Book Reading #43: Things That Make Us Smart

Chapter 1
Summary
The first chapter discusses how technology should be more centered on the human. He discusses how technology can aid people but can also make them dumb and enslave them. He writes of how technology that is designed to aid people more often confuses people and interferes with thought processes. He differentiates between hard (sciences that rely on accurate measurements) and soft (sciences that relies on observation and classification) sciences. He also discusses two types of cognition: experiential (a state in which people react effortlessly and quickly to events) and reflective (a state in which thought and decision making takes place).

Discussion
I didn’t realize this was a Norman book until I read the first few pages and noted that the style matched Norman’s style: long-winded and plagued with his own set of vocabulary words and definitions. By page 11 he’s jumped back onto the design bandwagon and it starts to feel like a rehash of DOET and Emotional Design for a while.

Chapter 2
Summary
In chapter 2 Norman begins by discussing museums and how little they teach their visitors. He revisits experiential and reflective cognition and discusses how technology needs to strike a balance between the two rather than forcing users to one extreme or the other. Norman also defines three types of learning: accretion (the accumulation of facts), tuning (the practicing of a skill and the transition from novice to expert) and restructuring (the hard part of learning where one forms the right conceptual model). The first two are experiential modes and the third is reflective. He also defines optimal flow, the peak experience where the mind is fully involved, and how important it is to learning.

Discussion
I’m realizing that I don’t like Norman’s books and that the main reason I enjoyed the others has to do with the pictures that broke up the reading and drew my attention away from his style of writing. I did enjoy the last part of the chapter where he compared teaching in the classroom to video games. Finding that balance between the two that both engages and instructs the user is not easy to do but I think it could give great results.