The Design of Future Things - Ch 3

The Design of Future Things

Donald A. Norman
Summary

Chapter three discusses Natural Interaction with machines. Mr. Norman starts by comparing how we relate to machines that beep, like an alarm, the dishwasher, the microwave, etc to the way we react and interact with natural sounds, environmental sounds. It is obviously very different; so why do we design our devices to transmit unnatural sounds? Well, it is the easiest ways for designers to add signals to machines, but sadly, it is also the least natural way of doing it. In the future we should use natural signals, like the sound of boiling water in a kettle, which has no fancy electronics and is naturally produced by the water boiling. This should be the model for other systems. The chapter then goes on to explain how important implicit communication is for intelligent design because it informs without interruption and annoyance. However, designs have become intentionally more silent as the sounds usually used are annoying. These noises, however, could be pleasant if well design. In any case, sight and touch provide alternative modalities as well. The chapter later discusses affordances and how important they are in the design of future things. Also, it talks about how machines should not infer the motives of people or try to second-guess their actions, as this could be unsettling and dangerous. The chapter later talks about risk and how studies have found that when an activity is made safer the accident rate does not change. This means that we tend to somehow keep the risk the same, so if an activity seems safer we will act less carefully when doing it.  We could reverse this and say that the more dangerous something appears to be, the more care the person will exert, so why not make activities look more dangerous in order to make it safer? This sounds a little vague but the chapter actually goes ahead and explains several examples of how we could do this. Finally, Mr. Norman gives several examples of natural interaction devices, including the Segway and Cobots.

Discussion

I find it really interesting how a lot of people in our class are complaining about this book and stating that they believe the author is crazy. In my opinion, everything he says makes a lot of sense. I understand that his ideas might be hard to imagine in today’s world; but if we could actually have a natural interaction with machines I think humanity would be much more productive and happy. I don’t think all of a sudden we are going to get overloaded with these types of machines, but I do believe that gradually we will be using more and more devices in a natural and obvious way; and that is pretty much what he is saying. Hopefully, even devices that already exist and we are accustom to will eventually be reinvented to make our life’s easier and safer.