Living With Complexity
Don A. Norman
Summary:
Chapter 3: Norman discusses how things that are supposed to be simple and non trivial can in fact complicate our lives. He gives the examples of door locks and passwords to demonstrate this idea. If we had only one door knob or only one password, then that would be an easy task to remember, however, technology allows for more than one door knob and requires more than one password. This idea then leads us to put information in the world, making it easier to be accessed by undesired people. Norman claims the solution to these problems is in the quality of a design.
Chapter 4: Social signifiers are those indicators that are either deliberately or incidentally placed that provide information to an individual. Signifiers are similar to affordances, in fact they are the perceived affordances. Norman discusses how culture affects these signifiers and how effective they really are.
Discussion: Even though the ideas are interesting, these were previously introduced by the other Norman books, so it is not something new really. As in the previous readings, Norman examples are useful and applicable to life, which in my opinion makes the book more readable.
Something I did enjoy reading about in these chapters was about the irony technology is what some times introduces complexity, however technology is also able to automate or somehow deal with this high complexity.
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