HmntyCntrd Book Club
10 books to help you be more human-centered in your work
HmntyCntrd book club picks: let’s talk books, design, and what it means to be truly human-centered in UX.
Design books are great for learning practical and theoretical things about technology and design. But they are not the best at teaching us to be more human-centered in our work as UX professionals.
Why? Two reasons, mainly:
- Most of the widely recommended UX and design books are written by majority white/allocishet/abled/Western/middle or upper class authors. We can hardly become more human-centered if we center the experience and knowledge of a very homogenous group who holds the most power in tech when learning about fundamental practices and frameworks of design.
- Authors of design books don’t typically set out to question the way our world works, they just aim to teach us how to design within established systems. But the systems of the world are created to maintain inequality and concentrate power, and being human-centered requires being intentional about transforming and dismantling the status quo.
So, to address the above, we need to:
- Center the knowledge and expertise of people whose voices are historically underrepresented in design and tech;
- Learn more about the way the world works and how the harmful systems of the world (like white supremacy or global racial capitalism) are created, maintained, and reproduced.
Reading can be one of the ways to do both of these things.
HmntyCntrd book club: A different kind of UX book club
Centering underrepresented voices and learning more about the world outside of tech is what we set out to do with HmntyCntrd Book Club.
Some books are recommended by community members and some we vote on, but overall we try to be intentional about what books we pick up to ensure each one fits at least some of the following criteria:
- Non-fiction;
- Non-design / non-UX;
- Can help us be more human-centered in our work;
- Written by author(s) underrepresented in publishing (e.g. authors of color, LGBTQIA+, disabled, Global South, etc);
- Not published by the “Big 5” (Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster);
- Not on a list of best-selling books for any given year.
With those guidelines in mind, here are the 10 books we ended up reading and discussing over the course of the past year.
Book 1: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
Additional resources: Free course| Interview with the author (video)
Big thanks to Moon Moua for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.
Why you can learn from this book:
Trauma is a protective mechanism used by the body to stop or protect itself from potential damage.
“…trauma is a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat.”
— Chapter 1. Your Body and Blood
White-body supremacy doesn’t just live in our conscious brains, it lives in our bodies and is being passed down over generations through the millennia of white-on-white violence resulting in racialized trauma. To begin to heal and unlearn the white-body supremacy, we need to address the trauma in our own bodies. Resma Menakem talks about how the pain of that healing process is inevitable, but we can choose the clean pain of growth over the dirty pain of avoidance, blame and denial. Read this book to learn more about how we can all start to heal from racialized trauma and the white-body supremacy.
Something to think about as UX professionals:
Trauma as a response to real or perceived danger is stored in our bodies, and the safety of trust is also physical: how do we then facilitate trust in remote research where we can’t physically connect with our participants, or when working with participants of a different race?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
Locating racialized trauma in our cultural upbringings; racial liminal spaces; inheriting racialized trauma.
Book 2: Design for Cognitive Bias by David Dylan Thomas
Additional resources: Podcast
Big thanks to Drew Bromfield for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.
What you can learn from this book:
About 95% of cognition happens below the threshold of conscious thought. A lot of this cognition happens through mental shortcuts meant to save us time & effort. However, some shortcuts lead to errors — cognitive biases. The book examines different kinds of biases and how we as designers and professionals might be susceptible to them.
“…the next time someone asks you why you did something, the most honest answer you can give is “How the hell should I know?” (Keep in mind this is also true when you ask your users why they do what they do.)”
— Chapter 1. What is Bias?
Something to think about as UX professionals:
What are the biased practices that we employ in our everyday work? How do we uncover and mitigate user, stakeholder, and our own bias as designers and UX professionals?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
The “bandwagon effect” bias and the importance of considering the racialized/gendered/ableist component of dissent while providing a safe environment for criticism that respects people’s boundaries and effort; general lack of ethical accountability in design and tech; tech unions.
Book 3: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Additional resources: Author reading and discussion (video)
Big thanks to Mina Karusala for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.
What you can learn from this book:
The book explores the relationship between disability justice and care work, from members of the disability communities establishing mutual aid based care webs to how conference and event organizing needs to take into account different access needs. Drawing on their experience organizing in QTBIPOC disabled and chronically ill communities, the author explores important issues like pain, unequal emotional labor, and the sustainability of anti-ableist futures. It stresses the importance of shifting our understanding of care from an individual responsibility to a collective responsibility.
Something to think about as UX professionals:
How can we center the leadership and wisdom of SDQTBIPOC (Sick, Disabled, Queer, Trans, Black and Indigenous People of Color) in design and a11y work?
“I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life — dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way.”
— Cripping the Apocalypse. Some of my Wild Disability Justice Dreams
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
Mutual aid and care webs; how non-disabled folks dominate the field of accessibility work; the political language surrounding disability.
Book 4: Identity Capitalists: How the Powerful Exploit Diversity and What It Means for the Rest of Us by Nancy Leong
Additional resources: Podcast | Interview with the author (article)
Big thanks to Elysa Smigielski for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.
What you can learn from this book:
The book defines identity capitalism as people and institutions benefiting from the identity of those not in power. For example, white DEI leaders or design managers in power showcasing their affiliations with members of historically marginalized groups so they can be perceived as allies without doing anything of substance to change the realities of white supremacy.
“Identity capitalism is not about promoting tolerance, diversity, inclusion, or equality. It’s about self-interest and power.”
— Introduction. Getting Used
Something to think about as UX professionals:
How does design and tech as an industry weaponize diversity and conversations about diversity to gain the social benefits associated with it without doing any of the difficult work required to make actual substantive progress?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
How the dominant culture benefits from policy; the ingroup — the group that controls power and resources vs. the outgroup — the group, often a numerical minority, without access to the ingroup’s power and resources and often the source of ingroup’s benefits; who is an identity entrepreneur.
Book 5: Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia
Additional resources: Interview with the author (article)
What you can learn from this book:
Borders are not an ontological category, but are created & maintained by the state to:
- consolidate racial-capitalist, border imperialist, colonial, and nationalist rule;
- create hierarchical social ordering based on racial exclusion;
- manage the flow of the capital;
- control the labor & divide the international working class via organization of difference (migrant/refugee status, race, gender, class etc).
Refugees and migrants who are the least responsible for poverty, wars, and climate crisis are disproportionately displaced by them and then face exclusion and criminalization in the countries that created the conditions for their displacement in the first place.
“Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.”
— Conclusion
Something to think about as UX professionals:
What are the many ways in which tech companies are complicit in reproducing external and internal borders (creating the tools of surveillance, outsourcing, exploitation)?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
Urban policy and gentrification as factors influencing the removal and fleeing of people; land grabbing and weaponizing citizenship; temporary labour migration as discussed in the book vs. the concept of ghost work in the book by Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri.
Book 6: Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food by Gina Rae La Cerva
Additional resources: Podcast | Interview with the author (article)
Big thanks to Lindsay Miller for suggesting this book & facilitating our discussion.
What you can learn from this book:
The book discusses the history of wild foods — from lobsters and sea turtles to game meat and bird’s nests. Foraged and wild-caught ingredients have become fads in the modern culinary world. But what do they represent in our lives? Are they a way for the postindustrial world to reconnect with nature or just another way for the privileged to fetishize poverty and survival? Gina Rae La Cerva looks into our fascination with wild foods and the implications of treating them as status symbols.
“We are comforted by the dullness that comes with domestication, but we crave the flavors of the wild. There is infinite anguish to live in such contradiction. But it is all we have. It is our most beautiful flaw. To be both mortal and godly, element and subject, body and mind.”
— Chapter 10. Wild Grass
Something to think about as UX professionals:
The author, who is an anthropologist, used provocative research methods and storytelling in this book. How can we be more intentional in how we interpret research data and allow our stakeholders to consume it?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
Research ethics of the author getting involved with one of the respondents; the complexity, history and terminology of “poaching” vs. “conservation”; commodification of restaurant culture and our emotional journey as food consumers.
Book 7: Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama
Additional resources: Talk by the author (video)
Big thanks to Marcela Musgrove for suggesting this book & to Elysa Smigielski for facilitating our discussion.
What you can learn from this book:
What is the role of technology in social change? Using his experience at Microsoft creating technology for “international development”, Kentaro Toyama introduces the law of amplification — technology serving only as an amplifier of pre-existing human capacities and intentions — and argues that even in our age of advanced technology, social progress depends on human change.
“…throwing gadgets at social problems isn’t effective.”
— Chapter 2. The Law of Amplification
Something to think about as UX professionals:
What social issues (if any) we can and can’t solve with technological solutions?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
The problems of the One Laptop program implementation in India and Latin America; the role of participatory design in using technological solutions to address social issues.
Book 8: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (ed. by Alice Wong)
Additional resources: Podcast
What you can learn from this book:
Through an intersectional & disability justice lens, the book discusses many different aspects of disability and inclusion, and how all of those things function on the intersection of other identities (race, gender, sexuality, religion and so on).
The essays in the book cover a range of topics that are grouped into 4 different sections:
- Being: Disability x Identity and different aspects of it, including institutional ableism and exclusion (especially medical ableism).
- Becoming: changing societal perception and representation of disability, taking a look at different narratives surrounding disability.
- Doing: how disability shapes and transforms other experiences: work, school, city living, communication.
- Connecting: connections inside the disability community and connecting other social justice movements to disability justice.
Something to think about as UX professionals:
How do we ensure the disabled community takes control of the narrative surrounding disability in design, especially a11y efforts? How do we center disabled and queer people of color in our work?
“The forces of capitalism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia may have cornered us into a vulnerable position in this unprecedented moment in our planet’s history, but the wisdom we’ve gained along the way could allow us all to survive in the face of climate chaos. The history of disabled queer and trans people has continually been one of creative problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs.”
— To Survive Climate Catastrpohe, Look to Queer and Disabled Folks. Patty Berne, as told to and edited by Vanessa Raditz
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
Bringing awareness of disability and highlighting the joy of the disabled community through art and media; social and medical interpretations of disability and defining what the cure is; community building and disabled ancestors.
Book 9: Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo
Additional resources: Podcast | Author event (video)| NYT review (article)
What you can learn from this book:
In this book, Ijeoma Oluo walks us through the history of America’s political, economic, and educational systems to expose the myth of meritocracy. For Oluo, the maintenance of these violent and unequal systems is rooted in white male “mediocrity.” What is the role of mediocrity in white manhood and how does it maintain racial power?
Because society uplifts and centers white men in all areas of social and political life, it also elevates incompetence. As a result, many white men have the expectation that they shouldn’t have to struggle like others, and the violation of this expectation leads to violence — both the violence they inflict on others (like mass shooters) and on themselves, with suicide rates being the highest amongst white men.
“By defining greatness as a white man’s birthright, we immediately divorce it from real, quantifiable greatness — greatness that benefits, greatness that creates.”
— Introduction. Works According to Design
Something to think about as UX professionals:
How does maintaining the racial power of white male supremacy manifest in design? Take a look at both the language we use professionally (for example, violent metaphors like “war room” or “north star”) and all the ways the industry leaders resist being held accountable.
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
How our language reflects the ideas of white meritocracy; proximity to power & allies; white men in social justice movements and Bernie Bros.
Book 10: Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
Additional resources: Panel with the author (video) | Podcast
What you can learn from this book:
In this book, Purnell argues that policing cannot be reformed because it is not a broken institution; instead, policing is an institution that is effectively executing its original purpose.
“Police manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete.”
— Introduction. How I Became a Police Abolitionist
Through Purnell’s own personal journey of becoming an abolitionist, the book explores how the work of forging abolitionist futures is much broader than just elimination of any one particular system or institution (police, prison industrial complex, capital punishment, etc). Purnell establishes abolition as building responses to harm in society that are rooted in community and accountability, and as an opportunity to eliminate harm in the first place.
Something to think about as UX professionals:
What could be the role of technology in an abolitionist future? How can technology and design assist on scaling down the harms from the carceral system, policing and other violent institutions today?
What we discussed in the HmntyCntrd book club after reading it:
Spaces that are coded as reformative and progressive but aren’t; how accountability without punishment could look like under abolition; imagining abolitionists futures (you can’t build what you can’t imagine).
Bonus: Abolish the Cop Inside Your (Designer’s) Head: Unraveling the Links Between Design and Policing by By Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Sean Lewis
For a bonus session, we also met to discuss an article by Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Sean Lewis that critically examines the connections between design and policing, from designers creating the tools of policing like various surveillance technologies to using and reproducing ideologies of policing in design.
First rule of book club: DO talk about book club
If some of the books on this list look interesting to you, I hope you pick them up. But I also hope that if you read any of these or other books that talk about social issues, you don’t just stop at reading. Share your learnings with others: your family, friends, and colleagues. Discuss them together. Question things you were taught based on the new things you learn. Think about how you can implement your learnings in your everyday work.
Let’s start with reading and learning, and continue by challenging the status quo together.
Neither this article nor the book club itself would be possible without Alba Villamil, the book club co-founder and our note-taker, and Vivianne Castillo, the founder of HmntyCntrd. Huge thanks to both of them for their stellar leadership and championing humanity in tech, always.
Hi, I’m Anna, a product designer by day and a book nerd by night. I frequently explore different design and tech related topics with the focus on ethics and responsible design, accessibility, and inclusion here on Medium. You can also connect with me via LinkedIn or Twitter.
