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 Book That Makes Us Smart? Maybe. April 27, 2008
"Things That Make Us Smart" is Don Norman professing his thoughts on how technologies serve as cognitive artifacts, from past to present. There is a lot of repetition and extraneous information including Norman's thoughts on forecasting technology trends. If you have read "The Design of Everyday Things," there will be familiar ideas. Likewise, I found that the last two chapters("Soft and Hard Technology" and "Technology is Not Neutral") to be very similar to Norman's ideas in "The Design of Future Things". For Information Science folks, the chapter called "A Place for Everything, and Everything in It's Place" might be of skimming interest; in it, Norman writes about workspace organization, and touches on information retrieval, though his views concerning the latter subject have been somewhat superseded by current search engine technologies. For me, "Things That Make Us Smart" was most fascinating when Norman spoke in chapter two(and other places) about cognition; experiential and reflective thought, and how technology can elicit each.
"Things That Make Us Smart" is typical Donald Norman; take the idea of a human-centered approach to technology and run with it. For those seeking an introduction to Norman, forgo this book in favor of "The Design of Everyday Things." For those familiar with Norman's ideas, skim at your leisure.
 Too many superficial generalizations January 19, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book was one of the required readings for a class I took years ago on Humans, Computer and Cognition. Unfortunately, I did not think highly of Donald Norman's opinions because I felt many of them were simply over generalizations. Perhaps this is because I have a background in psychology that includes learning and motivation. I found myself disagreeing with many of Norman's statements and routinely asking, "What evidence is he basing that on?"
Getting outdated June 16, 2005
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
Originally written in 1995, many of the technologies talked about in the book are either developed already, shown to be not useful, or used in ways not originally foreseen - therefore making many of the arguments irrelevant.
For instance, he talks about caller ID and how it's not THAT useful to know the phone number, because it doesn't identify a person, but just a phone. Well, with the rise of cellular phone usage, a person's phone number has indeed become their ID.
However, the best part of the book comes in the beginning and the end, when he discusses the precise differences in what humans are good at doing versus what machines are good at doing. He points out the disconnect between these two worlds are viewed by each, but doesn't really give any suggestions as to how to overcome the problems it creates.
Humanity for Dummies December 27, 2003
8 out of 24 found this review helpful
Yet another tome about the greatness of human qualities and the belief that machines do not and will not achieve these? Yes but with a little more aplomb and erudition that most in the field. There is not a "we are doomed" mood to this book and the author seems to prefer explication over prophecies of a machine world.But a lot of what is covered is not only known but well-known. Who thinks that Big Blue is actually "thinking" in his various chess tournaments? Norman talks endlessly about misconceptions concerning the computer world, beliefs held (he thinks) by a sizeable number of intelligent people. It is because the PC so aptly simulates human behavior that we hold such views in the first place. And while such subjects as art, music, learning, ritual, satire, and recognition of such subjective qualities as good, bad, beautiful, ugly, and appropriate are today solely human qualities, who knows at what point in the future that humans may program their machines to simulate some or all of the above?
A majority of the book is spent explaining why this cannot happen. A discussion of the difference in human associative brains and the mechanicsm of machine computation has been noted numerous times before. In fact, it makes perfect sense that the two shall never meet. Human thought is based on sensory perception with the real world - something a machine cannot partake in at the present. We require vision, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling in order to formulate a world view. Until machines can develop a mechanism for simulating these experiences, we will experience only what smartly programmed machines are told to do.
 Making Peace with Machines July 30, 2000
30 out of 33 found this review helpful
What if we put aside worrying about how computers will replace human thought and behavior and focused, instead, on the fundamental differences and complementary strengths of humans and machines? Perhaps then we could make best use of the things that have the potential to make us smart. Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things, takes the insights he is famous for, regarding the design of everyday objects, and turns these towards a thoughtful consideration of the high tech objects in our lives.Norman contends that what machines are best at are memorization and calculation, and that part of our fears about them come from comparing ourselves mentally to computers with regard to these dimensions. This is a fundamentally flawed way to think about the relationships between humans and computers. He encourages us, instead, to optimize the powerful potential of computation in order to liberate ourselves for more important ends, such as the time and capacity for deep reflective thought. In this way, and in other ways, he advocates for a human-centered approach to technology. Humans make tools and build objects, or artifacts; and the artifacts we build help to make us smart. They remind us of important things and when designed well help us accomplish important things and provide "affordances" for desired behaviors and outcomes. We need to develop better and keener senses of design. With regard to computers, the more we can unload, the more conceptual knowledge that we can convert into "experiential" knowledge through the use of such things as powerful computer-based data representations, the more we will free ourselves for higher order reflective thought and human judgment. Norman convincingly argues that rather than locking ourselves in a battle of turf with machines, we should take advantage of the ways machines, like other human-designed objects, can, indeed, help to make us smart.
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