Tools are how the method travels.

The India Report

Charles & Ray Eames · 1958

The founding document of Indian design education — the report to the Government of India that led to NID. Its meditation on the humble lota remains the finest short argument for human-centred design ever written on Indian soil.

Handmade in India

Aditi Ranjan & M P Ranjan (eds.) · 2007

The monumental encyclopaedia of Indian crafts — six years of fieldwork mapping the country's making traditions state by state. Prof. Ranjan's life thesis in one volume: India's craftspeople are its original human-centred designers.

Bamboo & Cane Crafts of Northeast India

M P Ranjan, Nilam Iyer & Ghanshyam Pandya · 1986

The classic study of material, maker, and community from Prof. Ranjan's Northeast fieldwork — a masterclass in how deep immersion in people's lives becomes design knowledge.

Design for India

M P Ranjan · blog, 2007–2015

Prof. Ranjan's long-running blog on design thinking, policy, and education in India — hundreds of essays arguing that design belongs in governance, agriculture, and classrooms. The intellectual foundation HCD Institute is built on.

Principles of Design through Photography

Deepak John Mathew

From our partner and Principal Design Investigator at IIT Hyderabad's Design Innovation Centre — training the designer's most fundamental instrument, the eye, through the discipline of the camera.

Thinking Design

S. Balaram · 1998

Essays from one of NID's most influential educators on design's role in Indian society — from politics and identity to the everyday objects of ordinary life.

Jugaad Innovation

Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu & Simone Ahuja · 2012

The book that took Indian frugal innovation to the world — do more with less, treat constraint as a design input. Read it alongside the One-Rupee Prototype tool above.

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman · 1988, rev. 2013

The book that gave the field its vocabulary — affordances, signifiers, feedback. If a door confuses you, the door is wrong. Start here.

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek · 1971

The field's conscience. Papanek's demand that design serve genuine human need over consumption anticipated everything the social design movement — and institutes like ours — would later stand for.

The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design

IDEO.org · 2015

The most practical single manual in the field — 57 methods with worksheets, developed for social-sector work in the Global South. Pairs naturally with the tools on this page.

Change by Design

Tim Brown · 2009

The case for design thinking as an organisational capability, from IDEO's long-time CEO — the book to hand a sceptical executive.

The Sciences of the Artificial

Herbert A. Simon · 1969

The Nobel laureate's dense, foundational argument that design — changing existing situations into preferred ones — is a science of its own. For when you want the deep roots.

Frame Innovation

Kees Dorst · 2015

The best book written on the hardest skill in this toolkit: reframing. Dorst shows how expert designers create new frames for problems that resist every standard approach.

Mismatch

Kat Holmes · 2018

Inclusive design made rigorous: every exclusion is a design decision, and solving for the margins produces better solutions for everyone. Essential for anyone designing public services.