This collection of varied works brings together some of my favourite pieces of writing from this year (and all time) with brand new, less familiar works that are helping me with my writing and defining my design practice. 


Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Frankenstein is a very important story to me. The first science fiction novel I ever read and quite possibly, one of the first science fiction novels ever written. It tells a remarkable story about the relationship between the creator and the created. I often find myself drawing parallels to this relationship and the one I have with my own work. Am I creating monsters? (If you haven’t seen The National Theatres version of the play, you really should.)

Le Guin, K.Ursula. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. 1986.

“We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the things to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.”

I need to read more Ursula Le Guin. I love the way she writes. I like the way she asks us to shift our thinking and consider a new history—a less violent, more human history by appealing to our own humanity.

Hardyment, Christina. Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings. Bodleian Library, 2019.

Novel Houses explores fictional dwellings from twenty works of English and American fiction. A friend recommended this book as inspiration to consider alternative ways of storytelling and developing narratives. I have been researching creative methods for writing about space and non-human perspectives.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

I was introduced to Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology by Anastasiia Rainer in her course “Design in the Posthuman Age”. I hadn’t yet been introduced to the idea of shifting perspectives from human (or my own) to a non-human/alternative perspective. I am interested in the object-oriented ontology that suggests that all things are at the center of being and that nothing is less or valuable than the other. That all things exist in equal importance. I try to remind myself of this in the design process and in my writing. I want to be inclusive or at least aware of other perspectives outside my own.

Nagel, Thomas. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, 1974.

After reading Ian Bogost’s, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, I read this piece by Thomas Nagel. I was asked to form a piece of writing about what it would be like to be the smell of grass. In the text, Nagel highlights that it’s impossible to know how a non-human feels or functions. I can merely project my own consciousness to create a fictional idea of what it might be like based on my own experience. 

Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative everything : design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts:The MIT Press, 2013.

Speculative design frameworks have become important to my design practice and I am often revisiting Dunne and Raby to remind myself of possible levels of speculation and modes of making for speculative simulations. 

Avanessian, Armen and Andreas Töpfer. Speculative Drawing: 2011–2014. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.

I have found it a struggle to find ways to put down some of my more abstract thoughts on paper. Particularly in sketch or graphic forms. This book is something I use to start generating form when I’m stuck on an idea. There are a million ways to show an idea but it takes practice and skill to be able to think laterally.

Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

This book has taught me how to be a better designer and how to “look” at design. He taught me that design is the communication between things and their “users” (not that I like the use of that word) who will ultimately interact with them. Norman teaches us how to best construct communication to enhance experience.

Sheller, Mimi. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. Verso, 2018.

This Spring semester, I was involved in a collaborative project about the future of mobility with industry partner, Hyundai. After watching Hyundai’s vision videos for their future plans, we were all concerned about the ethical issues that would arise from their approach. Wanting to know more about mobility justice, our faculty leader, Anastasiia Rainer recommended this work by Mimi Sheller, a professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication, and the founding Director of the New Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Inspired by Sheller, we created a speculative scenario which would explore a micro, meso and macro way of tackling the Wicked problem of mobility justice.

Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. Mushroom at The End of The World. Princeton University Press, 2015.

How can we collaborate with our environment and multispecies landscapes to preserve life on earth? This is a question that is proving near impossible to solve. We know how to mimic nature and design “inspired by nature” but actually working together with nature in collaboration is a complex task. Mushroom at The End of The World shows us the resilience of nature in the face of human destruction. This book has inspired projects of mine this year to consider working with natural processes and alternatives to what is most easily accessible to me.