Week 4 Reading Reflection

I enjoyed reading Don Normam’s “The Design of Everyday Things.” After reading Crawford’s definition’s of interactivity in “The Art of Interactive Design,” it was necessary to understand the fundamentals of interactions themselves, which go beyond the definition and importance. To me, the fundamental principles of interactivity were very well put in Don Norman’s book. I liked the text, probably because the examples were very grounded in our day-to-day interactions.  The way Norman advocated for human-centric design seemed very similar to Myron Krueger’s philosophy that technology should serve human needs and desires (What Should You Wear to an Artificial Reality?). This also prompted the benchmark of calling a design good or bad.  The reading really helped me to understand the importance of intuitive design. I always wondered why all the cars, phones, and computers looked similar.  Norman’s examples of the learning curves of the users and intuitive design pretty much answered that question. However, I felt the examples lacked the presence of age groups. It would have been interesting to explore how intuitive design changes through time and generations. Norman’s illustration of the distinction between affordances and signifiers was very thought-provoking for me, as I had never explored the dimension of interactivity this much.

 

Leave a Reply