Design a Better World
Recommended Books and Articles
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
The Dalai Lama
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the World We Need, by Sasha Costanza Chock (MIT Press 2020) is an exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.
Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Thinking and Social Justice, by Design Studio for Social Intervention (Minor Compositions 2020), claims that multiple, overlapping social arrangements shape our lives and that making society more just and enjoyable requires sensing, questioning, intervening in, and reimagining our existing arrangements.
Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming our Lives through Urban Design (McMillan, 2013). Drawing on principles from the Enlightenment and contemporary research, Founder of the design firm Happy Cities, Charles Montgomery, examines the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness.
Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Bring Extraordinary Happiness (Little, Brown, Spark, 2018). Designer and the founder of the blog The Aesthetics of Joy, Ingrid Fetell Lee, explores the relationship between happiness and the design of everyday things.
In Design for Wellbeing (Routledge, 2020) Ann Petersman and Rebecca Cain draw together contributions from international academics and designers to demonstrate the latest thinking and research on the design of products, technologies, environments, services and experiences for wellbeing.
Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination, by Batya Friedman and David G. Hendry (MIT Press 2019), is a book of theory, method, and applications for value sensitive design about using our moral and technical imaginations to create responsible innovations: .