The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things | 
| Author: Donald A. Norman
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 19029
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0465002277
Dewey Decimal Number: 745.2
EAN: 9780465002276
ASIN: 0465002277
Publication Date: October 29, 2007
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Condition: NEW BOOK
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Product Description
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: Read 1 more reviews...
 Not Impressed April 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 between
future home appliances, cars and furniture with man". It patronizes
computers as hardly being suitable candidates for future sentience.
Given that we have had millions of years to evolve I hardly think
that this could be concluded from only about 60 years of computer
technology...certainly in light of the fact that all of NASA's expensive computers in the 1960's Apollo era filling out an entire room does not approach the computing power of even a single laptop computer today.
In general buying a book about future technology is not as informative as
reading about articles on a daily or weekly basis because the shear
breadth of the subject does not do well in book form where it quickly
becomes outdated. If you are reading about history, language an
autobiography and so on you are more likely to be adequately informed
because it is not an evolving topic and only a few new things get discovered over the years to amend to what you already know. On the
other hand if you are reading about PAST technology such as the works
of Tesla and his D.C. motors then you are on a topic which fits into
history which is adequately constrained in its breadth and is not
evolving unless you believe Tesla is somehow alive like Elvis and is still inventing new machines that no one can can guess at.
dull treatment of an interesting topic February 19, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 often horses) which became repetitious; instead of getting excited about the possibilities of the future, I became concerned and even depressed. I definitely recommend skipping the Afterword which contains a fabricated conversation between the author and a machine.
 How intelligence will be installed in new devices February 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 types of issues and how to design things that are truly useful for humans.
I thought it was a fascinating book and I learned a lot about design from it. He goes over the problems that making things too smart can cause and notes that when designing new devices the human interaction is the critical problem. A lot of future design will have to take into account how best to control human reactions in addition to providing the best features. Our devices are sometimes too smart (but not smart enough) and need to be designed to help humans in different ways than is first obvious.
A fascinating description of what can go wrong and how to design around it using a system view.
Good but not Great January 5, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
An interesting read. Ranks in this order:
(1) Design of Everyday Things
(2) Emotional Design
(distant 3rd) Design of Future Things
It wasn't "bad" it simply wasn't as interesting as the others. Whereas at the end of (1) and (2) I felt enlightened - that Norman was breaking new ground. At the end of Future Things I felt he had spent much of the time repeating himself, that the book could have been half the length.
Good book, but I would skip.
Okay, but no Design of Everyday Things December 17, 2007
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
Norman's book Design of Everyday Things had a profound effect both on the way I perceive the world and how I design. I have bought every consumer book he has written since then, and have always come away disappointed.
I am giving this book only 3 stars because I felt it became repetitive after a while, having covered the points adequately in the first half of the book. Not up to the quality I expect of Norman.
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