Donald Norman Featured in The New York Times

December 12, 2007

Donald A. Norman, Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Senior Professor in Design, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and co-director of the Segal Design Institute, is featured in the December 18 issue of The New York Times. Norman discusses the design of some of the year's hottest holiday gifts, and why many recipients may suffer from what he calls "featuritis" -- frustration with new features that lack intuitive controls.

Read "Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine" in The New York Times.

Norman published a new book last month called The Design of Future Things. The book, one in a long line of everyday design books by Norman, focuses on the ever-increasing role of automation in our homes and cars — how it’s done badly and what can be done to make it right. Norman’s book and ideas have gotten a lot of coverage recently in publications like BusinessWeek, Time and The New York Times.

“In The Design of Future Things, he turns to technology on the cusp of invention--smart homes, cars that drive themselves--and finds big problems brewing… Faced with silence, we often grow frustrated and start over. Better to use natural and intuitive signals. Consider vibrations in a car seat instead of yet another blinking light on the dash to let you know you're drifting across lanes. It's technology that gets psychology.”
- Time magazine, Nov. 8, 2007

“In his new book, The Design of Future Things (Basic Books), Don Norman isn't afraid to call himself out on statements he made in his earlier, wildly popular publications such as The Design of Everyday Things… The focus of his new book, however, is not on how he wishes to update his philosophies of design and innovation. Instead, it centers on so-called "smart," or automated, gadgets and products. Increasingly being produced and marketed, these range from talking refrigerators that scold you for not keeping to a diet to cars that are comfortable and easy to drive to the point of distracting drivers from the dangers of the road.
- BusinessWeek, Dec. 5, 2007

“Donald A. Norman, a psychologist and an industrial designer, argues in The Design of Future Things, his recently published book, that a new organism is emerging that he calls a “person+machine.”
“Machines have neither motives nor emotions,” he wrote recently in an e-mail message. “Still, machines, appliances and even services have personality traits, if only because they were designed to be conscientious or not, friendly or curt, smooth or abrupt, condescending or understanding, recalcitrant or forgiving.”
Autonomous machines of the future, he said, will increasingly have emotions for the same reason that people have them: to protect themselves as well as to make choices among competing demands for their attention as well as a mechanism for social cooperation.”
- The New York Times article, “No Drivers, but a Lot of Drive,” Nov. 11, 2007

“Donald A. Norman, a Northwestern University professor and author of Emotional Design and other books, has famously argued that “attractive things work better.”
- The New York Times Magazine article, Dec. 9, 2007

“If anyone knows a thing or two about designing for human-computer interaction, it's Don Norman, professor at Northwestern University, author of The Design of Future Things, and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.”
- CNET.com, Nov. 26, 2007

“In his book The Design of Future Things, Dr Norman hints at a day when intelligent machines identify the parts needed to replace those that are wearing out, download the instructions and then mend themselves.”
- Economist.com, Nov. 27, 2007