Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [122]
2 There are very good descriptions of the hill-climbing process in Alexander’s (1964) book Notes on the synthesis of form and Jones’s book Design methods; also see Jones’s (1984) Essays in design. Jones (1981) has a particularly good description of the evolution of the wheels of farm wagons: did you know they are “dished” or “cupped” outward, so that the rims bulge out more than the center? Did you know that the wagon will not function as well if the wheels are not cupped? This improvement resulted from a natural, hill-climbing design process.
All of Alexander’s works describe this process of evolution, and his books on architectural design are influential. In addition to the one already mentioned, see The timeless way of building (Alexander, 1979) and A pattern language: Towns, buildings, construction, by Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein (1977). I find the works fascinating to skim, frustrating to read, and difficult to put into practice, but his descriptions of the structure of homes and villages are very good.
While you’re tracking down these classic books on design, by all means look at Simon’s (1981) The sciences of the artificial.
3 New York Daily Tribune editorial from about 1890, quoted in G. C. Mares (1909), The history of the typewriter, successor to the pen: An illustrated account of the origin, rise, and development of the writing machine frontispiece.
4 The story makes sense, but the arrangement of the keys doesn’t completely fit the story. Yes, i and e form a frequent pair and are far apart, but what about other frequent pairs, such as e and r, or i, n, g? And it seems suspicious that the letters of the word typewriter all appear on the top row; some other constraints seem to have been operating. Almost every country in the world uses a keyboard similar to qwerty. There are differences—the French, for example, replaced q and w with a and z, for “azerty”—but the changes are remarkably minor. Yet different languages have very different patterns of letter use, so an English-based keyboard would not be expected to work well for other languages.
5 The account of the “duel” is presented in Beeching’s (1974) book, Century of the typewriter (pp. 40-41).
6 Fisher and I studied a variety of keyboard layouts. We thought that alphabetically organized keys would be superior for beginners. No, they weren’t: we discovered that knowledge of the alphabet was not useful in finding the keys. Our studies of alphabetical and Dvorak keyboards were published in the journal Human Factors (Norman & Fisher, 1982).
7 Admirers of the Dvorak keyboard claim much more than a 10 percent improvement, as well as faster learning rates and less fatigue. But I will stick by my studies and my statements. If you want to read more, including a worthwhile treatment of the history of the typewriter, see the book Cognitive aspects of skilled typewriting, edited by Cooper (1983), which includes several chapters of research from my laboratory.
8 The Israeli psychologist Daniel Gopher has developed a clever single-hand chord keyboard for both the roman and Hebrew alphabets. He claims great success with the use of the Hebrew chord keyboard by pilots who have to enter data into their flight computer with one hand while flying the plane with the other (Gopher, Karis, & Koenig, 1985; Gopher & Raij, in press).
9 Wall Street Journal, Dec. 9, 1986. Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © Dow Jones & Co., Inc., 1986. All rights reserved.
10 Sommer (1983), Social design: Creating buildings with people in mind (p. 126).
11 Sommer (1983, pp. 128-129).
12 “Wait a minute,” you might say, “what has the design of the cafeteria got to do with the Design Centre? That isn’t the purpose of the Centre. You are missing the whole point.” I don’t think so. The lack of concern for the user of the Centre reflects the attitude of the Centre as a whole. The exhibits