New Course: The Design of Everyday Things
blog.udacity.com
blog.udacity.com
Speaking of civility, my touchstone design book is The Ice Palace That Melted Away, by Bill Stumpf (Aeron chair designer). The first chapter, on reflecting the wonder of flight in the experience, is the designer's answer to Louie CK.
In the book, the term "affordance" refers to any kind of opportunity for a user to exert leverage on a designed object or system. So, a hair brush has a handle, and that handle is the point at which the object (the hair brush) affords any use by the user, because the person can grab the handle and orient the bristles when the dragging the brush through their hair. Hence the book's cover design, depicting the coffee pot with the misplaced handle, demonstrating a misplaced affordance, which results in the user getting burned when they try to pour hot coffee. The mouse is an affordance on a computer, because it's the device used for pointing. The keyboard is the affordance for typing. The video monitor is the affordance for observing output. The "submit" button on a web form in an HTML page is the affordance for sending data to the web server.
When would you ever use the words "honest", "humane" or "civil" in place of "affordance"? Those are adjectives, but the word "affordance" is a noun.
Yeah, I wouldn't use those words in place of "affordance". My point is that those are also words in the designer vocabulary, but ones that are on the fluffy side of design rather than the hard human-factors side, like "affordance". Which we don't have enough of. But I'm a fluffy designer, so who am I to complain?
as an english english speaker, it's associated with regret, sadness, etc. yet i've seen it used here multiple times to mean something completely different. what?
a subject of poignant interest.
i suspect it's a cultural variation.
Won't it be very interesting if we are lucky enough to one day examine our own design trends through the lens of social change. What moral shift might be responsible for the trend toward flat design?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
You'll never look a door the same way again... particularly if it has a handle but still expects to be pushed open.
Oh yes! It's one of those "WTF" moments and you want to find the company that designed that thing and send them the book. The book is really an eye opener.
This is not to dispute the (great) value of the book, but to point out that there's often more than one use case.
That said, door design is a good example for many other things. To give you a particular one, a certain DVD player/recorder made by Panasonic has two large buttons on the upper corners of its front panel. One is the on/standby button and the other is the eject button. They placed the on/off button right next to the DVD tray, and literally everyone who has attempted to place a DVD in it has accidentally turned it off instead. Given it takes 20+ seconds to power cycle, this is extemely annoying, but of course not painful enough to ditch the whole thing as it otherwise works fine. You don't get used to it either, it's a jarring experience every time. Given neither switch is actually on the PCB and both are wired in, it would have been trivial to flip them around (and one of these days I will do so), but the designers didn't think of it.
As for poorly designed power switches. I do not at all dispute the majority of the philosophy of this class. Even plan on taking the class, myself. I just find the door fixation obnoxious.
As a counterpoint, I usually reach towards cars. Most are very similar to each other, yet as someone that used to have to rely on rentals, the first 2 minutes in any car are spent making sure I know how to do all of the basics. The myriad ways to control a windshield wiper, adjust the brightness of the inner lights, reset trip timers, etc, is quite impressive. Same for the radio and its highly varied functions.
The fact that this even needs to be said is a sad comment on people's lack of imagination.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great book, but it's popular because it's easy to understand, not because it necessarily contains actionably insights or complex issues that require a course to unveil.
"When I started, I assumed that the basic principles were still true, so all I needed to do was update the examples. But in the end, I rewrote everything."
"When I wrote the original book I was an academic researcher. Today, I have been an industry executive (Apple, HP, and some startups), a consultant to numerous companies, and a board member of companies. I had to include my learnings from these experiences."
"Finally, one important component of the original edition was its brevity. The book could be read quickly as a basic, general introduction. I kept that feature unchanged. I tried to delete as much as I added to keep the total size about the same. The book is meant to be an introduction: advanced discussions of the topics, as well as a large number of important, but more advanced, topics have been left out to maintain the compactness."
Although these portions were taken from the new book I expect to gain even more insight from this course.
All in all, though, highly recommended.
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. This is the paradox of technology.
The paradox of technology should never be used as an excuse for poor design.
~ The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
I'll suggest reading Henry Petroski's stuff, too. "The Evolution of Useful Things", "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance", and "To Engineer is Human" all make the case that the design of things around us are shaped less by insight and more by evolution, incrementally building on the mistakes of the past.
If "The Design of Everyday Things" is half as interesting as Petroski's books, I can't wait to read it.
Pretty annoying it gave me the option of Google/Facebook login, then made me fill out information anyway. The whole reason I picked Google to login is because I don't want to fill out a registration form for site number 1000.
FYI, it says right there on the page:
> Design of Everyday Things will consist of four courses that are tentatively scheduled to start in Fall 2013.
> If you're interested in enrolling, please click the orange “Add to My Courses” button on this page and we'll be in touch as more details are available.
I wonder how this will play into Udacity, as I view it more as a platform for short quizes and testing via code. This is more a book on conceptual understanding.