Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Design of Future things could have been a much better book, but it has its value.

Norman has a distinguished career as engineer, cognitive scientist and champion for good design before it was fashionable. The book's weakness is its trade book focus on the general reader. It needs to be more engaging and expand beyond a focus on automobile and home automation R&D laboratories.

Its value are proposed principles for human-intelligent machine interaction: provide rich natural and continuous signals; be predictable; provide a good conceptual model; understandable output; and exploit natural mappings. Given the immaturity of the field, these are a very rough starting point. They will be replaced or evolved as broad real experience with intelligent machines evolves.

More important are the recommended readings: suggestions on important technical books and researchers on intelligent machine topics.

Norman's trade book philosophy omits conventional footnotes, though a page linked notes section allows limited references for the reader to go deeper.

A book copyright 2007 would have been written in 2006-6, but missing completely are developments in mobile, gaming, simulation, search, language translation, health care; and the potential of network-backed intelligence in the cloud. Discussion of intelligent social network interaction systems, or social network driven intelligence are absent. Norman also omits the impact of generational adoption and the signaling theory value of technology adoption by individuals.

The book could have omitted science fiction-style dialogs between fictional humans and Norman's fictional future machines. A better approach would have been to critique the interactions in popular film, with online film clip references. A more important focus could have been lessons from the evolution of artificial intelligence research and its disappointments; and ethnographic studies of current early intelligent systems, across cultures. We are sure to see unexpected variety in design theory across developers and academics in diverse world cultures.

Nonetheless, we look forward to the author's next significant book.

This book was very interesting, as all of Don Norman's books are. In this book he goes into detail about how future designers will need to design future devices, how they can make them more useful and more human. He talks a lot about how what sounds like seemingly 'no-brainer' new features (radar-based minimum distance following cruise control) can actually cause problems (speeding up when you pull off the road, slowing down when you merge into traffic.) He gives suggestions to designers on how to avoid these types of issues and how to design things that are truly useful for humans.

I thought it was a fascinating book and I learned a lot about design from it. He goes over the problems that making things too smart can cause and notes that when designing new devices the human interaction is the critical problem. A lot of future design will have to take into account how best to control human reactions in addition to providing the best features. Our devices are sometimes too smart (but not smart enough) and need to be designed to help humans in different ways than is first obvious.

A fascinating description of what can go wrong and how to design around it using a system view.

This book is at best a sequel to "Design of everyday things". He delivers with a few interesting anecdotes but never really dazzles. As a fan of the other book I found this one to be a disappointment.

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."

I did not find this book as thought provoking as I would have liked. I agree with the author on his various design principals - especially the idea of machines augmenting rather than completely automating tasks. I smiled at the anecdote about beeping from household devices as I have experienced that myself (Is it the smoke detector battery? Is it my cell phone discharging?). Obviously, there is great progress to be made in the design of common everyday devices. However, the examples kept coming back to cars (and often horses) which became repetitious; instead of getting excited about the possibilities of the future, I became concerned and even depressed. I definitely recommend skipping the Afterword which contains a fabricated conversation between the author and a machine.

This book explores design issues concerning intelligent machines. Norman is a professor and author of several books on machine design. In this book, he takes up the question of how machines may be designed in the future to give the air of intelligence. Topics include the psychology of people and machines, the nature of the interaction between people and machines, communicating with machines, and rules for interface design. End material includes a fancied interview between Norman and an intelligent machine, a summary of Norman's proposed design rules, and a short annotated list of recommended readings.

I found Norman's ideas about machine design thought-provoking, but not always well supported by the discussion in the text. He lists 6 rules: provide natural signals, be predictable, provide a good conceptual model, make the output understandable, provide awareness without annoyance and exploit natural mappings. These rules are all presented in one chapter at the end of the book, but the specific details and scenarios described in the book are not explicitly linked to these rules--they may be related to some of the rules, but the connections are not clear.

Much of Norman's discussion focuses on cars and a comparison to horses as an example of a more natural or intelligent transportation mode. While one can observe a number of design issues relating to cars, I felt there are many other types of machines worth considering that weren't taken up in the book.