Applied & Interactive Arts

Goals

Understand design thinking and user-centered methodologies. Analyze relationships between form, function, and human experience. Develop skills in visual communication, prototyping, and iteration. Evaluate design's impact on behavior and society.

Why these books

These three books approach applied and interactive arts from complementary directions — design thinking as a methodology, interactive design as creative history, and aesthetics as a cultural and economic force — and together they cover the intellectual terrain of this curriculum with both practical grounding and broader critical perspective.

Tim Brown's "Change by Design" is the most methodologically focused book on the list and the most directly aligned with the learning goals around design thinking and human-centered practice. Brown, the longtime CEO of the design firm IDEO, argues that design thinking — an iterative, empathy-driven, prototype-and-test approach to problem-solving — is not merely a tool for product development but a generalizable methodology applicable to healthcare, education, social policy, and organizational change. The book walks through the core principles of human-centered design: beginning with deep observation of real human behavior, generating possibilities through divergent thinking, building rough prototypes early and often, and refining through iteration rather than planning. For students of applied and interactive arts, it provides the conceptual vocabulary and process framework that underlies professional design practice across every discipline the curriculum covers, from digital interfaces to industrial products.

David Kushner's "Masters of Doom" offers something no methodology text can: a visceral, human account of what design creativity actually looks and feels like under pressure. The book tells the story of John Carmack and John Romero, the two designers and programmers who built id Software and created Doom and Quake — games that not only transformed the entertainment industry but established interactive design conventions that persist to this day. Kushner writes with the propulsive energy of a thriller, and the book works simultaneously as a history of the games industry at its most formative moment, a study of how technical constraints and artistic vision interact in the design process, and an unflinching portrait of creative partnership and its dissolution. For students, it illustrates how the principles Brown describes abstractly — iteration, problem-solving under constraint, the tension between form and function — play out in the messy, competitive, and deeply human reality of a working studio. It also raises questions about authorship, collaboration, and the ethics of design that no purely procedural account can surface.

Virginia Postrel's "The Substance of Style" pulls back to the widest possible view, asking why aesthetics — the look and feel of designed objects, spaces, and experiences — has become so central to modern economic and cultural life. Postrel argues that as basic material needs have been met in wealthy societies, the aesthetic dimension of goods and environments has become an increasingly powerful driver of value, identity, and human satisfaction. This is not superficiality, she contends, but a genuine and legitimate human need that good design addresses as seriously as function. For students of applied and interactive arts, the book provides a cultural and economic framework for understanding why design matters beyond utility — why the relationship between form, function, and human experience is not a secondary concern but is in many respects the central one. It is also a useful corrective to the purely process-oriented perspective of Brown, reminding students that design ultimately exists to serve human desires that are richer, stranger, and more aesthetic than any methodology fully captures.

Together these three books move the reader from the broadest cultural argument for why design matters, through the conceptual framework of how human-centered design works, to the lived creative reality of designing under constraint and in collaboration. A student who engages seriously with all three will come away with an understanding of design that is simultaneously philosophical, methodological, and grounded in the irreducible human complexity of actually making things.