How Design Makes the World

I recently concluded How Design Makes the World (Scott Berkun, 210 pages). It is not exactly what I hoped for, but it still a good introduction to design as a discipline.

What I was hoping for in this book was some deeper descriptions of human behavior and classical design ideas or principles that should be respected when coming up with a product or service. The book contains a bit of that. But, to be honest, almost nothing that I hadn’t heard before.

The part that may be interesting for someone who is not familiar with design thinking, is the process about how to go about including design when working with products or other concepts. The build, test, and learn loop is indeed quite powerful. But it is not too different from the agile practices we know and use regularly in software development for a long time already.

One of the main strengths of the book, for those who may be interested in that, is the discussion points along different aspects of doing (or choosing not to do) design. The author has some good points about the societal and organizational forces that can drive and promote good design. Or can be an impediment to it.

That said, this book may be useful for someone with little previous exposure to the topic. Although in my case, in particular, it is not sure that it added any new concrete ideas to keep in mind when doing design that I didn’t already have from before.