Bookshelf
Resources
Books, essays, and references I keep recommending — on design leadership, agentic AI, and the ethics of building things that act for people. Each one links out.
Platform Business Models
A talk on the structural forces in platform products — useful any time your users, your buyers, and your agents want different things.
Powers of Ten
Nine minutes on scale and zoom that will change how you think about detail, overview, and the space between them.
Rams
Dieter Rams on less, but better, in his own voice. The quiet-design manifesto in film form.
Refactoring UI
The practical visual-design shortcuts most engineers, and plenty of designers, are quietly missing. Immediately applicable.
Shape Up
How to scope and bet on design work without drowning in backlogs, prioritization, and grooming. I order it for every new design manager.
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction & Social Dreaming
A book about imagination, it challenges designers to move beyond convention and design prototypes of alternative futures. It’s both timeless and timely as we move beyond the paradigms of the past.
Stark: Accessibility Checker
Contrast, vision simulation, and accessibility checks that live where you design, so inclusion is not a last-minute audit.
Strategic Writing for UX (Second Edition)
I met Torrey when she spoke at the South Bay UX meetup. Since then, I’ve recommended her book to designers and content writers. The new edition is a framework for clear, actionable copy that is vital when your interface consists almost entirely of text strings generated by an LLM.
The Agentic UI Landscape, A Primer (Updated)
A conceptually grounding discussion of the patterns emerging as software starts acting on our behalf.
The Alignment Problem
The clearest tour of how machine-learning systems learn the wrong thing. Required context for designing guardrails and trust boundaries. It’s the book that makes you think twice about taking an AI at its word.
The Best Interface Is No Interface
A provocation against reflexively adding another screen. It’s exactly the right question in an era of agents that could do the task invisibly. The snarky prose makes it a fun read.
The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet (1997)
A still-relevant reminder from the father of the GUI and object-oriented programming is that we have barely begun to use computers as a medium for thought. Fuel for ambition beyond yet one more screen.