I am delivering a message of warning," says cognitive psychologist Dr. Norman, "but accompanied by hope, not despair." Part complaint, part exhortation, _Things That Make Us Smart_ is more a sermon on the evils of poorly-designed technology than a prescription for its repair. Its main message is that we must listen to the high priests of cog. But, as Dr. Norman himself correctly points out, most of the cogs have been working in mountainous academic monasteries far removed from the grubby valleys of silicon. Their voluminous writings have all the clarity and directness of a Delphic oracle.
If creators of real products would read this, its more interesting predecessor, The Design of Everyday Things, and other books on the subject, they might be inspired to make products work within the constraints of human mental abilities. But they would not have significantly better tools with which to do it. So while strongly recommending this book to designers, I am left wishing for a science of interface design so that at least the routine parts of interfaces, the nuts and bolts, as it were, could be engineered rather than intuited.
The book is somewhat unfocused, smothering a multitude of problems with blanket statements: "We read too quickly, without questioning or debating the thought of the author." What do you mean, "we," kemo sabe? Norman's attempts to distinguish between hard and soft science is as misguided as it is trendy. Whether data is numerical observations or collections of stories is irrelevant. There is only one kind of science: a hard-nosed pursuit of testable summaries of how the world works. When we stray from this we fall into the traps science was designed to avoid: subjective judgments, kowtowing to authority, reliance on myth.
At times the book's ramblings take us into interesting territory. Norman's speculations on the reasons why dreams take the forms they do are rational and convincing, if somewhat off the track the book starts on. At the end, we are not sure what train we're riding, but have, nonetheless, a better appreciation for why the schedule was so hard to read.
_Things That Make Us Smart_, by Donald A. Norman, $22.95, Addison-Wesley: +1 (213) 655 6023.
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