I personally have not always thought much about the appliances or objects we always interact with even though I sometimes get annoyed by them so when going through the chapter I began to think more about the things I use on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, the beginning of the chapter outlines a philosophy which I have started hearing more of today: Human Centered Design. In my last semester I believe it came up in one of my classes, I am personally surprised that it didn’t exist until recently because I always imagined that designers (anyone that designed anything to be specific) always had the person at the center but what’s new is that designers are accounting for the worst possible mistakes or misunderstandings to best “foolproof” their work.
By the end of the chapter I began to think about two things. How have designers or the discipline of design in general changed since this book has been published. I ask this because as I’m reading it sometimes feel obvious and maybe thats because it has become more ingrained into the culture or perhaps it’s obvious when its spelled out. Then my second thought was about a recent product. The Apple vision pro, which I’m sure almost everyone has heard of by this point, uses the senses in a way which comes naturally to people whereas before with other virtual reality headsets people would have to be taught or spend more effort learning. It made me consider how sometimes a designer might approach a problem from the perspective of how can we make it with the tools we have already or some designers might approach a problem with the perspective of what tools do we have to make the product we should. Maybe I didn’t explain myself very well but thats what came to mind.