Cheryl Heller
Cheryl Heller is a designer, author, educator, writer and entrepreneur. She is also the Director of Design Integration and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and the President of The Measured Lab, which she founded to investigate the impact design has on human health and society. Cheryl is the author of The Intergalactic Design Guide, which shows how social design can help address our most pressing challenges, from poverty to climate change.
If you could recommend 3 books to anyone, what would they be?
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
I would recommend this book to everyone who needs to be reconnected to nature. Without exception, that means everyone. This book is a soul-opening, magical perspective on what indigenous people know, what trees perceive of us, and what might be possible for us to sense if we only cultivated our senses. It shows us the extraordinary worlds that we're a part of if we only pay attention to our natures.
Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley
Anyone who wants to be a creative leader would love this book. It integrates the laws of quantum physics with corporate organizations and cultures, and provokes new thinking about how we might break out of the toxic legacy of the industrial revolution.
A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester
Manchester is a wonderful historian and excellent writer. He manages to create, in a single compelling narrative, a clear picture of how the world went from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. The book is filled with many of the crazy characters we've heard of, but Manchester relates them to the cause and effect of dramatic, sometimes violent, always interesting history of the world. Reads like the best kind of crazy fiction that no one could ever invent.
What are you reading now?
I'm reading tons for my doctoral dissertation, and have a big stack of books to read for pleasure to start the moment I have my time back. I'm about to read Designing Design Education, by 250 experts from 4 continents. I'm reading this because I'm deeply interested in design education and am on the steering committee of The Future of Design Education Initiative.
And I'm about to start reading Brain Storm, an autobiography by Shelley Kolton who has been my doctor for many years. It's a book about her childhood and her diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder.
What is your favourite bookstore or library?
The New York Public Library is an extraordinary institution. And I have a pretty great book collection at home and a big stack of unread books waiting for me.
