In 2025, I’ll be digging deep with some carefully selected books that I intend will fuel my professional growth. Spanning design, technology, strategy, and human behavior, these works will shape my approach to design challenges in our rapidly evolving technological landscape.
I’ll be sharing my learnings and reflections on these books at the end of the year, so stay tuned for updates on this reading journey.
The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2nd Edition)
By Leah Buley & Joe Natoli / Rosenfield Media, 2024
This is an insightful guide to maximizing impact as a UX designer from seasoned pros. Comprehensive and approachable, Joe and Leah have synthesized knowledge and tools with clarity and straightforwardness. I anticipate it’ll be an invaluable resource for both new and experienced designers that I’m excited to dig into.
I’m also thrilled to see there’s a shoutout to my book, Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services included. Additionally, the Laws of UX card deck is also highlighted!
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
By Ethan Mollick / Penguin Random House, 2024
Mollick shows what it means to think and work together with smart machines, and why it’s imperative that we master that skill. He challenges us to utilize AI’s enormous power without losing our identity, to learn from it without being misled, and to harness its gifts to create a better human future. Wide ranging, hugely thought-provoking, optimistic, and lucid, Co-Intelligence reveals the promise and power of this new era.
Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results
By Shane Parrish / Portfolio, 2023
I’ve long been a fan of the Farnam Street blog, the host of The Knowledge Project podcast, so this book caught my attention right away. This book is about recognizing the pivotal moments between stimulus and response – and learning to deploy our full cognitive capacity to them. Through engaging stories and powerful mental models, it shows us how to turn our desired behaviors into our default behaviors.
Mindful Design: A Survival Guide for Responsible Product Designers
By Scott Riley / Apress, 2024
Design is a responsibility, but not enough designers understand the human mind or the process of thought. This book introduces the areas of brain science that matter to designers, and passionately explains how those areas affect each human’s day-to-day experiences with products and interfaces, providing a battle-tested toolkit to help you make responsible design decisions.
The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future
By Michael D. Watkins / Harper Collins, 2024
As a designer, I’ve becoming increasingly aware that making great design is not enough to have impact within your organization. To optimize your value and impact, you must also be strategic. This book presents an actionable new framework to help people learn to think strategically—a set of skills more necessary than ever in a world of constant change.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
By Fred Turner / University of Chicago Press, 2006
I love connecting the dots and understanding the history behind my craft. This book, recommended to me by Bob Baxley, promises to do just that. It’s the first book to explore the extraordinary and ironic transformation of computers from bleak tools of the Cold War to collaborative and the driving force behind a digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the 1960s counter culture. Turner traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network.
Universal Principles of UX: 100 Timeless Strategies to Create Positive Interactions between People and Technology
By Irene Pereyra / Rockport Publishers, 2023
I’ve long been a fan of the work from Anton & Irene, so this book was a must have. This book is a philosophical anthology of case studies, situations, problems, and contradictions encountered across more than fifteen years of working on real world client projects that will teach you how to think, rather than tell you what to do.
