Book Reading #5 Design of Future Things

Design of Future Things
Donald A. Norman
Designed and Edited by Donald A. Norman

Chapter 3: Natural Interaction

This chapter the author starts by talking about natural interactions of machines and humans. He claims that because we get so many signals from various devices that eventually it could be possible that we all get way too much stimulus and that eventually we will just have a large cacophony of sounds controlling us at every turn. He says, however, that the sounds need to be informative and distinct and let us know what the real problem is, he uses the tea kettle as a perfect example of this. He then talks about how in some cases different indicative noises can mean a level of comport for the user, letting them know that something is working correctly or is there. He speaks of how when he goes into a lab the different noises let one know that everything is in working order and may be seen as a form of normal rather than an indication that something is changing. He then talks about how these ideas can play into different everyday objects that we use, and sometimes people come up with novel ways to fix or use them. He claims that in the past these were called hacks but now we can call them affordances. He explains how these different kinds of affordances can be used in future design and let us know more precisely when something is being used correctly or when there is something wrong with its design. He then recalls back to the idea that there is an inherent problem of communication between the two: man and machine. The two cannot communicate in quite the same way and that raises the whole new set of problems. He then ties this back to the horse and rider design where the two have a common sense of a few different views of information and the communication between the two is a behavioral process that is at first learned but then eventually becomes second nature between the two. He then ends the chapter by discussing safety and how this entire study can relate to communication of warning messages and how if warning messages were displayed and written in a natural way and if the device was made in a way that humans wouldn't misuse it then there would be less issues. He ends as he has in all the other chapters by discussing ideas of the human-machine hybrid.

I think this chapter while interesting did talk about some points that were rather interesting. If you think about it there are sounds traveling all around us all the time, some to let you know something is on, some off, some to know they're working etc. However it does seem that in all this noise we sometimes still seem to miss various things, which is ironic because it probably was just drowned out by another noise. I think the most interesting thing is that despite all this I find myself just wanting some quiet and sometimes that's really hard to do with my dryer going off, my ac turning on and my roommates listening to music. In fact it seems like sometimes people spend just as much money to make things quiet as they do to make them noisy in the first place. Maybe the idea of a future system where machines know more about what were thinking are a good idea, and the idea that we will have behavioral patterns that the machine will learn when we want to be informed and when we don't. It is interesting that we are reading this now because I was just reading an article about how people tend to receive the interruptions of texts better or worse based on the content and the time in which they are notified. The researcher was trying to figure out how to make these times better for the user without attaching electrodes to their brain. I do agree that I wouldn't want my phone monitoring my brain waves but it would be nice for it to know not to interrupt me during blog writing for class.