Book Reading #45: Things That Make Us Smart

Chapter 3
Summary
Chapter 3 deals with external aids (two of the most important being paper and pencil) and how they make us smart. Norman discusses cognitive artifacts and how they help people keep track of complex events. He defines two ingredients for a representational system: the represented world and the representing world. He uses different examples such as tic-tac-toe, getting flight information, representing numbers and filling medical prescriptions to discuss how the way a person represents something makes the task related to the representation easier or harder to do.

Discussion
I appreciated Norman’s examples in this chapter, and I found the section on representing numbers particularly interesting. Though it’s a simple task, I had never thought about how easy it is to add up roman numerals. While I do feel some of this was covered in his other books, I do feel he takes the whole power or representation thing one step further.

Chapter 4
Summary
In chapter 4 Norman continues his discussion about artifacts and things to consider when fitting the artifact to the person. He differentiates between surface artifacts (what we see is all there is) and internal artifacts (part of the information is represented internally). He uses three puzzles (The Tower of Hanoi, Oranges and Coffee) in which the problems are the same but to a person seem different due to how much or how little information is present in the environment. Norman then discusses different ways to represent information and how the best way depends on the information and the task to be performed with the graphic. He also mentions how technology has affordances and uses voice-messaging systems as an example of a technology that in some instances forces a medium into usage that violates the affordances and gets in the way.

Discussion
As in the last chapter, I liked the examples Norman uses, especially the ones about the three puzzles. I also found his discussion on analog and digital displays to be an interesting one. My car has a digital display, which I really like. It might just be because I’m used to it now, but whenever I drive a car with an analog display, I feel it takes just a little longer for me to check my speed than it does with the digital. Something else nice about the digital display in my car is its placement. It’s placed above all the other gauges, making me only need to shift my eyes down slightly to glance at the speed.