Full Book Blog: Things that Make Us Smart

Full Blog on the chapters we read: 1-4

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).

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.

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.

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
While I complained about Norman’s tendency to be long-winded in my discussions for the first two chapters, he does make some interesting points. However, I feel that DOET is the best of Norman’s books. Norman gives a lot of great/interesting examples in chapters 3 and 4 that got me really thinking about how something is represented and how much or how little thought is needed depending on the design.

One of my favorite discussions was about the analog and digital displays in cars. My car has a digital display for the speedometer, 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 display. 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.