Five new and wonderful academic design books for your office shelves

Every day is a reading day if you're an ambitious designer. It's a chance to learn, grow and perfect your craft, which is why you'll appreciate these recent new books on design — sharing everything from best design practice and design economics to setting up your professional creative firm. Enjoy.

1. Designers, Users and Justice by Turkka Keinonen

How do we design for users? How might users best participate in the design process? How can we evaluate the user's experience of designed products and services? These fundamental questions are addressed in Designers, Users, and Justice, through a series of dialogues between a design scholar and a designer.

2. Designing for Service by Daniela Sangiorgi

Service design is the activity of planning and organising people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. It is now a growing field of both practice and academic research. Designing for Service brings together a wide range of international contributors to map this field and identify issues for practitioners and researchers such as identity, ethics and accountability.

3. Design and the Creation of Value by John Heskett

John Heskett was a pioneering British design historian, with a particular interest in design and economics. Design and the Creation of Value publishes for the first time his groundbreaking seminar on design and economic value. In remarkably clear and accessible prose, Heskett explores how the key traditions of economic thought conceive of how value is created.

4. Practice-based Design Research by Laurene Vaughan

Practice-based Design Research provides a companion to masters and PhD programs in design research through practice. The contributors address a range of models and approaches to practice-based research, consider relationships between industry and academia, researchers and designers, discuss initiatives to support students and faculty during the research process, and explore how students' experiences of undertaking practice-based research have impacted their future design and research practice.

5. The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers by Alison Branagan

This second edition of the best-selling, comprehensive handbook The Essential Guide to Business for Artists and Designers will appeal to a wide range of artists, makers, designers, and photographers looking to set up and establish an arts practice or design business within the visual arts and creative industries. With fully revised content, three new chapters, and profiles of contemporary artists and designers from around the world, this guide leads the reader through the most important aspects of setting up and growing a profitable enterprise.