Customer Reviews

Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine

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This book is easy to read - and should open most peoples eyes a bit more...

It describes how we (mankind) uses external representations to assist our brains - from writing, to diagrams, to maps, to the way we build our offices.

If you want a deeper psychological understanding with which you can do your own reasoning on different types of external representation - get this book. If you want clear-cut guidelines - get another book.

If you like this book - try Normans: The Design of Everydaythings as well. You might like Donald Schöns The Reflective Practitioner also.

Last word: Norman seems to prefer easy reading to structure - which means the book is best read end-to-end.

In this book, Donald Norman offers a thoughtful examination of the tools, toys and games that we interact with every day. According to Norman these "things that make us smart can also make us dumb." It is the way that we use and interact with these "things" that will determine their effect on our intelligence. Not only does this text offer a comprehensive history of technology tools, but it also examines the evolution of human thought and cognition.

Like Alan Cooper, Norman examines "what is wrong in the design of the technology that requires people to behave in machine-centered ways for which people are not well suited." Norman, however, does not concentrate on the negatives of software design. He presents a look at how we have evolved into our current state in order to make predictions and recommendations about how to proceed into the future.

Norman's study of experiential and reflective cognition should be required reading for any teacher. The study could help both new and veteran users of educational technologies make appropriate choices for the use of different software for different learning opportunities. The section on "optimal flow" is useful for educators, software or game designers and cognitive scientists. Doesn't everybody strive for a "continual flow of focused concentration?"

In his study of the human mind and distributed cognition, Norman examines some of the differences between humans and other species. One of the key distinctions for me was that humans can create tools to help them "overcome the limitations of brainpower." This is where he makes the connection to how things can make us smart. The philosophical nature of this section of the book was very interesting and useful for me. I believe it could help the reader better understand how social learning theory and situated cognition can have an impact on the work of educators and interactive designers.

Overall, this book could be useful for a wide audience of educators, software developers, game designers, interactive designers, cognitive scientists, and students of any of these fields of study. Norman successfully makes connections between many technologies and thought processes. Whether it be the "Wooton Desk and the file cabinet or video games and edutainment, he shows the significance of each and their place in the study of interactive design.

Technology can make us smart. Or stupid. It can liberate. Or enslave. Norman joins a select group of thinkers advocating a human-centered approach to technology. Inspired (or, more accurately, depressed) by Jerry Mander, he wrote this book to examine the differences between humans and machines, and to establish some ground rules for policy that protected the one and leveraged the other. Norman notes that when technology is not designed from a human-centered point of view, it produces accidents and more often than not the human is blamed. He focuses especially on the distinction between experiential cognition and reflective cognition, and laments that television and entertainment are swamping us with the experiential and not teaching us the reflective. He is concerned that our ever-lengthening chain of technology dependence is forcing us to deal with ever-increasing loads of information at the same time that it weakens our inherent capabilities further. People first, science second, technology as servant.

I have to preface this review by saying that I'm probably a tough audience for this sort of book -- I have a PhD in cognitive psych, and I work as a research scientist with a specialist in interface designs. With that caveat, I have to say that the book was very readable and enjoyable, but I was constantly wondering "Where's the Beef?"

Much of the research he reviewed was rather old, even at the time of publication, and most of the analysis of them elaborated too much, without really being that trenchant. I found myself skipping ahead about halfway through the book when I knew the point of a chapter after a page or two, and didn't find any surprises along the way.

A good "gee-whiz" book for those new to cognitive psych or human factors, but a bit of a let-down for the specialist.

As a student at the University of California, San Diego, the native school of Dr. Donald Norman, I had the good fortune of reading Things That Make Us Smart as a textbook. I can now truthfully say that this has been the ONLY textbook that I enjoyed reading, and in fact, looked forward to reading. Norman is a witty and clever writer - he uses humor so subtly that it feels as if someone is tickling you throughout the book, and though you don't burst out laughing, you have a really good time. Through his humor, Norman conveys a very important message about technology and human interaction with it - with outstanding examples to which anyone can relate, he clearly explains how we have shaped and can shape our environments to, in fact, make us smart.

In Things That Make Us Smart, Donald Norman comes to the defense of the human being in the world of technology. He contends that technology has developed historically through mankind's desire to make up for human limitations. The problem comes about when we develop technology without taking into consideration human strengths and other qualities, the whole person.

In his book, Norman calls for us to recognize the effects of today's technologies on the way we think. Rather than our human qualities and ideas shaping technology, today's technology is actually shaping our qualities, ideas and actions. Technology has superseded the human being. He contends we can still turn this into a positive experience. We are still in charge. But more importantly, it is a call for mankind to return to the idea of technology development as a means for improving the quality of human life and thought, not as a means of replacing it.

This book was actually not at all what I thought it was going to be. I was pleasantly surprised and challenged by what I read. Norman writes in both a scholarly and pragmatic fashion. Read it. You'll never look at your television the same way again.

I have often heard that "computers don't make mistakes, humans do." It is around this premise that Donald Norman centers his book. He agrees with this statement - that humans make the mistakes, but it is because the computers and software are poorly designed. We make mistakes because "the machine-centered tasks imposed upon us through our technology ask us to behave in ways incompatible with our fundamental capabilities." (p. 138) If computers and software were people-centered, that is designed from the humans point of view, there would be less mistakes, or at the very least, the technology would be able to make "fuzzy" judgments for corrections.

Norman takes us through a discovery of what is "right" and what is "wrong" with many of the objects we use everyday. He points out both good design (such as the genius of the filing cabinet) and bad design, while also wishing for a new and better way. The interesting part is to note that many of these wishes he made in 1994 have actually become reality. He wished for "computerized scheduling" that can be updated and shared (p. 216) - many of us have Palm Pilots from which we can down/upload calendar updates to and from our desktop computer or share our calendar to another Palm Pilot via "beaming." He also warns us that technologies take a long time to be accepted... and asks us to consider the present to ten years prior - that there isn't that much difference. (p. 192) In 1994, there wasn't much difference in the world from 10 years before, but in the six years since 1994 the world has undergone tremendous change, mostly due to the increased use of the Internet. I am very interested in reading his latest book to see how he addresses this.

Where The Design of Everyday Things is device-centered, this work analyzes device interaction with a similar degree of rigor but from a user perspective. Norman divides interaction into experiential and reflective modes while considering the strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines. Concluding that human strengths are pattern recognition, perception with spatial navigation and manipulation, and narration and that human weaknesses are poor memory for detail along with a vulnerability to tunnel vision, Norman proposes three guiding principles for design. The first two, the naturalness principle and the perceptual principle, respect human strengths. The former insists that a device's surface representation maps to its internal state in a comprehensible way. The perceptual principle insists that a device convey these state changes by perceptible changes, i.e. visually and aurally. These principles seem to follow directly from the affordances and feedback Norman emphasizes in The Design of Everyday Things.

Alternatively, Norman's third, most novel, principle follows his analysis of human weaknesses. This appropriateness principle insists that machines provide exactly the info needed for a task, i.e. they should limit the detail of their reports and hide the method, though not the organization, of storing information. According to Norman, by following all these principles designers can produce devices that informate rather than automate, i.e. complement humans rather than substitute for humans. However, Norman laments that it is often easier for designers to allow machine needs for accuracy, quantifiable metrics and their insensitivity to physical constraints or user needs to drive design and thereby produce hard technology, which forces users to accommodate the machine, rather than soft technology, which shapes the machine to serve user needs.

The arguments of this work seem more theoretical and less practical than those of The Design of Everyday Things. Further, most of the practical advice and applications of this work appear with greater detail in that book. Consequently, this work may be more gratifying to readers interested in psychology, including learning, as well as artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, Norman's distinction between experiential and reflective modes of interaction is underdeveloped in this work, only to be expanded in the subsequent Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.

"Things That Make Us Smart" is Don Norman professing his thoughts on how technologies serve as cognitive artifacts, from past to present. There is a lot of repetition and extraneous information including Norman's thoughts on forecasting technology trends. If you have read "The Design of Everyday Things," there will be familiar ideas. Likewise, I found that the last two chapters("Soft and Hard Technology" and "Technology is Not Neutral") to be very similar to Norman's ideas in "The Design of Future Things". For Information Science folks, the chapter called "A Place for Everything, and Everything in It's Place" might be of skimming interest; in it, Norman writes about workspace organization, and touches on information retrieval, though his views concerning the latter subject have been somewhat superseded by current search engine technologies. For me, "Things That Make Us Smart" was most fascinating when Norman spoke in chapter two(and other places) about cognition; experiential and reflective thought, and how technology can elicit each.

"Things That Make Us Smart" is typical Donald Norman; take the idea of a human-centered approach to technology and run with it. For those seeking an introduction to Norman, forgo this book in favor of "The Design of Everyday Things." For those familiar with Norman's ideas, skim at your leisure.

Originally written in 1995, many of the technologies talked about in the book are either developed already, shown to be not useful, or used in ways not originally foreseen - therefore making many of the arguments irrelevant.
For instance, he talks about caller ID and how it's not THAT useful to know the phone number, because it doesn't identify a person, but just a phone. Well, with the rise of cellular phone usage, a person's phone number has indeed become their ID.

However, the best part of the book comes in the beginning and the end, when he discusses the precise differences in what humans are good at doing versus what machines are good at doing. He points out the disconnect between these two worlds are viewed by each, but doesn't really give any suggestions as to how to overcome the problems it creates.