Curation
What I’d hand you if you asked.
No shelf here is comprehensive, and none is trying to be. Each holds the few things that changed how I think, plus the one or two that are the best doors in for someone arriving cold. Where a shelf is thin, that is because I have not found much worth adding — not because I have run out of room.
Rules
What makes this a library
- Nothing is here because it is famous. Several famous things are deliberately absent.
- Every entry carries one line in my own words on why it matters. No publisher blurbs.
- Every shelf names its best door in for a newcomer.
- Anything superseded is removed, not archived.
Learning science, complexity education, and maker education are unusual company for design thinking and visual communication. The pairing is itself an argument: that how learning works, how systems behave, and how ideas are made visible are one problem viewed from three sides. A shelf that only held one of them would be easier to explain and less use.
Professional
9 shelves
Learning science
Every other shelf here assumes an answer to how people learn. This one makes that answer explicit, so the rest can be argued with.
8 entriesLearning spaces
Because the room is already making decisions about who can speak and who can be seen, and most briefs treat it as an empty container.
8 entriesEducational technology
Every generation of technology arrives certain it is different. This shelf is the record of the previous ones saying the same thing.
8 entriesMaker education
Because building something is the fastest way to discover what you actually understand, and the slowest thing to argue for in a curriculum meeting.
8 entriesComplexity education
Because schools are not machines with broken parts, and almost every improvement plan is written as though they are.
8 entriesDesign thinking
It is the method I was schooled in and the one I am most wary of, because it is easy to run the workshop and skip the thinking.
8 entriesBehavioural insights
Because most educational design assumes people act on what they know, and the gap between knowing and doing is where the work really is.
8 entriesUI/UX and interaction design
A national platform is a room too. The same question applies — what does its structure make easy, and who does that leave out?
8 entriesVisual communication
If a framework cannot be drawn it is probably not finished. This shelf is how I test that claim on my own work.
8 entriesPersonal
4 shelves
Mahjong
A game held together by convention rather than documentation, which is exactly why writing it down is interesting.
8 entriesContract bridge
The best-designed information problem I know of, and the literature is unusually well written for a games shelf.
8 entriesBooks
Science fiction is the only literature that treats a designed system as a character. That is closer to my working life than most realism.
8 entriesCartoons
The most unforgiving compression problem in visual communication, and the only medium where failure is immediate and unmistakable.
8 entries