Books that Kenneth Dsouza recommends for new product designers

Kenneth Dsouza is a Senior Design Manager at Gojek and also a mentor in the Product Design Fellowship. During cohort 1, he’d mentored Aishwarya, Mudita and Yashasri for their project in the speculative design domain.

1. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by David M. Kelley and Tom Kelley

An entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from the authors’ work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world’s top companies. The book is written keeping in mind the larger audience and as a designer, you may feel that the ideas they talk about may be familiar but it’s still worth reading once, especially the first four chapters.

2. Mismatch, How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes

In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. In this book, she tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. My favourite part of this book is the case study about WWII aeroplanes which is now a source of the survivorship bias meme.

3. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek

Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world’s most widely read books on design. Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, and the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world.

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