Design Of Everyday Things Quotes

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

Principles of design: 1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. 2. Simplify the structure of tasks. 3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation. 4. Get the mappings right. 5. Exploit the power of constraints. 6. Design for error. 7. When all else fails, standardize.

A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

Fail often, fail fast,

Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value.

The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.

Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.

It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

Norman’s Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.

One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old.

Finally, people have to actually purchase it. It doesn’t matter how good a product is if, in the end, nobody uses it.

The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.

When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.

In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.

Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.

If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.

It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.

A story tells of Henry Ford’s buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.

In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right:

Don't criticize unless you can do better. Try to understand how the faulty design might have occurred: try to determine how it could have been done otherwise.

If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.

Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.

The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.

Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand.

The meanings of today may not be the meanings of the future.

From a spiritual perspective, each individual heart is a place where Divine love is expressed and experienced. That's what it's designed for. That love shows up in an unlimited number of shapes and sizes, colors and flavors. We are here to love, as big and as fearlessly as we possibly can.

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.

The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought. You’re trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With the passage of time, the psychology of people stays the same, but the tools and objects in the world change.

A device is easy to use when the set of possible actions is visible, when the controls and displays exploit natural mappings.

Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes, which probably means they will never be solved.

Question everything. I am particularly fond of “stupid” questions. A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious.

I relish the etymology of our word thing – that sturdy term of designation, that robust everyday indicator of the empirical – whereby in Old English thynge does not only designate a material object, but can also denote ‘a narrative not fully known’, or indicate ‘the unknowability of larger chains of events’.

Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative––to enable learning while traveling, or while in remote locations, or when one wishes to study a topic for which there is not easy access to teachers. Robot teachers will help make lifelong learning a practicality. They can make it possible to learn no matter where one is in the world, no matter the time of day. Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

How

Procedural knowledge is difficult or impossible to write down and difficult to teach. It is best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice.

If the skill is easily automated, it wasn't essential.

Once again, the designer should assume that people will be interrupted during their activities and that they may need assistance in resuming their operations.

Engineers and designers simultaneously know too much and too little. They know too much about the technology and too little about how other people live their live and do their activities.

We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise. Machines require precision and accuracy; people don’t. And we are particularly bad at providing precise and accurate inputs. So

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself.

Surely there is a knowing behind it all. There is a teacher, an expresser, a creator, an artist perhaps, a poet certainly that has designed and presented all of the clues that we need to navigate life with some degree of grace, and perhaps with a greater degree of happiness than we now have.

Alas, sometimes clever people are too clever for our good. Some well-meaning plumbing designers have decided that consistency should be ignored in favor of their own, private brand of psychology.

Design is successful only if the final product is successful—if people buy it, use it, and enjoy it, thus spreading the word. A design that people do not purchase is a failed design, no matter how great the design team might consider it.

Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for example, can be beautiful. Ugly art can be beautiful.

It is only at the reflective level that consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside. It is only here that the full impact of both thought and emotions are experienced. At the lower visceral and behavioral levels, there is only affect, but without interpretation or consciousness. Interpretation, understanding, and reasoning come from the reflective level.

Recognize that most of our interactions with products are actually interactions with a complex system: good design requires consideration of the entire system to ensure that the requirements, intentions, and desires at each stage are faithfully understood and respected at all the other stages.

When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

We are, as a culture and as a specias, in the midst of a great awakening, remembering that there is a nature of things, an inherent, Divine design. The more aware of and in alignment with that design we can become, the more we will experience the deep desires of our hearts and souls, and perhaps, together, we can truly create a world that works for everyone.

day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.

Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of the interaction between people and technology.

To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business.

The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.

It is amazing how often people solve the problem before them without bothering to question it.

A conceptual model is an explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works. It doesn’t have to be complete or even accurate as long as it is useful. The

We have become dependent upon our technologies to navigate the world, to hold intelligent conversation, to write intelligently, and to remember.

Yet surprisingly in this era of screen-based devices, paper tools are still enormously popular and effective, as the number of paper-based diaries and reminders indicates. The

Never underestimate the power of social pressures on behavior, causing otherwise sensible people to do things they know are wrong and possibly dangerous.

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions. That is why much of language is based on physical metaphors, why the body and its interaction with the environment are essential components of human thought. Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.

Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role. Skeuomorphic designs are often comfortable for traditionalists, and indeed the history of technology shows that new technologies and materials often slavishly imitate the old for no apparent reason except that is what people know how to do. Early

These days, personal taste has suffered a decline. Colours have become garish, forms flimsy, and designs hideous. It is only natural that surrounded by such objects, our sense of beauty should be dulled.

One way of overcoming the fear of the new is to make it look like the old. This practice is decried by design purists, but in fact, it has its benefits in easing the transition from the old to the new. It

If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things.

Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.

So the hierarchy of goals is roughly: satisfy hunger; eat; cook; read cookbook; get more light. This is called a root cause analysis: asking “Why?” until the ultimate, fundamental cause of the activity is reached.

Basically, it means that when searching for the reason, even after you have found one, do not stop: ask why that was the case. And then ask why again. Keep asking until you have uncovered the true underlying causes. Does

Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses. But the spectacular success of modern physics, which is based upon concepts such as Feynman’s that clash with everyday experience, has shown that that is not the case. The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics.

When people are anxious they tend to narrow their thought processes, concentration upon aspects directly relevant to a problem. This is a useful strategy in escaping from danger, but not in thinking of imaginative new approaches to a problem.

Because visceral design is about initial reactions, it can be studied quite simply by putting people in front of a design and waiting for reactions. In the best of circumstances, the visceral reaction to appearance works so well that people take one look and say “I want it.” Then they might ask, “What does it do?” And last, “And how much does it cost?” This is the reaction the visceral designer strives for, and it can work. Much of traditional market research involves this aspect of design.

When companies try to increase sales by matching every feature of their competitors, they end up hurting themselves. After all, when products from two companies match feature by feature, there is no longer any reason for a customer to prefer one over another.

It took a long time for me to realize that my understanding of human behavior was relevant to my interest in the design of technology. As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.

Often people will use their own conceptual models of the world to determine the perceived causal relationship between the thing being blamed and the result. The word perceived is critical: the causal relationship does not have to exist; the person simply has to think it is there.

Good designers never start by trying to solve the problem given to them: they start by trying to understand what the real issues are. As a result, rather than converge upon a solution, they diverge, studying people and what they are trying to accomplish, generating idea after idea after idea. It drives managers crazy. Managers want to see progress: designers seem to be going backward when they are given a precise problem and instead of getting to work, they ignore it and generate new issues to consider, new directions to explore. And not just one, but many.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

Creeping featurism is the tendency to add to the number of features of a product, often extending the number beyond all reason. There is no way that a product can remain usable and understandable by the time it has all of those special-purpose features that have been added in over time.

We only need to remember sufficient knowledge to let us get our tasks done. Because so much knowledge is available in the environment, it is surprising how little we need to learn. This is one reason people can function well in their environment and still be unable to describe what they do.

Fire,” yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn’t open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward and must be pulled, not pushed? Highly anxious, highly focused people are very unlikely to think of pulling.

market-driven pressures plus an engineering-driven company yield ever-increasing features, complexity, and confusion. But even companies that do intend to search for human needs are thwarted by the severe challenges of the product development process, in particular, the challenges of insufficient time and insufficient money.

Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, “remembering” events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. A huge number of psychological experiments show how easy it is to implant false memories into people’s minds so convincingly that people refuse to admit that the memory is of an event that never happened.

Technology does not make us smarter. People do not make technology smart. It is the combination of the two, the person plus the artifact, that is smart. Together, with our tools, we are a powerful combination. On the other hand, if we are suddenly without these external devices, then we don’t do very well. In many ways, we do become less smart.

The hardest part of design is getting the requirements right, which means ensuring that the right problem is being solved, as well as that the solution is appropriate. Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.

Root cause analysis is the name of the game: investigate the accident until the single, underlying cause is found. What this ought to mean is that when people have indeed made erroneous decisions or actions, we should determine what caused them to err. This is what root cause analysis ought to be about. Alas, all too often it stops once a person is found to have acted inappropriately.

We can see what is in front of us, but not what is behind, just as we can remember what happened in the past, but we can't remember the future. Not only that, but we can remember recent events much more clearly than long past events, captured neatly by the visual metaphor in which the past lines up before us, the most recent events being closest so that they clearly perceived (remembered), with long/past events far in the distance, remembered and perceived with difficulty.

human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else. I

During an incident, there are never clear clues. Many things are happening at once: workload is high, emotions and stress levels are high. Many things that are happening will turn out to be irrelevant. Things that appear irrelevant will turn out to be critical. The accident investigators, working with hindsight, knowing what really happened, will focus on the relevant information and ignore the irrelevant. But at the time the events were happening, the operators did not have information that allowed them to distinguish one from the other.

AFTER DINNER, WITH A GREAT FLOURISH, my friend Andrew brought out a lovely leather box. “Open it,” he said, proudly, “and tell me what you think.” I opened the box. Inside was a gleaming stainless-steel set of old mechanical drawing instruments: dividers, compasses, extension arms for the compasses, an assortment of points, lead holders, and pens that could be fitted onto the dividers and compasses. All that was missing was the T square, the triangles, and the table. And the ink, the black India ink. “Lovely,” I said. “Those were the good old days, when we drew by hand, not by computer.” Our eyes misted as we fondled the metal pieces. “But you know,” I went on, “I hated it. My tools always slipped, the point moved before I could finish the circle, and the India ink—ugh, the India ink—it always blotted before I could finish a diagram. Ruined it! I used to curse and scream at it. I once spilled the whole bottle all over the drawing, my books, and the table. India ink doesn’t wash off. I hated it. Hated it!” “Yeah,” said Andrew, laughing, “you’re right. I forgot how much I hated it. Worst of all was too much ink on the nibs! But the instruments are nice, aren’t they?” “Very nice,” I said, “as long as we don’t have to use them.

In my university, copying machines are purchased by the Printing and Duplicating Center, then dispersed to the various departments. The copiers are purchased after a formal “request for proposals” has gone out to manufacturers and dealers of machines. The selection is almost always based solely on price, plus a consideration of the cost of maintenance. Usability? Not considered. The state of California requires by law that universities purchase things on a price basis; there are no legal requirements regarding understandability or usability of the product. That is one reason we get unusable copying machines and telephone systems.

THE SANSKRIT WORD for meditation is dhyana; the Tibetan term is samten. Both refer to the same thing: steady mind. Mind is steady in the sense that you don’t go up when a thought goes up, and you don’t go down when it goes down, but you just watch things going either up or down. Whether good or bad, exciting, miserable, or blissful thoughts arise—whatever occurs in your state of mind, you don’t support it by having an extra commentator. The sitting practice of meditation is simple, direct, and very businesslike. You just sit and watch your thoughts go up and down. There is a physical technique in the background, which is working with the breath as it goes out and in. That provides an occupation during sitting practice. It is partly designed to occupy you so that you don’t evaluate thoughts. You just let them happen. In that environment, you can develop renunciation: you renounce extreme reactions to your thoughts. Warriors on the battlefield don’t react to success or failure. Success or failure is just regarded as another breath coming in and going out, another discursive thought coming in and going out. So the warrior is very steady. Because of that, the warrior is victorious—because victory is not particularly the aim or the goal. But the warrior can just be—as he or she is.

...afflictions arise from identifying with a false sense of self, whereas great contentment arises from seeing the true nature of things. If one believes that the self exists solidly and independently, as it appears, then the dissolution of the self at death is a disaster. But if the self is understood to be illusory from the beginning, the dissolution of the self at death is simply another opportunity for awakening. The conventional self is simply a convenient designation for the everyday collection of transitory aggregates: body, feelings, recognitions, karmic formations, and consciousness. Ultimately, the self as a permanent entity is an illusion and all attempts to elevate the self merely compound the illusion. The stronger one grasps at the illusory self, the more one suffers when the illusion shatters.

Others say it was rather less romantic than that. It began right at the point when people had to pick up everyday life again. ‘You should start your story with that brilliant invention by the Levitts,’ I was told. ‘That’s what really got it all going.’ Bill Levitt, his brother Alfred and their father Abraham were the first to mass-produce prefabricated homes, an invention no less significant than Henry Ford’s assembly line in 1913. With an ingenious design and brilliant planning, Bill Levitt was able to build a simple, sturdy house for less than 8,000 dollars. The basic model, with its two bedrooms plus an attic, was just the thing for a young family. It was the Model T Ford of houses, sure, but a good bit of luxury was included all the same: the living room had a fireplace and a built-in television set; the kitchen was equipped with a

that’s another thing I was going to ask you. McGovern: I don’t think anybody really knows what was at the base of that movement. I suspect that race was a lot more of a factor than we were aware of during the campaign. There wasn’t a lot of talk about racial prejudice and the old-fashioned racial epithet, things like that, but I think it was there. There were all kinds of ways that—of tapping that prejudice. The busing issue was the most pronounced one, but also the attacking on the welfare program and the way the President handled that issue. I think he was orchestrating a lot of things that were designed to tap the Wallace voters, and he got most of them. Now what the Democratic Party can do to bring those people back, I’m not sure. I suspect that there should have been more discussion in the campaign of the everyday frustrations and problems of working people, conditions under which they work, maybe more of an effort made to identify with them.

Perhaps it is in this respect that language differs most sharply from other biologic systems for communication. Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. The specifically locked-on antigen at the surface of a lymphocyte does not send the cell off in search of something totally different; when a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower. Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point. If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness, the words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into the sun. To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

On the other hand, everyday language would soon prove inadequate for designating all the olfactory notions that he had accumulated within himself. Soon he was no longer smelling mere wood, but kinds of wood: maple-wood, oak-wood, pine-wood, elm-wood, pear-wood, old, young, rotting, mouldering, mossy wood, down to single logs, chips and splinters – and could clearly differentiate them as objects in a way that other people could not have done by sight. It was the same with other things. For instance, the white drink that Madame Gaillard served her wards each day, why should it be designated uniformly as milk, when to Grenouille’s senses it smelled and tasted completely different every morning depending on how warm it was, which cow it had come from, what that cow had been eating, how much cream had been left in it and so on … Or why should smoke possess only the name ‘smoke’, when from minute to minute, second to second, the amalgam of hundreds of odours mixed iridescently into ever new and changing unities as the smoke rose from the fire … or why should earth, landscape, air – each filled at every step and every breath with yet another odour and thus animated with another identity – still be designated by just those three coarse words. All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.