Donald Norman
Designed and Edited by Donald A. Norman
Chapter 1: Human-Centered Technology
In these chapters Norman discusses the idea of how technology is essentially geared for humans. In fact most of the things we make are for our comport or ease of use, but does this really make us smarter? Does it in fact just make us lazy or make us unaware of how things are changing? He talks about a few of these idea and the different stories he has about how technology has made his colleges smarter...or was it less smart? He talks about two models of human cognition with regards to technology experiential cognition and reflective cognition. Experiential is how we percieve and act to things around us and reflective is how we compare different items and think about objects.
I think that this chapter was quite a bit different for Norman. While he did go back to this stories with different collegues and things he did talk about some examples that were a little outside the box for him. He talked about different models of cognition and the many different sides there is to technology. However it did seem that there was that nagging tone that Norman sometimes get, where he is not only saying about how he dislikes the technology but also how it is bothesome and really irks him.
Chapter 2: Experiencing the World
In this chapter Norman talks about the ideas from the first chapter and how they can be applied. Again he does his standard model of setting up what he is going to be talking about and then going strait into examples and explaining why they apply. It is the idea that the more situations that a person is in the more they are to understand how experiential cognition and reflective cognition play a role in our understanding of technology. Norman even offers examples that normal people would understand such as the Sylvester and Tweety metaphor talking about how their relationship at first is seen one way and then after reflecting in another. The chapter goes further into more specific examples and more analysis of the kinds of cognition.
Again this was a different kind of chapter by Norman. While he did do his standard model he did talk about items that are not spherically technology and made the chapter rather familiar. I also liked the example he gave where he was talking about the pilot and flight crew who need or make a decision about how long the plane can stay in the air and what they need to do in the event of turbulence. The strange thing is that the ways in which he talked about these it actually reminded me of old StarTrek Episodes in which the crew has a problem and then has steps to go through to solve it, first experiential and then reflective.
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