Fri sep 25

1) Select a breif passage from Chapter 1 of The Design of Everyday Things and post it, also explain why it is interesting.

"(On the affordances of different train shelter materials,) Glass is for seeing through, and for breaking. Wood is normally used for solidity, opacity, support, or carving. Flat, porous, smooth surfaces are for writing on. So wood is also for writing on." I find this passage interesting, as it addresses, in a very analytical way the psychology of interactions with materials, something that to me, seems so obvious that it seems novel not to have thought of it before.

2)Norman's book was first published in 1988 and it still influences designers today. Why do you think this book continues to be influential 20 years later?

The influence of this book is tied, not to the objects that it talks about, but to the ideas that they embody; ideas that have no expiration date. If a concept is as relevant and as ill understood as it was years ago, then it stands to reason that an answer will we equally as well valued as it was years ago.

3) Based on this chapter, what factors would you include on a checklist for evaluating the design of a product?

I think this question is more complicated than it initially lets on, as I brought up in class on Wendsday, not all products/objects are interacted with in quite the same way, some products are active ones in which you often interact with the object in such a way that intelegently designed supplementary actions can be a boon, but most objects are interacted with in a far more passive way, the door handle for example, is not an object that you would often spend a period of time learning, you simply expect it to work in an obvious way. I think the differentiation between these two classes of objects is relevant not because it changes the checklist of what is important in a product, but for how it changes what is most important in a product. Both classes of objects can be seen in a typical car, the steering wheel, accelerator and brakes all are very active controls, and not necessarily intuitive unless you have driven a car before, but because they are all very simple to interact with, at least in a very rudimentary sense, they are very easy to learn. You would not be particularly happy, however, if the air conditioning control or stereo in your car were similarly obtuse initially. These are both instances of passive controls, the user simply wants them to do what they ought to, and as a result, there is much greater pressure on the designer to take visibility, mapping and natural design into account as they design the air conditioning control. The steering wheel however, need not necessarily have good mapping or visibility, as the designer can expect that the user will spend a reasonable amount of time learning the basic controls of the automobile.