Hippo: The Human Focused Digital Book

by Pete Trainor, Luke Shipman (Editor), Jamie Twyman (Illustrations)

Don't do things better, do better things.

Digital technology. It has crept into our lives, and so deeply has it penetrated us, that it has completely redesigned us. In the deep oceans and the high skies, it is now as elemental in our landscape as the wind and falling rain. It's not going to stop.

Due to the way civilisations progress, we are about to zip-line and observe more change in the next ten years, than of the last hundred. But how do we prevent this acceleration from eroding away our humanity? As technology becomes increasingly immaterial, ask does the technology we've created add more layers of confusion? When we strip away all the technology, what are we left with? The same thing we started with -- people.

Incorporating the psychological and philosophical fields into the design process, Pete Trainor takes us back to the fundamental questions, that drive us, and through a journey of design thinking, he asks one simple question, the one we have asked through all times...  why ?

Genres: Design, Business

263 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2016

Reviews

[Pete Trainor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started writing this book at the start of this year to mark my 20th year as a digital designer. It's been a joy reflecting on the industry I've worked in so passionately over the last 20 years of my life. It's more of a joy to share my vision of how we can do better things, rather than things better. It's time we approached digital design and product design in a different way, one more grounded in the things that make us brilliant as humans, not the things that make us bitter as consumers. I hope you enjoy reading my book too.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still really not sure what to think of this book! It was definitely interesting: the author is clearly passionate and has vast experience in many areas. Despite that experience, and his excellent vocabulary and descriptions, points often feel laboured! For a slim tome, this could have been even more concise, and not suffered as a result. Ultimately, this isn't required reading, but interesting and thought-provoking nonetheless.

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

As someone interested in design and user experience, this was un-instructional and unhelpful. It did little to actually discuss tech trends in a meaningful way, it did nothing to discuss design, and it's full of tangents and examples that obfuscate rather than illustrate. Most of what Trainor says you can think on your own so his years of designing doesn't really offer much wisdom, which defeats the purpose of reading a book about UX. Unlike other books I've found, he doesn't discuss elements of design, nor does he give practical tips. Instead, this seems to be more a manifesto about how design should be more holistic - which would be fine if this was 25 pages long.