Beatriz Vargas Studio
Library
Books that shape how we think about people, behavior, systems, and evidence.
Behavior & Decision-Making
Nudge — Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
Explores how environments and choices can be designed to influence behavior while preserving individual agency.
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
A framework for understanding how people make judgments and decisions—and where intuition, bias, and context shape those decisions.
Thinking in Systems — Donella H. Meadows
A powerful introduction to seeing problems as interconnected systems rather than isolated events or variables.
Human-Centered Research
The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
A foundational exploration of how people interact with the world around them—and how better design starts with understanding human behavior.
Just Enough Research — Erika Hall
A practical case for asking better questions and gathering just enough evidence to make smarter design and product decisions.
Misbehaving — Richard Thaler
A guide to conducting meaningful user interviews and turning human experiences into useful research insights.
Policy & Systems
Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott
Examines how institutions simplify complex realities—and why policies can fail when they overlook local knowledge and lived experience.
Dealing with Complexity in Development Evaluation — Vaessen & Raimondo
A framework for evaluating interventions when context, systems, and change are too complex to be captured by simple cause-and-effect stories.
Politics on the Edge — Rory Stewart
A firsthand look at the realities of policymaking, where political ambition meets institutional constraints, competing priorities, and the complexity of implementation.
Evidence, Evaluation & Learning
Evaluative Inquiry for Systemic Change — Emily F. Gates & Pablo Vidueira
Challenges evaluation to move beyond fixed, incremental solutions toward deeper, lasting change—examining how evidence, values, and multiple perspectives can help us understand and shape complex systems.
The Oxford Handbook of Program Design and Implementation Evaluation — Anu Rangarajan, ed.
A contemporary view of evaluation across the full life of a program—from design and implementation to adaptation, scale, and systems change.
Blue Marble Evaluation — Michael Quinn Patton
Expands evaluation beyond individual programs to understand change across interconnected systems, emphasizing complexity, adaptation, sustainability, and long-term transformation.