Book: User Friendly
This book follows the history of what is commonly referred to as user experience (or UX) design. The book both chronicles the history of UX, and describes how we arrived at the current state of the design industry (warts and all).
I particularly liked this passage discussing how accessibility in design has lead directly to innovation:
You sit at the end of a long line of inventions that might never have existed but for people with disabilities: the keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email. In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters, because electronic messaging was the best way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.