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The Design of Everyday Things. By Donald Norman. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Pp. xviii+347. $17.99.
Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things is a thorough revision of one of the standard general-interest works on human factors, originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things twenty-five years ago. Norman rightly notes a fundamental paradox that informs his work: "The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use."
The author and other cognitive psychologists have developed a toolkit for analyzing our relations with things. Once learned, their jargon makes familiar problems more understandable: affordances, signifiers, mapping, feedback, level of processing, stages of action, types of memory, mapping, constraints, interlocks, lock-ins, lockouts, activity-centered controls, the difference between slips (doing something other than intended) and mistakes (erroneous planning), mode errors, the Swiss cheese model of accidents, and procedural models like Human-Centered Design and Activity- Centered Design, among others. By understanding the human mind's limits and tendencies, Norman believes, designers can develop products that are safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable in use.
At times Norman glides...