Brian Saunders

Badass: Making Users Awesome

Kathy Sierra (2015)

“On their deathbed, nobody will say: "If only I'd engaged with more brands."”

Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design

Jeff Johnson (2011)

“...mental models are personal, partial, uncertain, and dynamic.”

Educating the Reflective Practitioner

Donald A. Schön (1987)

“Each move is a local experiment that contributes to the global experiment of reframing the problem.”

How Buildings Learn

Stewart Brand (1995)

“When my generation outgrew the domes, we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.”

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Christopher Alexander (1964)

“We should always expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants, or forces, which cause misfit.”

The Nature of Order, Book 2: The Process of Creating Life

Christopher Alexander (2000)

“Sketches and computer drawings are seductive and may be interesting. But if only 20% of the information in a sketch is based on real decisions that have been taken by a living process in the designer’s mind, and the remaining 80% is arbitrary stuff entered into the drawing only because the notation (sketching) requires it, trouble inevitably follows.”

The Timeless Way of Building

Christopher Alexander (1979)

“So long as the people of society are separated from the language which is being used to shape their buildings, the buildings cannot be alive.”

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Stanley and Lehman (2015)

“The idea that all our pursuits can be distilled into neatly-defined objectives and then almost mechanically pursued offers a kind of comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life. There's something reassuring about the clockwork dependability of a world driven by tidy milestones laid out reliably from the starting line.”

Stoner

John Williams (1965)

“But he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss.”

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas (1844)

“He found him entirely surrounded. People were hanging on his every word, as is always the case with those who say little and never waste words.”

Abraham Lincoln: A Life

Michael Burlingame (2009)

“His mind is at once philosophical and practical. He sees all who go there, hears all they have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him; but thinks and acts by himself and for himself.”

The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Book 1

Robert Caro (1982)

“Words won't come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.”

The Wide Wide Sea

Hampton Sides (2024)

“At first the Mowachaht decided that the visitors were a species of salmon that had transmogrified into human form.”

Language in Thought and Action

S.I. Hayakawa (1949)

“...learning language is not simply a matter of learning words; it is a matter of correctly relating our words to the things and happenings for which they stand.”

Metaphors We Live By

George Lakoff (2019)

“If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.”

Orality and Literacy

Walter J. Ong (1982)

“Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.”

Steering the Craft

Ursula K. Le Guin (1998)

“People often use the passive voice because it's indirect, polite, unaggressive, and admirably suited to making thoughts seem as if nobody had personally thought them and deeds seem as if nobody had done them, so that nobody need take responsibility. Writers who want to take responsibility are wary of it.”

Working

Robert Caro (2019)

“I always liked finding out how things work and trying to explain them to people.”

Demand-Side Sales 101

Bob Moesta (2020)

“Companies get sucked into thinking about the features the customer wants, as opposed to the outcomes they’re seeking.”

Design Cybernetics

Thomas Fischer (2019)

“Designers intuitively recognize that perfection is unattainable, and therefore don't seek a perfect solution; only one that is good enough.”

Systemantics

John Gall (1975)

“The main control panel at Three Mile Island had more than 600 dials, alarm signals, sirens, and bells. But when they all went off on that fateful day, no one could actually tell what had gone wrong. 600 alarms going off in unison did not add up to a comprehensible picture of the problem.”

Systems Generating Systems

Christopher Alexander (1965)

“The word system, like any technical word borrowed from common use, has many meanings and is imprecise. This lack of precision in a technical word might seem dangerous at first; in fact it is often helpful. It allows new ideas to flourish while still vague, it allows connections between these ideas to be explored, and it allows the ideas to be extended, instead of having them cut short by premature definition and precision.”

Thinking in Systems

Donella H. Meadows (2008)

“Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”