IEEE Spectrum May, 2008 - 15

books
In Defense of Dumb

gadgets don't necessarily get better
when you give them brains

i

am a technologist," says Donald
A. Norman in his brief and
insightful book The Design of
Future Things. "I believe in making
lives richer and more rewarding
through use of science and
technology. But that is not where
our present path is taking us."
Norman, a professor of elec-
trical engineering and computer
science at Northwestern Univer-
sity, became famous for his
book The Design of Everyday
Things (first published in 1988
as The Psychology of Everyday
Things). In it he called for "user-
centered design," a way to make
everyday products easier to use
and more foolproof. Now he
turns to seemingly futuristic
technologies that in fact may not
be so far away. Many of Norman's
examples involve automobiles.
For example, some new cars are
now equipped with an adaptive
form of the familiar cruise control.
Like the old form, it keeps the car
going at a constant speed; unlike
the old form, it automatically
slows the car when it gets too
close to the car in front of it.
But that extra automation can
lull the driver into complacency,
Norman says, taking over
when the going is easy and
unexpectedly giving up when
things become difficult. Norman
describes how one of his friends
had a close call after driving
for some time at low speed on
a congested highway and then
turning onto an exit ramp. The
car suddenly accelerated because
of the adaptive cruise control,
which he had forgotten to disable.
www.spectrum.ieee.org

A better-designed system would
have reminded the driver that
the control had been activated. In
fact, Norman thinks, automobiles
should be designed to appear less
safe than they actually are to keep
the driver on guard, a suggestion
not gladly accepted by some of
his automobile-industry clients.
Intelligent systems, he argues,
should be understandable and
predictable, and when something
goes wrong they should send
messages that get the user
to make the right response
intuitively. As an example of good
design, he cites the aeronautical
system that vibrates the control
yoke to warn the pilot of an
impending stall. For bad design
he offers the writing recognition
system in Apple's old Newton
personal digital assistant, which
could turn a

THE DESIGN OF FUTURE THINGS
By Donald A. Norman;
Basic Books, 2007; 231 pp.; US $27.50;
ISBN: 978-0-465-00227-6

carefully written
word into nonsense
without giving the user
any clue as to how to
correct the problem.
It's wrong, Norman
argues, to try to make
machines too smart. A
car with an automatic
navigation system that
chooses a scenic route when it
thinks the driver is in a good
mood is unlikely to succeed, he
says, because cars will probably
never be good at reading human
intentions. Instead, he wants
machines that augment human
capabilities-for example,
robots that allow auto-assembly
workers to manipulate heavy
objects while receiving tactile
feedback, to make their
operation intuitive to a worker.
The Design of Future Things is
short, easy to read, and clearly
meant for a lay audience-
the very people who most need
to be warned not to expect too
much from automation. No
doubt most engineers would
agree with his criteria for good
design. The problem is that many
subtle usability issues manifest
themselves only after somebody
has gotten into trouble with a
product; that's why designers,
consumed by the rush to bring new
products to market, overlook them.
Norman inhabits the very
particular world of designers
of high-end consumer products.
Such products chase those so lost
in overconsumption that they
can contemplate a refrigerator
that locks its doors when a dieter
approaches. Where is the guru
for the bottom billion people
in the world's economic order,
who have too little to put in their
nonexistent refrigerators in the
first place? -Kenneth R. Foster

miniprofile

By Susan Karlin
JEANNINE
MOSELY:
PAPER
SCULPTOR
It was her Menger
sponge, a cube
measuring 1.5 meters
(5 feet) on one side
and made from
66 048 folded
business cards, that
put her on the map,
but Jeannine Mosely
has loved origami since
the age of 5. It was the
perfect background
for an MIT Ph.D. in
electrical engineering
and computer science
and a career in threedimensional modeling.
She says she loves
to breathe life into
numbers: "You can
see a mathematical
theorem or formula
made real when
you create a new
model." See her work
at the Peabody Essex
Museum in Salem,
Mass., through 8 June;
at the Siggraph
2008 Convention
in Los Angeles, in
August; and online at
TheIFF.org, Creased.
com, and PEM.org.
photo: riCK FriedMAn

mAy 2008 * iEEE SpEctrum * NA

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http://www.TheIFF.org http://www.PEM.org http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum May, 2008
