 At AJ&Smart we read a lot of books every year and all of the designers at AJ&Smart are super obsessed with reading and learning and leveling up their game and it doesn't have to necessarily be design books either. There's books everywhere in this office, we're actually getting it painted now but there's already a giant pile of books just right there, there's another pile of books over there, there's just a pile of other things. Anyway, so what we decided to do in this video is go around the AJ&Smart office and ask the different designers, what are they reading right now? That's basically the idea. So let's take a look at what designers at AJ&Smart are going to be reading in 2020. Hi, my name is Amar and I'm a product designer at AJ&Smart. In 2020 I'm excited to read this book called Aesthetic Intelligence and the reason I'm excited to read this is that I heard about it on a podcast and the author was talking about how there's this untapped potential in what she calls Aesthetic Intelligence which is the idea that people care about good experiences and it's not just like a surface level thing of like something is pretty, it's deeper than that and she tries to kind of capture what it means to be, to have that aesthetic intelligence and like good taste basically and she talks about how Apple has made tremendous use of this, how Apple kind of popularized design and made it as a differentiator, how Starbucks did the same for coffee, it made it like a cool experience to go into a coffee shop and so in this book she talks about how you can basically do that for your own business and use aesthetics as a differentiator and how you can give that experience to your customers. So that's why I'm excited about this book Aesthetic Intelligence. Hi, my name is Jonas, I'm a product designer here at AJ&Smart and for next year especially I'm really excited about reading egos to enemy by Ryan Holiday because I think ego overall is a very, very interesting topic because it really can influence you and your decision-making and not just in your decision-making but also how you talk to your colleagues, how you talk to your friends and it can really like create really unrealistic expectations for you and entitlement as well. So I think being able to handle your ego is a really, really important skill and I'm just super excited to work on this next year. So that's the book I'm most excited about, ego is the enemy by Ryan Holiday. Hi, I'm Anastasia and I'm brand strategist for workshopper.com at AJ&Smart. So over the holiday season I'm going to be reading this little book here by April Dunford. Obviously awesome, how to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it and love it. The reason I'm excited about it is because recently someone posted the link to an article in our Slack channel with recommendations for books that every marketer should read in 2019 and this was on the list. I have to admit I compulsively ordered all of the books on that list but I'm mostly excited about this one because it talks about positioning and how to communicate in the best possible way, why your product is exciting, why customers should love it and basically how to find the secret sauce that would make not only you and your team excited about the product but basically the whole world as well. And that's the book I'm most excited about reading, obviously awesome by April Dunford. Hi, I'm Rita, I'm a product designer and UX researcher here at AJ&Smart. So my next book I will read is Universal Principles of Design. Show it to the camera here. I will read this book because it shows a couple of psychological principles to design which might help me make better designs for my next concepts. You always have two pages per chapter, one page here where it explains the principle a bit and then it shows you an example. It's a super easy read and it's really interesting things. So for example here, I don't know if you've heard of this one, it's actually a video. So your task is to watch a couple of basketball players play basketball and your task is just to always see where the ball is. I don't know if a couple of people have maybe seen this video already and then what they do in the video is they put a gorilla, a person in a gorilla costume into the video, you don't notice it and this basically shows you that principle of inattentional blindness. Learn something. So that's the thing that I'm most excited reading about next, Universal Principles of Design. Okay, I'm Dom. I work as a performance marketer at Agen Smart and the book that I'm really excited about to read this winter season, holiday season is Ultra Learning from Scott Young and I'm excited because it kind of promises to show you how to master hard skills quicker. You know, we all do online learning. This is how we develop our skills and actually finding a way to do it quicker, more efficient rather than just putting more time in it. I think it's very valuable. Something that can help me get better at learning in 2020 and I think it can, you know, it can improve anybody's career pretty quickly. So yeah, this is what I expect from this book. Check it out. Again, Ultra Learning, Scott Young. Thanks so much for watching this video. I hope you got a few ideas that maybe you wouldn't have thought about reading this year. Let us know in the comments what you're reading, what you found to be a really interesting, maybe non-designing book to learn things that will help you in your design career. Down in the description, you can find a link to a much bigger selection of the books we're reading at Agen Smart. So check that out if you're interested in books in general in the design and product space. Make sure you subscribe, like this channel. If you want to see more videos like this, that's all I want to say. Goodbye from myself and Callum. Bye! All right, let's go and see what people are reading. How short, like, what is the minimum shortness? Hi, I'm Almir from Agen Smart. I'm a product, no. Hi, I'm Almir from, you know, why am I saying that? Okay, so if you could get an intro from yourself, what's your name and what do you do here? Hi, my name is Anastasia. I am a brand new... What's your name? What's your name? What do you do at Agen Smart? Hi, my name is Jonas. I'm Britta, I'm a product designer and UX researcher here at Agen Smart. Cool, you may be there again. You look like, hi, I'm Britta. Oh my god, you're asking me. Okay, hi, I'm Britta. I'm a product designer and thanks, Inka. Okay, good. It's actually quite to Machiavellian if you read it through, so I might become the second... Oh, good, I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna say I'm not. I can talk about a part of it. Can you just pick up when you're talking about it? Okay, done. So what's your name and what do you do at Agen Smart? It's also recording the camera, right? Yeah, yeah. Look at the camera, not the microphone, that's how it works. Yeah, hi. Talk to the camera, look at the microphone. The reason I'm excited about this, the reason I'm excited about this is because... What are you laughing at? Because it's a very long name.