Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Book Reading #1: Design of Everyday Things

Reference Information
Title: Design of Everyday Things
Author: Donald Norman


Chapter 1: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
Summary
This chapter presents an introduction to design, and suggests a relation between the design of everyday things and the psychology of everyday things, which emphasizes understandability. The author suggests important aspects in design, such as visibility, conceptual models, and mapping relations. Each aspect is emphasized with a relevant example of either good or bad design and a suggestion of why it is good or bad and a way to fix the design.

Discussion
Incorporating specific examples and the author's own opinions helped to demonstrate the design aspects that the chapter discussed in an easy-to-understand way. While the detailed explanations of the examples were somewhat helpful, many of the explanations just served to show that the author is very opinionated on certain topics, like telephones and his personal car.

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