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The Design of Future Things
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”...more
Hardcover, 240 pages
Published
October 30th 2007
by Basic Books
(first published 2007)
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Norman takes his ideas from The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design and applies them to "intelligent" machines or artificial intelligence in this book. However, given that this book was published in 2007, it does not have the groundbreaking quality of the earlier books. He also does not cover broader systems such as computer software or the web, which forms a large part of our human-machine interactions today. Ironically, many of the ideas he presents are probably more innovative when...more
Jan 21, 2010
Alan
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Worried futurists, and anyone who still reads WIRED magazine cover to cover
Recommended to Alan by:
The Psychology of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman's earlier The Psychology of Everyday Things (renamed with its first paperback release, apparently as a misguided sop to the business and marketing types who were incapable of appreciating the elegance and poetry of the original title, to the sadly prosaic The Design of Everyday Things) was a landmark work, filled with meticulous, pithy and interesting observations about how the objects around us succeed, and fail, when measured against our expectations and assumptions.
It's a lot...more
It's a lot...more
Many of the principles elaborated in this book can already be found in Norman's previous work (The Design of Everyday Things), however, this book does provide a wealth of examples of cutting edge technologies and some of the design considerations involved. The book is worth reading for the examples alone. I found Norman's treatments of the relationship between humans and technologies to be insightful, but lacking in more sustained development. In particular, I kept wondering what is Norman's und...more
Don Norman's webpage --- Don Norman, a champion of human-centred design.
Machines are getting smarted. We read about visions of smart homes that will automate all the mundane actions of life, such as regulating light and temperature, even ordering groceries. Norman sounds a caution in his book -- even human-human interactions go awry because our communication is not perfect, how much more so when machines try to 'read minds' using what they can measure about human behaviour and environment.
Whil...more
Machines are getting smarted. We read about visions of smart homes that will automate all the mundane actions of life, such as regulating light and temperature, even ordering groceries. Norman sounds a caution in his book -- even human-human interactions go awry because our communication is not perfect, how much more so when machines try to 'read minds' using what they can measure about human behaviour and environment.
Whil...more
Book Review
Social Machines
A new book argues that machines work best when they help us perform, not perform in our stead.
The Design of Future Things by Donald A. Norman. Basic Books. 2007. 231 pages. $27.50.
“Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, simple or direct than does Nature. In her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous,” Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci once remarked. Former Apple vice president Donald Norman’s Design of Future Things is very...more
Social Machines
A new book argues that machines work best when they help us perform, not perform in our stead.
The Design of Future Things by Donald A. Norman. Basic Books. 2007. 231 pages. $27.50.
“Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, simple or direct than does Nature. In her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous,” Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci once remarked. Former Apple vice president Donald Norman’s Design of Future Things is very...more
If you haven't read Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, I would urge you to put it on your reading list. It was a catalog of human factors design failures, and a set of prescriptions to improve design. An excellent read.
In The Design of Future Things Norman tries to recreate his earlier success, with mixed results. He is as insigntful as ever, but the material is a tad thin. To fill space he resorted to repetition and added a wholly extraneous and redundant 'afterword'.
He proposes six...more
In The Design of Future Things Norman tries to recreate his earlier success, with mixed results. He is as insigntful as ever, but the material is a tad thin. To fill space he resorted to repetition and added a wholly extraneous and redundant 'afterword'.
He proposes six...more
This book is an attempt to describe the current relationship between people and machines, and to find a path to optimal design strategies for the relationship going forward. It does some of that, but a lot of what it does it repeat itself. He told the same stories three or four times, and frequently described an idea in detail, discussed it, and described it again. Maybe I'm impatient, but I think this would've been a much better speech or article than book.
On the plus side, some of the concepts...more
On the plus side, some of the concepts...more
Norman has been building on the ideas in his classic Design of Everyday Things over the years and instead of reading it again, I have enjoyed reading his newer work that shows his evolution of thought on the foundation of DOET. This one had a few sticky ideas for me. Using the activity of a human riding a horse as a metaphor for designing automated products was a eye opener. Machines can more easily attain the kind of give-and-take that an animal has with a human much more easily than the more l...more
Rules for human designers:
1) Provide rich, complex and natural signals.
2) Be predictable
3) Provide good conceptual models
4) Make the output understandable
5) Provide continual awareness without annoyance
6) Explore natural mappings
For machines to communicate:
1) Keep things simple
2) Give people a conceptual model
3) Give reasons
4) Make people think they are in control
5) Continually reassure
6) Never Label human behavior as "error"
1) Provide rich, complex and natural signals.
2) Be predictable
3) Provide good conceptual models
4) Make the output understandable
5) Provide continual awareness without annoyance
6) Explore natural mappings
For machines to communicate:
1) Keep things simple
2) Give people a conceptual model
3) Give reasons
4) Make people think they are in control
5) Continually reassure
6) Never Label human behavior as "error"
Good discussion of the current and conceptual limits of automation and how automation design can best be matched with human behavior and needs. It felt somewhat repetitive in parts, particularly as I'd recently read another of his books and there's a lot of carryover. I was also irritated to see a case where he used 'discrete' when he meant 'discreet' as that's one of my pet peeves.
(3.0) Not as educational as The Design of Everyday Things
Feels fluffier, less concrete, more repetitive (e.g. keeps coming back to autonomous driving (well, makes sense, he's funded/paid by Ford and Toyota at time of writing) and doesn't really add more as he does so). Feels like a rehashing of Everyday Things with just the added complication that the technology/devices/products now are "intelligent" and help automate things that humans would otherwise have to do (or couldn't possibly do) on the...more
Feels fluffier, less concrete, more repetitive (e.g. keeps coming back to autonomous driving (well, makes sense, he's funded/paid by Ford and Toyota at time of writing) and doesn't really add more as he does so). Feels like a rehashing of Everyday Things with just the added complication that the technology/devices/products now are "intelligent" and help automate things that humans would otherwise have to do (or couldn't possibly do) on the...more
Aug 23, 2009
Dolores
is currently reading it
Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" is a classic. I blame him for making me think about the usability of doors...every time I encounter one!
Let's see if he can have the same effect with "The Design of Future Things".
Let's see if he can have the same effect with "The Design of Future Things".
Poorly edited, self-indulgent speculation about future technology trends. May work as a passable introduction to "technology and design" for grade schoolers.
Book on user interfaces for future gadgets. Interesting, but not as good as his first book "Design of Everyday Things".
An interesting look at technologies that may infiltrate our lives in the future and how we can design them to better live in harmony rather than confusion. Many of Norman's warnings are well thought out. However I feel that quite a few of his thoughts on the emergence of future technology are a bit misguided. Nevertheless his philosophies are well placed and he covers some ground that few others dare to consider. For example, I wholeheartedly appreciated his discussion of how even the technologi...more
Norman is to HCI what Gladwell is to sociology. Still need to read The Design of Everyday Things!
A must-read book on product design for knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.
A great discussion about how we will/should interact with smart machines.
Interesting topic, but not a pleasant read.
First book to listen on Audible.com.
could not slog through it. ugh.
Some good ideas surrounded by some of the worst (and repeated) strawman arguments and cherry-picking I’ve run across in years. In one paragraph, he points out that machines can’t do something, then he turns around and has them doing just that in a way that no sane individual would permit, much less design hardware to do. And that happened in almost every chapter.��It was worth slogging through that BS, though, as there were some solid points among the hyperbole, but I can’t recommend it overall.
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Really like Donald Norman - this was my second book. Written so simply, it's difficult to appreciate the broad applicability of insights he develops. This book focused on machine-to-human interaction, appropriate signaling in a wider context and suggests design issues for the increasing number of automated processes coming our way.
One of my students recommended this book to me, and I can see why. He is such a technical learner -- obsessed with knowing how and why things work -- and this book totally fits his profile. I'm learning more about my student from this book than anything else -- I think other people's literature choices can be so telling.
Pleasant though somewhat arbitrary survey of some of the current thinking on human-machine interaction psychology - omits the impact of gaming, machine personas, and bunch of other stuff... Readable.
Great book on human-machine interaction. It talked mostly about how to make cars and home appliances more useful for humans. It makes me want to be a technologist.
Classic Book on design issues. Norman points out issues that seem so obvious, you question why you never thought of it.
A great reference for all product and interface designers. Very insightful.
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![Designing Interactions [With CDROM] by Bill Moggridge](http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348241331m/258476.jpg "Designing Interactions [With CDROM] by Bill Moggridge")
Donald Arthur Norman is a professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, where he also co-directs the dual degree MBA + Engineering degree program between the Kellogg school and Northwestern Engineering. Norman is on numerous company advisory boards, including the editorial board of Encyclopædia Bri...more
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