The current outline for the book

book

The project is rolling along, enough so I can confidently share the outline of the book with you. First, a quick recap on the goals:

  • Invite people to think about the person-made world and how it can be designed better or worse.
  • A fun learning experience that helps anyone see people, places and things in an enlightened way, based on knowledge of design.
  • Something a designer can give to their coworkers, clients and friends to explain what they do and why.
  • Inspire readers to ask better questions about the design of software, apartments, mobile phones, cities and workplaces in their daily lives.
  • Learn how to make better decisions by seeing the world more like our best designers do.

And without further ado, here’s the current outline from draft #2.

  1. Everything Has a Design
  2. Building < Designing
  3. What Is Good?
  4. People Come First
  5. Everyone Designs Something
  6. The Street You Live On
  7. Style Is a Message
  8. Design Is How It Works
  9. Someone Has to Pay
  10. The Powerful Decide
  11. Design Is a Verb
  12. The Pass in Your Pocket
  13. Ideas and Systems
  14. Design Reflects the Team
  15. The Way People Think Matters
  16. Tradeoffs and Values
  17. Design Is How It Flows
  18. Design for Conflict
  19. Solutions Create Problems
  20. How To See the World: Checklist
  21. Notes and Recommendations
  22. Acknowledgments
  23. About the Author

The initial draft had closer to 30 chapters – but as with all good design, it is sharpening the aim that raises quality.

Two questions:

1. For a book with these goals, what’s missing?
2. I want these titles to line up better – if you have renaming suggestions towards this, leave a comment.

2 thoughts on “The current outline for the book”

  1. Pingback: 5 great designs from underrepresented places – How Design MAKES THE WORLD

  2. Scott, the book outline reads and flows well. You may consider adding a chapter (or renaming and extending an existing chapter) to cover the need for simplicity, elegance and courageous decision-making as part of “good” design.
    This could include themes such as:
    * Not over-engineering – remove the unecessary “bells & whistles”
    * The need to continually refine and pare back/sharpen the solution to its essence.
    * What could be left out? Need for courageous design decisions.

    Here’s a related article that references Nike, Apple and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2011/05/16/steve-jobs-get-rid-of-the-crappy-stuff/#714f2e427145
    A quote from the article:
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