Design

  • A Pattern Language
    Christopher Alexander
  • The Art of Game Design
    Jesse Schell
  • Thing from the Future
    Situation Lab
  • Understanding Comics
    Scott McCloud
  • Universal Methods of Design
    Martin, Hanington
  • Universal Principles of Design
    Lidwell, Holden, Butler
  • Designing Interactions
    Bill Moggeridge
  • Everyware
    Adam Greenfield
  • Designing and Engineering Time
    Steven Seow Ph.D.
  • Designing with the Mind in Mind
    Jeff Johnson
  • Graphic Design: The New Basics
    Ellen Lupton, Jennifer Cole Phillips
  • IDEO Method Cards
    IDEO
  • Making and Breaking the Grid
    Timothy Samara
  • Notes on the Synthesis of Form
    Christopher Alexander
  • The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid
    Oliver Byrne
  • The Elements of Typographic Style
    Robert Bringhurst
  • The Medium is the Massage
    Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore
  • The Field Study Handbook
    Jan Chipchase
  • Design with the Other 90%: Cities
    Cynthia E. Smith
  • Design Like You Give a Damn
    Kate Stohr,‎ Cameron Sinclair
  • Design Revolution
    Emily Pilloton

Form and space

  • A Pattern Language
    Christopher Alexander
  • Architecture: Form, Space, and Order
    Francis D. K. Ching
  • Graphics Shaders: Theory and Practice
    Bailey, Mike
  • Conditional Design
    Anthony di Mari
  • Operative Design
    Anthony di Mari, Nora Yoo
  • Parametric Design for Architecture
    Jabi, Wassim
  • Real Time Rendering
    Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines
  • Siteless
    François Blanciak
  • Digital Fabrications
    Lisa Iwamoto
  • Design Drawing
    Francis D. K. Ching

Software

  • Robotics Primer
    Maja J. Mataric, PhD
  • Concrete Mathematics
    Graham, Knuth, Patashnik
  • Graphics Shaders: Theory and Practice
    Bailey, Mike
  • Real Time Rendering
    Tomas Akenine-Moller, Eric Haines
  • The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    Sussman, Abelson
  • Procedural Generation in Game Design
    Tanya X. Short

Making

  • Machinery's Handbook
    Oberg, Erik & Jones, Franklin D.
  • Making It
    Chris Lefteri
  • Pocket Ref
    Thomas J. Glover

Anthropocene

Strategy

  • The Innovator's Dilemma
    Clayton Christensen
  • The Innovator's Solution
    Clayton Christensen
  • Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
    Carlota Perez
  • The Entrepreneurial State
    Mariana Mazzucato
  • The Art of the Long View
    Peter Schwartz
  • Business Model Generation
    Alexander Osterwalder,‎ Yves Pigneur
  • Lean UX
    Jeff Gothelf, Shosh Seiden
  • Running Lean
    Ash Murya

Systems

  • Signals and Boundaries
    John Henry Holland
  • Designing an Internet
    David D. Clark
  • The Moment of Complexity
    Mark C. Taylor
  • Evolution in Four Dimensions
    Eva Jablonka, Marion J. Lamb

Human systems

  • A Secular Age
    Charles Taylor
  • Seeing Like a State
    James C. Scott
  • The Origins of Political Order
    Francis Fukuyama
  • Political Order and Political Decay
    Francis Fukuyama
  • The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
    Max Weber
  • Extrastatecraft
    Keller Easterling
  • Clash of Civilizations
    ‎Samuel P. Huntington
  • The Mystery of Capital
    Hernando de Soto Polar

Tail risks

  • Global Catastrophic Risks
    Nick Bostrum
  • Global Catastrophies and Trends
    Vaclav Smil
  • Superintelligence
    Nick Bostrum

Thinking

Ethics, meaning

  • The Periodic Table
    Primo Levi
  • Survival in Auschwitz
    Primo Levi
  • The Sunflower
    Simon Wiesenthal
  • The Gulag Archipelago
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • The Story of My Experiments with Truth
    Mahatma Gandhi
  • Man's Search for Meaning
    Viktor Frankl
  • The Courage to Be
    Paul Tillich
  • On the Shortness of Life
    Seneca
  • The Enchiridion
    Epictetus
  • To Have or to Be
    Erich Fromm

Imagining better

Literature/poetry

  • Beowulf
    Seamus Heaney
  • Denise Levertov, Collected Works
    Denise Levertov
  • Silence
    Shusaku Endo
  • The Brothers Karamazov
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • Anna Karenina
    Leo Tolstoy
  • Leaves of Grass (and other works)
    Walt Whitman
  • Grapefruit
    Yoko Ono

Biography

  • Leonardo da Vinci
    Walter Isaacson
  • Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
    Leonardo da Vinci
  • Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
    Walter Isaacson
  • Three Worlds Gone Mad (The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven)
    Robert Young Pelton

Backlog

  • An Introduction to Cybernetics
    W. Ross Ashby
  • Radical Markets
    Eric Posner, Glen Weyl
  • The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
    Richard W. Hamming
  • Mindstorms
    Seymour Papert
  • The Stack
    Bejamin Bratton
  • Digital Humanitarians
    Patrick Meier
  • A Thousand Plateaus
    Deleuze, Guattari
  • Deep Learning
    Ian Goodfellow, Yaoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville
  • Energy and Civilization
    Vaclav Smil
  • Identity and Violence
    Amartya Sen
  • Escape from Freedom
    Erich Fromm
  • The World of Yesterday
    Stefan Zweig
  • Our Posthuman Future
    Francis Fukuyama
  • The Society of Mind
    Marvin Minsky
  • The Hardware Startup
    Renee DiResta
  • Art as Experience
    John Dewey
  • Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation
    Jencks, Charles, Silver, Nathan
  • The Dream Machine
    M. Mitchell Waldrop