From best-selling author Donald A. Norman, the long-awaited sequel to The Design of Everyday Things: a critical look at the new dawn of “smart” technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators.
Donald A. Norman, a popular design consultant to car manufacturers, computer companies, and other industrial and design outfits, has seen the future and is worried. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Design of Everyday Things, he points out what’s going wrong with the wave of products just coming on the market and some that are on drawing boards everywhere–from “smart” cars and homes that seek to anticipate a user’s every need, to the latest automatic navigational systems. Norman builds on this critique to offer a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow’s thinking machines. This is a consumer-oriented look at the perils and promise of the smart objects of the future, and a cautionary tale for designers of these objects–many of which are already in use or development.
Customer Reviews
How intelligence will be installed in new devices:
This book was very interesting, as all of Don Norman’s books are. In this book he goes into detail about how future designers will need to design future devices, how they can make them more useful and more human. He talks a lot about how what sounds like seemingly ‘no-brainer’ new features (radar-based minimum distance following cruise control) can actually cause problems (speeding up when you pull off the road, slowing down when you merge into traffic.) He gives suggestions to designers on how to avoid these types of issues and how to design things that are truly useful for humans.
I thought it was a fascinating book and I learned a lot about design from it. He goes over the problems that making things too smart can cause and notes that when designing new devices the human interaction is the critical problem. A lot of future design will have to take into account how best to control human reactions in addition to providing the best features. Our devices are sometimes too smart (but not smart enough) and need to be designed to help humans in different ways than is first obvious.
A fascinating description of what can go wrong and how to design around it using a system view.
Good but not Great:
An interesting read. Ranks in this order:
(1) Design of Everyday Things
(2) Emotional Design
(distant 3rd) Design of Future Things
It wasn’t “bad” it simply wasn’t as interesting as the others. Whereas at the end of (1) and (2) I felt enlightened - that Norman was breaking new ground. At the end of Future Things I felt he had spent much of the time repeating himself, that the book could have been half the length.
Good book, but I would skip.
Okay, but no Design of Everyday Things:
Norman’s book Design of Everyday Things had a profound effect both on the way I perceive the world and how I design. I have bought every consumer book he has written since then, and have always come away disappointed.
I am giving this book only 3 stars because I felt it became repetitive after a while, having covered the points adequately in the first half of the book. Not up to the quality I expect of Norman.
Decent, not essential:
Though the title’s similar, this is no Design of Everyday Things. This book’s very strongly focussed on design ideas for automobile automation, smart cruise control and the like, which gets a little tedious. Surprisingly, Norman also barely explores transportation possibilities beyond the car, and there’s no discussion at all of sustainability, how cities and transportation habits are changing, or really any context at all. I guess Norman sees a one-man, one-exhaust pipe future for us.
In other ways, the book feels very much like the product of the last generation of attitudes about technology: there’s basically no discussion of the web, or really anything about products that might have both online and physical manifestations. There’s certainly some interesting stuff about how people adapt to increasing automation and lack of control in their cars or homes, but no essential insights nor much about the implications of generalized ambient computing and automation, something Adam Greenfield deals with very thoughtfully in Everyware.
