The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things

The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things
by Donald A. Norman

The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things
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Book Summary Information

Author: Donald A. Norman
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-10-29
ISBN: 0465002277
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Basic Books

Book Reviews of The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things

Book Review: Not Impressed
Summary: 2 Stars

Much of the book reiterates and repeats the same points over and
over again about communication between machines and man but I found
that it was very limited in scope. From what I have read in technology
advances I am forced to conclude that this author has not done adequate
research to write what the title suggest which is a much wider scope than what is written within its chapters. A more correct title would be
"The communication between man and machine" or "Communication between
future home appliances, cars and furniture with man". It patronizes
computers as hardly being suitable candidates for future sentience.

Given that we have had millions of years to evolve I hardly think
that this could be concluded from only about 60 years of computer
technology...certainly in light of the fact that all of NASA's expensive computers in the 1960's Apollo era filling out an entire room does not approach the computing power of even a single laptop computer today.

In general buying a book about future technology is not as informative as
reading about articles on a daily or weekly basis because the shear
breadth of the subject does not do well in book form where it quickly
becomes outdated. If you are reading about history, language an
autobiography and so on you are more likely to be adequately informed
because it is not an evolving topic and only a few new things get discovered over the years to amend to what you already know. On the
other hand if you are reading about PAST technology such as the works
of Tesla and his D.C. motors then you are on a topic which fits into
history which is adequately constrained in its breadth and is not
evolving unless you believe Tesla is somehow alive like Elvis and is still inventing new machines that no one can can guess at.

Summary of The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman, a popular design consultant to car manufacturers, computer companies, and other industrial and design outfits, has seen the future and is worried. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Design of Everyday Things, he points out what’s going wrong with the wave of products just coming on the market and some that are on drawing boards everywhere-from “smart” cars and homes that seek to anticipate a user’s every need, to the latest automatic navigational systems. Norman builds on this critique to offer a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow’s thinking machines. This is a consumer-oriented look at the perils and promise of the smart objects of the future, and a cautionary tale for designers of these objects-many of which are already in use or development.

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