User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

by Cliff Kuang

skeuomorphism

Nifty new word!

Lakoff and Johnson suggested instead that the ideas that fill our minds don’t come from the pure faculties of reason—rather, we’d have no ideas without the bodily sensations upon which to ground them. Part of the reason that we can’t seem to think without resorting to metaphors of some kind is that ideas themselves, when they emerge from our brains, emerge from the same neural pathways in which our bodies are represented. Metaphors reflect some deeper organization about how our minds are structured.

Being physically warmed could change our emotional judgments.

How strange it would be if the user-friendly world—brought about by industrialized processes for fostering empathy with users—ended up not increasing the empathy those users feel, but stunting it.

our behavior has become a design material, just as our intuitions about the physical world once were—and those behaviors are often involuntary. It shouldn’t be surprising that our psychological quirks necessarily lie at the core of every app or product that takes hold in the market.