The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things

Product Description:
From best-selling author Donald A. Norman, the long-awaited sequel toThe Design of Everyday Things: a critical look at the new dawn of "smart" technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators.

Donald A. Norman, a popular design consultant to car manufacturers, computer companies, and other industrial and design outfits, has seen the future and is worried. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Design of Everyday Things, he points out what's going wrong with the wave of products just coming on the market and some that are on drawing boards everywhere--from "smart" cars and homes that seek to anticipate a user's every need, to the latest automatic navigational systems. Norman builds on this critique to offer a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow's thinking machines. This is a consumer-oriented look at the perils and promise of the smart objects of the future, and a cautionary tale for designers of these objects--many of which are already in use or development.

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Customer Reviews

Rating: - Not as good as the original
This book is at best a sequel to "Design of everyday things".He delivers with a few interesting anecdotes but never really dazzles.As a fan of the other book I found this one to be a disappointment.
Rating: - Augmenation, not automation
As Donald Norman points out, design today is taught and practiced as an art form or craft, not a science with validated principles through experimentation. Working with this premise, "Design of Future Things" (an ambitious title to say the least) is the authors attempt to move us towards distilling some universal rules on human-machine interaction.

For the most part, the book reads as a collection of essays - offering a fusion of discussions on industrial and "artificial intelligence" ... Read More
Rating: - Not Impressed
Much of the book reiterates and repeats the same points over and
over again about communication between machines and man but I found
that it was very limited in scope.From what I have read in technology
advances I am forced to conclude that this author has not done adequate
research to write what the title suggest which is a much wider scope than what is written within its chapters.A more correct title would be
"The communication between man and machine" or "Communication ... Read More
Rating: - dull treatment of an interesting topic
I did not find this book as thought provoking as I would have liked. I agree with the author on his various design principals - especially the idea of machines augmenting rather than completely automating tasks. I smiled at the anecdote about beeping from household devices as I have experienced that myself (Is it the smoke detector battery? Is it my cell phone discharging?). Obviously, there is great progress to be made in the design of common everyday devices. However, the examples kept coming back to cars (and ... Read More
Rating: - How intelligence will be installed in new devices
This book was very interesting, as all of Don Norman's books are.In this book he goes into detail about how future designers will need to design future devices, how they can make them more useful and more human.He talks a lot about how what sounds like seemingly 'no-brainer' new features (radar-based minimum distance following cruise control) can actually cause problems (speeding up when you pull off the road, slowing down when you merge into traffic.)He gives suggestions to designers on how to avoid these ... Read More