Product Description
In The Design of Future Things, best-selling author Donald A. Norman presents a revealing examination of smart technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators. Exploring the links between design and human psychology, he offers 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. A fascinating look at the perils and promise of … More >>
Other Articles of Interest:
- The Design of Everyday Things
- Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things
- Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean
- Machine Elements in Mechanical Design
- Materials and Design, Second Edition: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design
Norman’s book Design of Everyday Things had a profound effect both on the way I perceive the world and how I design. I have bought every consumer book he has written since then, and have always come away disappointed.
I am giving this book only 3 stars because I felt it became repetitive after a while, having covered the points adequately in the first half of the book. Not up to the quality I expect of Norman.
Rating: 3 / 5
Though the title’s similar, this is no Design of Everyday Things. This book’s very strongly focussed on design ideas for automobile automation, smart cruise control and the like, which gets a little tedious. Surprisingly, Norman also barely explores transportation possibilities beyond the car, and there’s no discussion at all of sustainability, how cities and transportation habits are changing, or really any context at all. I guess Norman sees a one-man, one-exhaust pipe future for us.
In other ways, the book feels very much like the product of the last generation of attitudes about technology: there’s basically no discussion of the web, or really anything about products that might have both online and physical manifestations. There’s certainly some interesting stuff about how people adapt to increasing automation and lack of control in their cars or homes, but no essential insights nor much about the implications of generalized ambient computing and automation, something Adam Greenfield deals with very thoughtfully in Everyware.
Rating: 3 / 5
An interesting read. Ranks in this order:
(1) Design of Everyday Things
(2) Emotional Design
(distant 3rd) Design of Future Things
It wasn’t “bad” it simply wasn’t as interesting as the others. Whereas at the end of (1) and (2) I felt enlightened – that Norman was breaking new ground. At the end of Future Things I felt he had spent much of the time repeating himself, that the book could have been half the length.
Good book, but I would skip.
Rating: 3 / 5
As Donald Norman points out, design today is taught and practiced as an art form or craft, not a science with validated principles through experimentation. Working with this premise, “Design of Future Things” (an ambitious title to say the least) is the authors attempt to move us towards distilling some universal rules on human-machine interaction.
For the most part, the book reads as a collection of essays – offering a fusion of discussions on industrial and “artificial intelligence” design patterns. Key takeaway: we need augmentation, not automation; machines should act deterministically, without introducing uncertainty.
Why four stars? Donald Norman skips over the non-physical world on which we all have come to rely: the internet, and how it is transforming everything around us. Virtually everything in our lives is now tethered to the online word, and it is only going to become more influential.
Having said that, still a highly recommended read, along with Donald Norman’s previous best sellers: “Design of Everyday Things”, and “Emotional Design.”
Rating: 4 / 5
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.
Rating: 2 / 5