The Design of Future Things

Summary:
This post is about The Design of Future Things by Don Norman. This book shares some ideas with Norman's earlier book The Design of Everyday Things but focuses on how things should be created in the future when machines have intelligence. An example that Norman highlights in his book is the realm of autonomous automobiles. This has long been a topic of science fiction societies and is beginning to show itself in today's technology. Norman discusses the issues concerning the half-autonomous vehicles that we have today and the issues of deploying imperfect intelligence into machines. Norman sets out a list of rules that machines should follow to interact with humans without confusion. These rules are:
1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.
2. Be predictable.
3. Provide a good conceptual model.
4. Make the output understandable.
5. Provide continual awareness, without annoyance.
6. Exploit natural mappings to make interaction understandable and effective.

Discussion:
The future that Norman sees amazing at times, scary at others. With greater automation brings less human control around their surroundings, and I, for one, surely like to be in control of my belongings. I would enjoy my refrigerator informing me of what I have, but not ordering me what to eat. The more automation in the world, the more time this frees up in humans for other activities. This could be leisure, or work related, but either way less brain power is used on tasks that impede on a person's goals. When this automation goes too far, I can only imagine a society similar to Wall-E, where people no longer do anything for themselves. I think that this future is inherently flawed however because, even today, people respect the aesthetic nature of something made by human hands. A machine may stitch a quilt perfectly, or produce a chicken breast cooked to the correct temperature to the tenth of a degree, but people enjoy the imperfections and natural skill of a task performed well by human hands.