Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [69]
What are not everyday activities? Those with wide and deep structures, the ones that require considerable conscious planning and thought, deliberate trial and error: trying first this approach, then that—backtracking. Unusual tasks include writing a long document or letter, making a major or complex purchase, computing income tax, planning a special meal, arranging a vacation trip. And don’t forget intellectual games: bridge, chess, poker, crossword puzzles, and so on.
The tasks most frequently studied by psychologists are not everyday tasks. They are things like chess or algebraic puzzles, which require much thought and effort; but indeed, these pursuits have just the sort of wide and deep structures that do not characterize everyday activities.
In general, we find wide and deep structures in games and leisure activities, where the structure is devised so as to occupy the mind or to make the task deliberately (and artificially) difficult. After all, what challenge would there be if games such as chess or bridge were conceptually simple? How would interest in a mystery novel—or any novel for that matter—be sustained if the plot were straightforward and the answers readily deducible? Recreational activities should be wide and deep, for we do them when we have the time and wish to expend the effort. In the everyday world, we want to get on with the important things of life, not spend our time in deep thought attempting to open a can of food or dial a telephone number.
Everyday activities must usually be done relatively quickly, often simultaneously with other activities. Neither time nor mental resources may be available. As a result, everyday activities structure themselves so as to minimize conscious mental activity, which means they must minimize planning (and especially any planning with extensive looking ahead and backing up) and mental computation. These characteristics restrict everyday tasks to those that are shallow (having no need for extensive looking ahead and backing up) and those that are narrow (having few choices at any point, and therefore requiring little planning). If the structure is shallow, width is not important. If the structure is narrow, depth is not important. In either case, the mental effort required for doing the task is minimized.
Conscious and Subconscious Behavior
Much human behavior is done subconsciously, without conscious awareness and not available to inspection. The exact relationship between conscious and subconscious thought is still under great debate. The resulting scientific puzzles are complex and not easily solved.
Subconscious thought matches patterns. It operates, I believe, by finding the best possible match of one’s past experience to the current one. It proceeds rapidly and automatically, without effort. Subconscious processing is one of our strengths. It is good at detecting general trends, at recognizing the relationship between what we now experience and what has happened in the past. And it is good at generalizing, at making predictions about the general trend based on few examples. But subconscious thought can find matches that are inappropriate, or wrong, and it may not distinguish the common from the rare. Subconscious thought is biased toward regularity and structure, and it is limited in formal power. It may not be capable of symbolic manipulation, of careful reasoning through a sequence of steps.
Conscious thought is quite different. It is slow and labored. Here is where we slowly ponder decisions, think through alternatives, compare different choices. Conscious thought ponders first this approach, then that—comparing, rationalizing, finding explanations. Formal logic, mathematics, decision theory: these are the tools of conscious thought. Both conscious and subconscious modes of thought are powerful and essential aspects of human life. Both can provide insightful leaps and creative moments. And both are subject to errors, misconceptions,