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A small collection of essays, talks, and books I keep returning to.

Taste

Learning to See — iA A designer's eye essay. Less about UI mechanics, more about training perception.
What Screens Want — Frank Chimero A meditation on the screen as a material with its own grain — fluid, edgeless, and best designed with rather than against.
Web Design is 95% Typography — iA Most of the web is text, so most of web design is typography. Treat type as interface.
Patterns of Software — Christopher Alexander (preface) & Richard Gabriel Alexander's preface alone is worth it: most professionals fail because they accept standards that are too low.
Simple Made Easy — Rich Hickey The careful distinction between simple (untangled, single-purpose) and easy (familiar, near-at-hand). One of the most useful lenses on software complexity.

Interaction design

A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design — Bret Victor The canonical critique of "pictures under glass." A reminder that hands and bodies were left out of the modern interface.
Magic Ink — Bret Victor A long argument that most software should be information design — letting people see, not click.
Inventing on Principle — Bret Victor A talk about building tools around a guiding principle. The live-feedback demos are still ahead of most software being shipped today.
No to NoUI — Timo Arnall A counterpoint to "invisible design." Argues for legibility, seams, and materiality so people can understand what systems are doing.

Tools for thought

As We May Think — Vannevar Bush, 1945 The memex essay. Prefigures hypertext, personal knowledge systems, and almost everything that came after.
Augmenting Human Intellect — Douglas Engelbart, 1962 The philosophical root of computing as augmentation, not automation.
The Mother of All Demos — Douglas Engelbart, 1968 Mouse, windows, hypertext, video conferencing, collaborative editing — all introduced in a single demo, decades early.
Personal Dynamic Media — Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg, 1977 The Dynabook vision: personal computing as an active medium for learning and creation, not a productivity appliance.
Bicycle for the Mind — Steve Jobs Two minutes on why computers, like bicycles, are tools that amplify what humans can already do.
How Can We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought? — Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen A modern continuation of Engelbart and Kay. Why we still don't have real tools for thought, and what kind of work might get us there.

First principles

The Coming Age of Calm Technology — Mark Weiser & John Seely Brown Technology should move between the center and periphery of attention, not constantly demand it.
Ten Principles for Good Design — Dieter Rams Useful, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough, environmental, minimal. Still the cleanest principle set in design.

Habits of thought

The Work Required to Have an Opinion — Farnam Street Charlie Munger's rule: you don't get an opinion on something until you can argue the other side better than its strongest defender. A discipline for honest thinking.
The Shapes of Stories — Kurt Vonnegut A five-minute lecture that maps every narrative onto a few simple curves. Delightful in itself, and quietly profound as a tool for seeing structure.

On walking

Why I walk — Chris Aarnade
Why We Walk: A Manifesto for Peripatetic Empowerment — Maria Popova / The Marginalian On Lauren Elkin and the flâneuse — walking as the body's way of thinking, and the city as a medium for attention and reflection.
Give Your Ideas Some Legs — Marily Oppezzo & Daniel L. Schwartz, Stanford 2014 The research paper everyone cites. Walking lifts creative output by ~60% in a controlled study; the effect persists shortly after sitting down.

Take a deep breath.