While IxD is young field there are tons of great books to help budding and established interaction designers.

1. From Concept to Consumer.

This is a cracking little book, Its short and to the point.  The book explains nearly all of the aspects of commeriazling a project and includes working out a BOM and pricing your product. The book has solid theory around the commiseration process and also gives some nice case studies that Philip had worked on.  The book includes a section called “Industrial design maters”,  Its nice to see a non-design person notice the importance of Product / Industrial design.

By Philip Baker. £15.19 – Buy it.

2. Designing for the Digital Age.

This book is a true beast, at 739 pages.  I only got this book last week and it is superb.  It covers the “Cooper” Design process as outlined in About Face 3. But, goes into more practical examples of how to undertake the work.  The amount of practical examples of good and bad work is great. Kim shows you how to make a persona, What a good Mood-board looks like, and how to write design documentation.

Along with it this book breaks down the roles of Interaction Design, Visual Design and Industrial Design. In doing so, I think Kim has made one of the best Industrial design process books.

By Kim Goodwin. £30 – Buy it.

3. Making things Talk

This book talks about process that Kim Doesn’t.. and that’s Making stuff, and New stuff that we haven’t had before. Tom has created a book full of easy to understand explanations of micro-controllers along with PHP and Ethernet code to get projects connected to the Internet.  The book goes a step further and provides a examples for a group of micro-controllers. He explains and shows code for three RFID readers.  While he doesn’t explain the fine details of HEX communication he has created a great book.  If I had this at college, nothing would be safe from my screwdriver, and everything would be hooked up to microcontroller.

By Tom Igoe. £17 - Buy it.

4. Air 1.5 Cookbook

This book is a lot drier than others in the list. Like all of the O’Reilly cook books it just gives you code snippets to help you. In the case of Air 1.5, these code snippets are Air Specific so the code will make you Air Application look a lt slicker.

By O’Reilly. £17 - Buy it.

5. Idiots Guide to Understanding the Brain.

This book was left over from Ben Sykes, a member of the IxDA Dublin. This book covers all of the basics of the brain, and touches on the basics of neuroscience.  This book is very introductory, and is a good starting point if you want to understand more about peoples underlying human behavior.

By O’Reilly. £7 - Buy it.

6. Getting started with the Ardunio.

This book is an introduction to the Arudunio, but If you are going to shell out £10 just buy Making things talk.  This book covers the basics of the Arundio, but I think it should really be free with Arudino.

I would recommend the book, but you can get a lot from the web. You can download the first chapter, and gesture stencils from the website.  Ow. And don’t forget you can download the source to build your own magnetic user interface.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is the latest book I’m reading.  The book is very well written and is a easy read.  Dan explains how humans make irrational decisions that aren’t irrational at all, and are in fact that irrational behavior is predictable.  Dan uses MIT research studies to prove this.  I would highly recommend this book to designers, and experience designers as by understanding irrational behavior you can convert a great percentage to the perfect usage scenario.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

As part of my work as an ‘interaction designer’ I have found that in I’m having to do a lot of interactive prototypes and have found flash as the most versatile tool for development.  While I already had some ActionScript experience I found that I had reached a wall with my coding.

I have found these three books a great addition to any flash designer, If you can afford it, get it all. But if you can’t I could properly loose the design patterns but its a good long term investment in long term code re usability.

Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential).

This is a great book that covers EVERYTHING and all of the smaller detials of the ActionScripit Classes.  If you were to only get one book, I would get this one.

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers

This book has loads of useful code snippets.  This is definitely one to have by the best for when you need to do a specific task.

ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques (Adobe Developer Library)

This book is written more towards developers, but I have found it good practice to design code in a reusable and structured manor.

“How do we deliberately add more emotional qualities into the products we design?”. First i would recommend reading Donald Normans “Emotioanl Design”, this is a very easy read an a good introduciton to the subject. I don’t really belive in all of Mr. Normans views, and thing “the design of future things should be more interssting”. The other book i would recommend is Design and Emotion, from the 3rd 2002 design and emotion conferance. It may be 5 years old, but the book contains papers all based on emotional design. Split into subsections, which are

Generative tools,
Evauative Tools,
Emotive Effects of Visual Properties,
Emotive Effects of the Other Senses,
From Design to Emotion,
Affective Usabilty,
Attachment,
Product Character,
Theoretical and Ethical issues,
and
Emotion in Design.

There is a paper for just about everthing, and there are only 4 – 5 pages long. There website design an emotion .org Has many resources for free.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things £4.20

Design and Emotion £48.67

After spending a couple days on a train I got the chance to read my latest design book. Book Review. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. By Bill Buxton. This book is a deep look at a product design techniquie, but in the lanuage for technical software / user interface designers.  The first half of the book is all about sketching, and covers some product design history. He talks though this by showing mountain bike, and orange juice case studys.  The 2nd part of the book (pages 234 and after) is all about diffent technics that we can us to create sketches using new technology.

This book is a very easy read, with 6 page bibliography and allows for lots of potential follow up reading, on many sections.  I would recommend this book to very one!

Read businessweek review for more information.

Bill Buxtons website.

 
£17.96 from Amazon.co.uk

I found this book in the Museum of Modern Art in SanFran, yet the book is written by Lee McCormack an English Designer. The book will teach any designer what you will learn on placement and that Is that industry sees ‘Designers as wankers’. The book talks about how to work with industry and manufactures. The book follows Lee’s multimedia Pod, and how he struggled filling orders and getting componets from manufacuteres. Lee addresses how to approach these industries and how to protect yourself and your ideas.

The book finishes with review from top designs, Paul Smith, Jason Kirk, Karmin Rashid, Neville Brody and Pier Roberts.

Personally I found that I learnt most of these lessons the hard way on my placement, this is an easy and quick read for all design and Product design undergraduates.

Designers Are Wankers

Price: £10.50 GBP

As a undergraduatte product designer it can be a worry to think about the future of our enviroment and what the result of the products we make. This book utlines a new design process that will not ‘make less bad products’ but we will make products that will create a better effect onto our enviroment.

It has a good range about manufacturing technique, Service Vs Product, Sustainable Arcteticutre, and a new outline framework. I would highly recommend this book to all undergraduate product designers and to read it!