Planning to drop by a bookstore in Armenia on the 19th of February might be a "Mission: Impossible." All due to the influx of bibliophiles to bookstores who are looking for the perfect book for their loved ones or themselves on the Book Giving Day. We at the SDG Lab love reading books. One of the rules here is to share the takeaways from the books during our monthly FishTalks (our very own TedTalks).
If you happen to search the word «innovation» on Amazon, the search will return around 100000 results. To save you some time on scrolling through reviews, we have collected a list of the books that can help you set a foot on the land of our innovation.
1. The Nudge - Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
We keep talking about behavioral insights. But what is nudge theory? Does it actually work? And why should we care? Here's the Behavioral insights 101 guide for those interested in how the human brain works and how we can encourage people to make decisions that are in their broad self-interest.
When asked simple questions about global trends we tend to choose the worst-case scenarios. Factfulness offers radical take on instincts that tend to distort our perspective. We think Bill Gates sums up the book the best:
3. The biological mind – Alan Jasanoff
Did you know that what you eat might affect the decision you will make afterward? MIT’s Alan Jasanoff looks at the influence of the environment, from chemicals and bacteria to the weather, sights, and sounds on the brain.
4. Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell
This is an intellectual journey to the world of high-achievers. The book rotates around the questions: what makes high-achievers different? From Beatles to software billionaires, immerse yourself into the world that will delight and illuminate.
5. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell
This is a great book about how we think about thinking, about choices that we make and the processes that lead to the decision-making processes.
6. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicolas Taleb
The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events — and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. This is what Thaleb calls the Black Swan Theory.
You have only five days to develop a solution and test your MVP. This sounds like an impossible task. The Design Sprint is a five-day process for solving problems and testing new ideas. Use the proven step-by-step checklist to test the reaction of the users before investing time and resources on the actual product development.
8. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott
Whether you are writing blogs about the work that you are doing or want to tell a story with numbers, this is one of the best step-by-step guides on how to write and on how to manage your time as a writer.
Our team of Design thinkers is currently redesigning one of the public services in Armenia. And they are obsessed with everything related to user experience and user-centered design. This is Service Design Doing is a practical guide for putting knowledge and solutions into practice and getting hands dirty. This book is great for learning how to instill design thinking and human-centered approach into team operations.
10. The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design - IDEO.org
This Guide has everything you need to understand the people you're designing for, to have more effective brainstorms, to prototype your ideas, and to ultimately arrive at more creative solutions.