Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Book Reading #5 - Design of Everyday Things

Chapter 2: The Psychology  of Everyday Actions
Summary:
This chapter discusses why we do certain things, and how that pertains to design of things. Often times we blame ourselves for misuse of a product, but in fact it is more due to the imprecise or faulty design of the product.  There are seven stages of action: Goals, Intention to act, sequence of actions, execution of action sequence, perceiving the state of the world, interpreting the perception, and evaluation of interpretations.
Discussion:
I found this chapter not as entertaining as the last. The previous chapter had several "ah-ha" moments, but this one seemed obvious to me, such as how a thermostat works or how a ball will drop from a moving object.  It is interesting to realize how we blame ourselves more often for trivial mistakes than the design of things. Overall I thought this chapter was fairly obvious.

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