Reference Information
Title: Things That Make Us Smart
Author: Donald A. Norman
Editors: Broadway Books (1993)
Summary
The beginning of this book talks about how technology should be more human-centric. Technology can aid people but it can also make them dumb and dependent. Hallinan talks about how some technology is designed to aid people and how that same technology can confuse and interfere with workflows. He also talks about hard and soft sciences and the different types of cognition, reflective and experimental.
Norman goes on to talk about museums and how little they actually teach us because our attention span is so low. He expands more on experimental and reflective cognition, talking about how we must find balance between the two. He goes on to describe three types of learning: accretion, turning and restructuring.
In the last chapter Norman discusses artifacts and things to consider when fitting an artifact to a person. Surface artifacts are everything on the surface, or rather, what we see is all there is and internal artifacts are information that is represented internally. He gives a few examples such as the Tower of Hanoi to demonstrate that problems that are the same can appear different due to the amount of information present in an environment.
Discussion
I actually really liked this book. It was repetitive but not in the way the other Norman books were. I felt like he gave a lot of good examples to illustrate his point. I really liked what he had to say regarding the three puzzles and how the same problems get interpreted differently by different people.
Summary
Norman goes on to talk about museums and how little they actually teach us because our attention span is so low. He expands more on experimental and reflective cognition, talking about how we must find balance between the two. He goes on to describe three types of learning: accretion, turning and restructuring.
In the last chapter Norman discusses artifacts and things to consider when fitting an artifact to a person. Surface artifacts are everything on the surface, or rather, what we see is all there is and internal artifacts are information that is represented internally. He gives a few examples such as the Tower of Hanoi to demonstrate that problems that are the same can appear different due to the amount of information present in an environment.
Discussion
I actually really liked this book. It was repetitive but not in the way the other Norman books were. I felt like he gave a lot of good examples to illustrate his point. I really liked what he had to say regarding the three puzzles and how the same problems get interpreted differently by different people.
No comments:
Post a Comment