Norman’s work strikes me as a meditation on the tension between what we create and how we live with it. That scissors example – seemingly mundane yet profound in its clarity and simplicity – is where the conversation begins, where the hands meet the object, and where intention aligns with ease. The holes for fingers, the sharpness of the blades, everything speaks in a language we already know, though we might not realize it. There’s something beautiful in that – that design could be so intuitive that it bypasses the conscious mind altogether. It’s as if the object whispers directions without uttering a word.
But then, there’s the watch. The digital one, with its five buttons and its cryptic functions, each one a mystery waiting to unravel or, more likely, frustrate. It’s a watch that asks for patience, for time spent reading manuals and pressing buttons in some uncertain combination. And here’s where the dissonance begins: the more we strive for mastery over our creations, the more we seem to lose the very thing we sought – simplicity, elegance, understanding.
I find it ironic, or perhaps inevitable, that as we design for greater utility, we inch closer to confusion. The refrigerator controls, for example, promise autonomy – adjust the freezer, adjust the fridge – but they deceive in their independence. They are not two but one, a system entangled with itself, a metaphor, perhaps, for how we often see ourselves within the systems we create: in control, but really, not quite. Is it possible to design something so complex that its very design dissolves into meaninglessness? I wonder.
Norman’s “system image” feels like a ghost, a presence that’s there but not fully. It’s the half-told story, the incomplete map, the set of instructions that leaves you more puzzled than when you began. And yet, we rely on it. It’s not just the object – the watch, the refrigerator, the scissors – but the way the object speaks to us or fails to. When the system image falters, we falter. It’s as though the object has lost its voice, or worse, it speaks in riddles.
There’s something almost tragic in this “paradox of technology” that Norman concludes with. We build and build, adding more features, more functions, more buttons, and yet the more we add, the more distant we become from the original purpose. The watch, once a simple device for telling time, now demands that we learn a new language just to access its many offerings. And I wonder – at what cost?
In the end, Norman gestures toward a truth that resonates deeply: design is not a solitary act. It’s a conversation, a collaboration – between engineers, marketers, manufacturers, and yes, the users, the humans who will ultimately live with these objects. And it is here, in this collaboration, where the balance must be struck. Not in the pursuit of complexity for its own sake but in the creation of objects that serve us, not enslave us.