Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [126]
I am not going to tell you whether I am for or against it. Actually, that is because I am both. It is a really exciting concept. But I don’t believe it can work for most material. For an encyclopaedia, yes; or a dictionary; or an instruction manual. But not for a text, or a novel. Imagine a mystery novel in hypertext. Hmm, it might be very interesting.
11 But what a pain these notes are. If positioned at the bottom of the page, they distract. If at the end of the text, as in this book, they are awkward to use. How much nicer if one could just touch the footnoted word and have it instantly expand into a note—on the side of the page, of course, where it wouldn’t get in the way. Ah yes, hypertext.
12 D. Bulkeley (1987), The ‘smartest house in America,’ Design News, 43, 56—61.
13 The small compact disk now used for audio recordings is capable of holding gigabyte of information, where a gigabyte is the technical term for one billion characters (109). This number is sure to increase in the coming years, and larger size disks already hold considerably more information.
14 An excellent treatment of how design affects and is affected by society is given in Adrian Forty’s Objects of desire (1986). The full assessment of the emptiness of the architectural revolution is provided most effectively by Tom Wolfe (1981), in his From Bauhaus to our house, and in a more scholarly way by Peter Blake (1977) in Form follows fiasco: Why modern architecture hasn’t worked.
SUGGESTED READINGS
Throughout the course of my research on design I have come across a number of relevant works. In this section I comment on the ones I have found most valuable, especially for those readers who wish to continue their investigations of the psychology of everyday things and the design process. I concentrate primarily on design, and especially on works that I feel did not receive sufficient acknowledgment within the chapters of POET. This list is not exhaustive but rather includes the books that I have found most helpful and that I recommend most strongly to others.
Everyday Things
Here are two fascinating books, which deal not with design but rather with the structures of everyday life—structures that, to a large extent, determine why things are designed. One book, Braudel’s (1981) The structures of everyday life, talks about the development of civilization and capitalism in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries and outlines the impact on ordinary people of rapid developments in agriculture, eating habits, clothing, housing, and fashion, as well as the general spread of technological developments in energy, metallurgy, and transport. (This is volume one of a three-volume series, Civilization and capitalism . Highly recommended as a masterful treatment, for those who are interested in such things.) The other book, Panati’s (1987) Extraordinary origins of everyday things, discusses the origins of many of our popular objects, habits, and customs. Panati includes excellent sections of references and suggested readings. Braudel’s book is a scholarly (but well written), systematic, cohesive treatment of the rise of modern civilization by a noted French historian. Panati’s book is a popular treatment consisting of hundreds of unrelated, short essays, each treating a different topic, including the development of tableware, table manners, toilets, and everyday superstitions and customs.
Architectural Design
Architecture plays a major role in design, in part because its many schools provide a natural home for the study of design, in part because architects so deliberately use the construction of homes and buildings as design statements. The Bauhaus in Germany was probably the origin of the modern extremes, but the emphasis started long before then. The most engaging discussion of the excesses of modern architecture is that of Tom Wolfe (1981), From Bauhaus