As usual for Donald Norman, this is a thought-provoking book on design. This time he focuses on things that are automated – that have a mind of their own, so to speak, and how we can communicate with each other.

It’s not as inspirational as The Design of Everyday Things, but Norman as usual makes provocative remarks that really stimulate your mind. At one point he mentions that robots are rather like the elderly – they have limited mobility, limited agility and limited vision. Therefore, fitting a home to allow the elderly to move around comfortably is just like future-proofing your home to allow for the influx of robots that will undoubtedly come in the future! Quite an interesting argument to persuade buildings to retrofit their fixtures.

The most useful part of the book though is of course his recommendations for how we should design machines to interact well with humans. They are:

• Provide rich, complex and natural signals.
• Be predictable
• Provide good conceptual models
• Make the output understandable
• Provide continual awareness without annoyance
• Exploit natural mappings

Looks familiar? Actually he recommended a lot of these in DOET. I guess good design is good design, whether you’re designing a robot or a teapot (he’s obsessed with teapots).