The Design of Everyday Things
A humane introduction to why confusing objects are usually a design problem, not a user failure.
Open the guide06
Idea hub
Technology & Work
Technology is never only a device. These readings follow design decisions into habits, workplaces, markets and public life, asking whose needs a system notices and whose labor or attention it makes invisible.
Questions to carry
Read with a live question.
- 01
Which behavior does a design make easy or difficult?
- 02
Who bears the hidden cost of convenience?
- 03
When does a useful tool become an institution of power?
Read the present
Contemporary guides
Original Linden maps for deciding how—and whether—to read important recent nonfiction.
The Code Breaker
A biography of scientific collaboration that opens into the promises and governance problems of gene editing.
Open the guideInvisible Women
A data-centered argument that systems designed around an assumed default person can distribute risk and inconvenience unevenly.
Open the guideThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism
A large-scale argument about how behavioral data became a source of prediction, profit and private power.
Open the guideRead the foundations
Classic texts in the conversation
Public-domain works that reveal earlier arguments, methods and social conditions.
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
Hugo Münsterberg
Psychology & Personal Growth · B2–C1 · 6 hr0% read
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
Fiction · B2–C1 · 13 hr · Guide0% read
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
Science Fiction · B1–B2 · 3 hr · Guide0% read
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Science & Technology · B2–C1 · 17 hr0% read
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