Week XII: The Design of Everyday Things Ch. 5 - 6
This week we're reading chapters 5 & 6 of a national bestseller, Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things."
If financially able, you are encouraged to order a physical copy. You can purchase it on ThriftBooks, Amazon, or a local book retailer that may have a cheaper copy onsite.
If you aren't yet able to purchase the book, here are highlights from each chapter to follow along and guide your study.
Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things
Good design, as Norman frames it, rests on discoverability and understanding, affordances and signifiers that make possible actions visible, constraints and mappings which guide correct use, and feedback plus clear conceptual models to let users predict and evaluate results. This thoroughly material process of perception, action, and iterative refinement maps directly onto “A Real, Magical Summer” where evolution itself is non-teleological design through variation, selection, and environmental feedback, producing living affordances without any external designer. In the same spirit, the project’s physicalist magick is transformance achieved by proof-of-work in art, design, and STEM. When causal mechanisms are made visible and testable, ordinary materials yield reliable, surprising effects without mystification.
Audiobook
Chapter 5
People make errors routinely. Creativity itself depends on seeing relationships between things that look unrelated; the same associative machinery that invents also slips. Most everyday errors are slips: the goal is right, the execution is not. Capture errors occur when a frequent or recently practiced action seizes the sequence. Description errors happen when similar objects or controls are confused. Data-driven errors are triggered by whatever is currently in the environment. Associative activation errors fire because one thought lights another. Mode errors appear when the same control means different things in different states.
Norman’s hypothesis is that error-correction mechanisms start at the lowest level possible and only slowly work higher. Many errors come from the vagueness of thought and memory. Memory overgeneralizes the commonplace, over-regulates familiar patterns, and over-emphasizes the discrepant. A large part of human thought rests on past experience more than on tidy rational calculation. Norman argues that thought is not like formal logic; it is more untamed. Rather than a filing cabinet, the mind is a network of frames or schemas, each associating with the next, one schema calling another. More than a single rational mode, the brain behaves like a neural net of parallel, distributed processes — tens of thousands of networks working at once. That is the connectionist picture.
Much of our knowledge stays hidden beneath conscious inspection. We discover it largely by acting, by testing ourselves, by retrieving fragments and streaming them together as a story. We should be able to do most things without thinking much about them. Decision structures can be wide and deep or shallow and narrow. A great deal of behavior runs subconsciously, with little available to introspection; that is a strength. Conscious thought is slower, more labored, and tightly limited by short-term memory.
Designing for error therefore means understanding its causes and minimizing them, making actions reversible and irreversible ones hard to perform, making the errors that do occur easy to discover, and changing the attitude toward error itself. Forcing functions like interlocks, lock-ins, lockouts are one practical tool: they make the wrong next step physically or logically unavailable.
Chapter 6
There is a natural evolution of design. A thing is tested, problems appear, it is modified, then retested and remodeled until energy or attention runs out. Previous designs are studied and altered, but “natural” design does not solve everything. Time pressure and the demand for individuality are among its curses.
If everyday design were ruled only by aesthetics, life might please the eye and punish the body. If ruled only by usability, it might be comfortable and ugly. If cost dominates, function and durability suffer. Trouble arrives when one criterion swallows the rest.
A major part of the design process is the study of how the object will actually be used. Complex designs can require thousands of schemas of knowledge to be integrated into one functional solution. Designers must work with problem awareness because consciousness’s short memory keeps attention pinned to whatever is currently wrong.
Two deadly temptations follow. The first is creeping featurism: adding too many capabilities until the whole becomes unintelligible; organization and modularization are the usual counter. The second is worship of false images and of complexity for its own sake. Good design keeps the real user, the real use, and the real constraints in view rather than the designer’s favorite extra.
