MIT Press News

Mismatch wins 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award in Innovation and Creativity

Please join us in congratulating Kat Holmes, author of Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design on winning the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award in Innovation and Creativity. The award ceremony was held last night in New York City. Executive editor Robert Prior was on-hand to accept the award on behalf of the author.  

The 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards exist to recognize the best books in the business genre every year, and all the people who help bring them to life. The award committee wrote of their decision to honor Mismatch:

All through our lives, our abilities ebb and flow, wax and wane, whether we are young, old, disabled, or impaired due to accident or circumstance. Kat Holmes explains that by designing for the majority, or for the non-existent “normal,” every single person will at some time in their lives be excluded, and by doing so, we limit “who can contribute their talents to society.” Her somber but hopeful question to that problem is “If design is the source of exclusion, can it also be the remedy?” Mismatch is a critical blueprint for how designers and creators can work against long-held ability biases so often employed when planning and problem solving and shows how to utilize inclusion design to make better things that will make things better for everyone.

Mismatch was joined in the Innovation and Creativity category by runners up Creative Quest by Questlove, Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Changeby Leonard Mlodinow, Leapfrog: The New Revolution for Women Entrepreneurs by Nathalie Molina Niño with Sara Grace, Unsafe Thinking: How to Be Nimble and Bold When You Need It Most by Jonah Sachs.

The overall Best Business Book of the year was Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas.

Mismatch is published in the Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Lifebook series, edited by John Maeda.