For this impulse, I read the first chapter of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. This book is considered by many to be the bible of interaction and industrial design, and although I have read bits and pieces over the years, I can’t say I have ever read it cover to cover. In an earlier post, I wrote about my desire to keep one foot behind me, reaching back to the basics of design to build strong theoretical and methodological foundations as I work on my thesis. Reading this book is a big part of that. I am planning on reading the entire book, but for this post I will highlight the first chapter, entitled “The Psychopathy of Everyday Things”.
This chapter first introduces “Norman doors”, or doors without clear signifiers on how to open them. From there, Norman continues with an analysis of all the ways the objects in our life do and do not work for us, and why this happens. Norman touches on his past as an engineer, noting the tendency of engineers to be overly logical and fail to understand and anticipate human behaviour as it actually is, rather than how it would be in an idealized world. Similarly, designers can fail to anticipate the response to their designs by believing that every user has the same conceptual model as they do. Norman also laments the rising complexities in our technologies, citing watches with too many buttons whose functions are not obvious and his own fridge with incredibly misleading hardware. At the end of the chapter, Norman imagines how technology will only become more powerful, and if not designed well, more frustrating to use.
