The Design of Things We Need and Why

“The Design of Everyday Things”, Donald Norman (excerpt)

Norman explains the psychology of everyday things, where he denotes that interactive objects have to be visible in context to be a functional design. In using psychology, designers can predict what actions users will inherently try first. Once these actions have been declared, then the designer should make visible the non-obvious actions required to activate the interface. He points out that users form a conceptual model of the interface before activating it. This conceptual model looks for affordances and constraints. He gives the example of scissors, where the handles act as affordances (letting the user know “these are for fingers”) and the blades as much as the small size of the handles reassures the user how to interact with the tool. Analyzing everyday objects such as doors and switches, Norman finds critical problems that truncate such simple interfaces. Why do most doors have a “pull” or “push” signs on them? Why do we have to touch endless walls in the darkness trying to find the light switch? He poses a bigger problem with switches in a control room. If all the knobs look the same,  how easy can it be to commit a disastrous mistake? His solution to these problems is visibility. Making the conceptual model apparent to the user by making it visible is crucial for interface design. He uses the term visibility loosely, not only meaning visible, but more making things apparent. Towards the end of the essay he explores using sound for visibility and feedback.  The insightful excerpt from “The Design of Everyday Things”  challenged me to see objects functionality beyond the social and learned behaviour that I have already acquired. Even though I still get trapped in between doors, because of their poor design or purposefully truncated action (ex. one side locked), it didn’t occur to me that it was bad design. It always appear to me as if I were the error, because I didn’t read the signs, but instead automatically assumed “I know how to open a door.”

“Why We Need Things”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
In his opening statement Csikszentmihalyi uses an example from Marshall Sahlins about hunter-gatherers explaining how in their nomadic lifestyles objects were burdens to the journey, having to carry all things you own at once. This reminds me of moving to a different city. Most people try to do this as least often as possible, to the point that we have made territory another commodity. We create our homes in houses that are semi-permanent objects. The problem that Csikszentmihalyi poses is that the extent of energy necessary to move locations today is displaced in a complex system and economy. We don’t think of moving all of our objects by foot, so we measure what to take with us by the cost instead of our physical energy, disregarding the chain of events to obtain the actual energy necessary. This displacement of energy to cost has an unfathomable result of rapidly depleting resources without taking into account the consequence to repair(replenish) these.

Beyond the practical relationship of objects to humans, he begins to explore the psychology of our necessity for things. Why do we feel compelled to keep anything? His theory delves into objects as regulators for the mind, as if they keep our minds from wandering into randomness, since this freedom makes us anxious and depressed. He talks about the minds of musicians, mathematicians, and any minds oriented towards symbols that are freed from objectified consciousness. He argues that objects are instruments that should not keep sentimental value. In a few of his studies he found that young and old people mostly  keep and interact with objects that are representative of action in the present or in the future (as instruments) and middle-aged people are concerned with the sentimental value that objects around the hold. This is an interesting conclusion, because it makes sense that the pausing and the pondering on life happens right at the middle of it. When we are young, we want to learn. We are active in our development, thinking and experimentation permeates our youth. When we are old we have no time (or lack of memory) to think about the past. There is only so much time left to digest the world around us. Again, we embrace the new, experimenting and absorbing more of what we have learned to enjoy. In the middle of our lives (hoping that one lives beyond that point), a lot of us have children, or gain stability.  We embrace a state of idling, where we look back and remember our youth, analyze how we have gotten to where we are, we transform to a solid state, a rock. As for the future, all we know is that we are getting old, and somehow need to make that comfortable.

Objects can represent social networks by signifying a forged friendship with a gift, they can also signify power like guns, spears, jewelry, or hats. They are also symbols loaded with meaning and function, an extension of ourselves, a signifier of identity. How could one understand math, language or music if there was nothing to relate it to? Objects as material, as purpose, as containing methods, functions, as structure- To me the question of objects is not refuting our necessity for them, but it becomes about their transcendence, when they lose their sentimental value, when they become raw material again. Humans necessity to create, reformulate, organize, compose, structure, and all the destruction that all of these imply is our nature- now as we continue to embrace our nature the hopefully the meaning of raw material also changes.