C. Thomas 2008-09-20

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

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.

Ilya Grigorik 2008-09-20

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

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."

Brian C. Clark 2008-04-20

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

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.

Nancy 2008-02-19

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

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.

M. W. Ritter 2008-02-09

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

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.