The Story of My Life

Helen Keller's autobiography, written at twenty-two, is the account of a mind constructed against unusual constraints — deaf and blind from nineteen months old, she learned language at seven and went on to read and write in five languages. For product direction it is not a manual, and that is its use: Keller's account of discovering that names referred to things, of building a world through touch and patterns of touch, is the clearest first-person description of sense-making under radical constraint in the English language. A reminder that users have mental models you have not imagined and that design is often the problem of finding the handle those models can grasp. Short, luminous, public domain.