Lou Fuiano
ITI Spring 2006
Duff

The Design of Everyday Things
Chapter 1
Donald A. Norman

Do we evolve from the modern experience?
As I settled into the assigned reading, I found myself chuckling and nodding in agreement. In fact, I began to get worked up at how vast the concept of an "interface" really is. Objects both stationary and mechanical as well as personal communication and the making of art all seem to possess an interface. The idea of what happens as the result of two things meeting is ubiquitous and profound.

In this early chapter, I agreed with Norman. I feel that with more design practitioners, design in general has become much more inconsistent. I can group myself among the culprits. I must confess that I only recently became aware of the term "interface" from spending time in some of the classrooms in this very department. As a graphic designer, I was only mildly concerned with the idea of an interface. Of course, making things readable and capable of dispensing information is an interface. However, I was generally more concerned with how the work held up as visual stimulus. Was the attitude of the work pointed, exciting and forward thinking? Was it appropriate interpretation of the subject matter? Am I having fun?

Most of the examples in the reading made me think of the push and pull of elegant design and cold hard usability. While cold hard usability is often a very elegant form of design there is a certain cool to the modern mind and therefore modern design. We navigate the world with the benefit of the modern experience. Design changes the way we live by changing our habits and our expectations. I believe that these things help us to evolve. We better understand how things work. When Norman mentions the things we come in contact with on a daily basis, it's astounding.

Those glass doors Norman mentioned seemed to walk the line between uncluttered modern and something baffling to the user. However, I feel with a few simple clues, the design of the doors would be workable while still maintaining a spare minimalism. When he mentions the superior design of the car, my first thoughts are that the car, much like the bus console mentioned in the article, will always show strains of an industrial era. The car, a machine hurling you through space, is a potential deathtrap. Designers here have a very real responsibility to the user. Likewise, good architectural design generally has, as a requirement, a visible sense of how to navigate and get out of a building.

In relating the reading to my own profession, I appreciated his distinction between the conceptual model and the design model. The refrigerator was a doomed conceptual model. However there are several instances where the concept is ahead of design. I recently had an awful experience with a faceless online printer. The conceptual model was very good once you went through the painful start-up process. But, how the first time user comes to understand it was problematic and time consuming. Imagine yourself trying to get a project to the printer, the clock ticking, and your confronted with pages of text designed for users who had very little knowledge of the print process. In this case I would suggest creating a hierarchy to the instructions so that those users who have had experience doing this a certain way didn't have to wade through a quagmire of text to get to what we needed. This was a clear case of bad graphic design costing me time and money. Granted, no one clipped a truck changing their wiper speed or was trapped in a burning building. However, in the modern business world, it was a failed design model. The idea of connecting graphic design to an interface is extremely helpful. It gives me a bit more clarity and is very liberating.

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