blog all dog-eared pages: The Design Of Future Things by Don Norman · 2008-01-19 11:13

Don Norman is a hero. Two of his books – Design/psychology of Everyday Things, and The Invisible Computer – remain touchstones: they led me into the murky worlds of user-centred design and interaction design. So it’s gutting that his last book, Emotional Design, and his new effort, The Design of Future Things, feel weak, unconvincing and without rigour.

It’s frustrating, as there are some interesting ideas here, both good and bad, but they remain unexplored, often thrown away in half a page, as again and again the book veers towards rehashing the same thoughts about intelligent cars and smart homes. Arguments seem muddled, often seemingly both for and against technological intelligence, and commits my cardinal sin: criticism without a proposal of a fix. It feels like 50- and 60-year old football commentators, complaining about the speed or intelligence of some player, when the game has changed since they ever competed.

It’s a quick book, but certainly not essential, and presses many of my hot buttons throughout – robots, education, virtual reality – and it’s a shame, as there are moments of interest along the way.

p5-7: Two Monologues do Not Make a Dialogue
...Tom dislikes his navigation system, even though he agrees that at times it would be useful. But he has no way to interact with the system to tailor it to his needs. Even if he can make some high-level choices – “fastest,” “shortest,” “most scenic,” or “avoid toll road” – he can’t discuss with the system why a particular route is chosen… What if navigation systems were able to discuss the route with the driver?

This is one of the most interesting ideas in the book. I’m a great fan of trying to let people play with their data (or, in my shorthand, Stamenize it). In a conversation with Eric a few years ago, I remember saying something like – we shouldn’t (and probably can’t) provide a view of data that answers the question, but a number of views that a person can use to answer the question for themselves.

p9: So-called intelligent systems have become too smug. They think they know what is best for us. Their intelligence, however, is limited. And this limitation is fundamental: there is no way a machine has sufficient knowledge of all the factors that go into human decision making.

I’d posit that these smug systems may have resulted from use cases, and traditional user-centred design. We’ve been taught to design systems for a purpose – preferably one purpose – collected through use cases and designed against them. Use case collection never really includes crazy ideas or tries to foretell unexpected and unplanned uses. Good design, in my mind, is designing enablers or tools that include the use cases given, but have breathing room, rather than designing strictly to the use cases. It could be said that this reduces usability, and it often does, but with the flipside of user value.

p59: Natural Interaction
Although simple tones and flashes of white or colored light are the easiest ways for designers to add signals to our devices, they are also the least natural, least informative, and most irritating of means. A better way to design the future things of everyday life is to use richer, more informative, less intrusive signals: natural signals. Use rich, complex, natural lights and sounds…

Like what? This is one of the most irritating passages. The only example is ‘the sound of boiling water’, which is trite, as it’s actually water boiling in a kettle. If you start using ‘natural’ notifications, they aren’t natural to the task in hand, and are therefore a learnt association. This is just how it has to be for intangible interactions. Even the most natural – a ringing bell of a phone call – is a learnt sound, from over a century of use. Notifications are a Hard Problem, given the palette of interactions we can use and the design constraints.

p66: Physical marks provide another possible direction. When we read paper books and magazine, we may leave marks of our progress, whether through normal wear and tear of by deliberate folding of pages … In electronic documents, all of these cues don’t have to be lost… why not make wear marks on the software?

Argh. No. This isn’t digital art. And again, it’s unnatural given the situation. If we have wear marks, we should really use the metaphor of real paper, and real books. The natural marks of electronic text are the links to, the referrers, the views, the links out: the hypertext, the associations, and the metadata. These can be visualised to provide implicit signals.

p98: When the day comes that the steering is under the car’s control, the car might very well decide to take you to the restaurant of its choice, possibly even preordering your favorite food for you. “what,” the car might say to you, “you mean you don’t want your favorite food every day, every meal? Strange – why is it your favorite then?”
What about an overload of advertisements or viruses inserted into the telephones, computers, and navigation system in the auto? Is this possible? Never underestimate the cleverness of advertisers, or mischief makers, or criminals.

There’s a lot of use of ad absurdum reasoning in this book. However, I get the point – I’ve been having discussions with a lot of people about the future of advertising recently, and there is a small minority of people who would see the scenario above and think it’s a great thing.

p114: Situation awareness… refers to a person’s knowledge of the context, the current state of things, and what might happen next. In theory, a person could still be in the loop, stay fully aware of the situation… being ready to step in when needed. This passive observation is not very rewarding, however… In experimental psychology, this situation is often called vigilance, and… studies of vigilance demonstrate deterioration in performance with time.

Noted mainly for the word, to look up more about, but it’s interesting paired with the notification stuff earlier. Thinking about mobile phones, you’re always in a state of vigilance – is someone calling me? have I received a message? – and you get odd psychological results – the fact everyone checks their phone when they hear a phone ringing, even if not their ringtone, the imaginary pocket vibration, etc.

p118: Consider the mundane task of making a cup of coffee… The result is that I have replaced the mild tedium of making coffee each morning with the more onerous need to maintain my machine… the automation lets me time-shift the demand on my attention: I trade a little bit of work at an inconvenient time – when I have just awakened, am still somewhat sleepy, in a rush – with considerable work later, which I can schedule at my convenience.

It’s an interesting trade-off, and one that would be hard to quantify.

p152: ((6 design rules))

I’m not going to list them here, as I guess they’re the nub of the book. But what I will say – there’s no proof that this list of 6 is canonical, irrefutable, final, and finished. It’s just 6 design principles to think about, 5 out of 6 of them being incredibly basic user-centred design or common sense. They join the hundreds of principles and drivers that most designers unconsciously think about when designing.

p172: Designers must be generalists who can innovate across disciplines. In turn, they must be able to call upon specialists to help develop their designs and to ensure their components are appropriate and practical.

I’m not going to get into the hoary question of What Is A Designer?, but I’ll say I almost agree – good designers are specialists, great designers are generalists who have a specialism. And lets not even go down the route of design vs. Design, design thinking, design strategy, or just plain common sense and business.

p172: It is time for a science of design… To date, engineers have attempted to apply formal methods and algorithms that optimize the mechanical and mathematical aspects of a design but tend to ignore the social and the aesthetic. The artistic side, on the other hand, fiercely resists systematization, believing it will destroy the creative heart of design. However, as we move toward the design of intelligent machines, rigor is absolutely essential.

Poppycock. I think we’ve already explored the fact that you can never ever break down problems into a complete set of use cases? Applying scientific rigor, such as old-skool usability, suffers from reaching local maxima: you will refine, but never fundamentally change an idea. Any attempt at providing the “science bit” only works if you have great designers who know when to break the rules (this is the slight-of-hand that Ideo play – provide a seemingly rigourous process to pacify management, then use designers who don’t need to follow the process to produce good results).

p174: ((a picture of Norman in a three-dimensional virtual space))

You have to question anything that ends on 3d spaces.

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