Emotional Design

Emotional Design: Why we love or hate everyday things by Donald A. Norman.
Here's a book that is a waste of time. While the topic of the topic of including emotions in the design process is currently very interesting, this book is a letdown. I expected interesting tools and thinking frames to incorporate user emotions in the design process. Instead I found an endless raving about the author's private collection of artifacts. It can be interesting and even delightful to hear people tell about the stuff they like, but Mr. Norman makes shallow generalizations of his experiences, unfounded extrapolations and likes to talk in absolutes.
After the rave, the second half of the book goes on about how robots and computers should have emotions, in a discussion that is totally irrelevant for the area of product design. If you want to hear about the future of robots and intelligence go read 'On intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins.

Two notions of the book were interesting - luckily they are on the first few pages so you can put the book aside after page 50.
One is the observation that people are more focused when tense and more creative and open minded when relaxed. Although this fact is mentioned in any book about creativity, it only struck me now that this notion can be used in product design: when good focus is required the designer can try to rise the tension in the interacting user. And vice versa.

Further Mr. Norman breaks the experience of a product down into three levels. This breakdown is really just a simplified version of the abstraction model described by Korzibsky and a similar one described by Hawkins. It consists of a first impression, an unconscious impression after interacting and a conscious reasoning about the product. Don Norman is too vague for my taste about the distinction between the first impression and the interaction. Much more interesting lecture on the subject is Blink. (See one of my previous posts).

Yesterday I was meeting a person who was knowledgeable in the area of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide. I learned that the production of books has a carbon dioxide byproduct weighing two times the weight of the book itself. This book is 400g wasted carbon dioxide.