Book Reading #43 - Things That Make Us Smart

Reference Information
Title: Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
Author: Donald Norman
Publisher: 1994 Basic Books

Chapter 1: A Human-Centered Technology

Summary:

The book begins by talking about problems with the new technology, how it is designed to aid convenience but often ends up confusing the users and becomes the cause of human errors. Norman suggests that the technology should be more human-centered, meaning getting information from human errors and their causes and incorporate the lessons into the technology designs.

He talks about two types of sciences:

• Hard sciences: requiring accurate measurements.
• Soft Sciences: based on observations, data collection and classification.

He also talks about two types of cognition:

• Experiential: when people react to events quickly and effortlessly - reflex actions.
• Reflective: when people think and make a decision before reacting.

Discussion:

Norman makes an excellent point when he says that the designs should be human centered rather than machine centered. It's indeed very important to understand human psychology and why human make mistakes to come up with intuitive designs and interfaces. Humans make mistakes and they are nowhere close to being ideal, knowing this fact can lead to intelligent designs.

Chapter 2: Experiencing the World

Summary:

In this chapter, he further discusses the different levels of cognition. He also talks about how these levels are applied differently in the real world scenarios. He then talks about how information about these two cognitive behaviors can be used effectively to strike a right balance between the two and incorporating this balance in technology design, thus leading to decrease in human errors.

He talks about three types of human learning:

• Accretion: The accumulations of knowledge, information and facts.
• Tuning: Gaining expertise at a task by repeatedly performing it.
• Restructuring:Forming of the right conceptual model behind whatever is learnt. This is the hardest part of learning.

Yet another term that he defines is Optimal Flow - the state in which the mind becomes fully engrossed and involved in the learning process.

Discussion:

After reading about four Donald Norman books, his style of writing is getting pretty monotonous and repetitive. The examples and pictures do make it interesting for a while before it again becomes monotonous. I understand that Norman comes from a technical background rather than from a literature background. He seems to have plenty of brilliant ideas, but the way he puts them does get repetitive.