On reading more…
In my last post, I talked about reading Injection Mold Design Engineering by David O. Kazmer, as a way to improve my skills in designing injection molded parts. And the knowledge gained from that book has already helped while working with a Chinese manufacturer to troubleshoot a tricky problem we’re having with an overmolded part I have designed.
The drive to read more books started when I began teaching a course at Northeastern University three years ago, an elective offered through the College of Engineering and The Sherman Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship Education, titled Engineering Product Development Methodology. I thoroughly enjoy teaching this course, helping students understand how products are designed and make it to market. While planning my syllabus and improving my lecture content each semester, I began reading more books relevant to the various aspects we cover. This past semester, I decided to emphasize the benefits of user research, adding Research Methods for Product Design by Alex Milton & Paul Rogers to the book list.
In addition to the books I read for the course, I have really ramped up my reading in general: I have read fifty books in the first half of 2020. Most weren’t specifically for the course, but there were titles I read that I thought might be helpful to recommend to my students. Examples include Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Design is a Job by Mike Montiero, and Prototyping and Modelmaking for Product Designers by Bjarki Hallgrimsson.
This year, I also did a shallow dive into the basics of Arduino, reading Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi and Michael Shiloh and Programming Arduino by Simon Monk. This will help me teach the course and could also have applications in my normal job.
Just the 30 from Apple’s Books app…
Some of the books I’ve read are long, like the textbook on mold design, or short, like Paul Rand’s 1947 Thoughts on Design. Some were to better inform myself on currently very relevant topics, like So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. Some were grim analogies to the pandemic, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Ling Ma’s Severance. Some were just for enjoyment, like Andrzej Sapkowski’s series for The Witcher, Ted Chaing’s latest collection of stories, Exhalation, and TV (The Book) by Alan Seppinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz.
Will I make it to one-hundred books read by the end of the year? I’m not sure, but I have found the written word to be a very soothing balm in the very stressful times we’re all living through right now. I’d recommend any and all of the books mentioned above, and if you have any books that you’ve enjoyed recently, I’d love to hear about them.
