FastCompany: “For just over a year, Google’s hardware design team has been working inside a new, highly classified design studio. Only a small fraction of Google’s employees are allowed inside this beautiful, birchwood-framed space—a team of around 150, who are hard at work designing the next Pixel phones, Google Home assistants, and all sorts of other things the public (and Google’s competitors) haven’t seen yet. As you can read in our exclusive first visit here, the Design Lab has areas devoted to every aspect of the design process, from precise color evaluation to a materials library that allows team members to handle over 1,000 material swatches. As this dedicated design lab was being developed, Google vice president and head of hardware design Ivy Ross also had another request for the design team: a library, with actual paper books that her designers could grab and read. Each designer was asked to bring in six of the most influential books in their lives, and write a line inside the cover about it. Some are rare art and design tomes. Others are children’s storybooks and pieces of literature. We asked Google to share a small selection of the library’s offerings with us. Think of it as your summer reading list, presented in no particular order, compliments of Google’s hardware design team…”