Customer Reviews

Very little content or insight from an otherwise excellent designer authority - By: Odibus, 06 Jun 2008
I was extremely intrigued by what Donald Norman was going to say about the design of future things, especially given his insights from previous books. The content is sparse: some interesting views of designing human/machine interactions to be more like human/horse (tight-rein, loose-rein, etc.) & technology that assists our lives rather than automate chunks of it. There's also a rather odd dialogue at the end of the book where he interviews a machine to get their perspective...

The bulk of the informationin the book appears to be gleaned from the conference circuit & some industrial tourism -- the remainder references his earlier books.

This book could have been summarised, with no loss of information,in a four thousand word essay, & the impression you're left with was that the author took his conference presentation & after dinner anecdotes, then quickly wrote a book around them -- there is littlein the way of substancein this short book. (This view is exacerbated by the repetition & easy-going, colloquial style, not to mention the large font size & leading!)

Save your pennies for his earlier books