Norman rant

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Returning to the subject of Etech, I'm still thinking about Don Norman's keynote, which made one nice suggestion and two unhelpful ones.

Norman is selling the importance of emotions to "win hearts and minds." Emotional (sometimes called "affective") design is a big thing right now; I think it represents an attempt to bridge the gap between design as art practice (usually taught using group studios in art schools, usually with aesthetics as a metric of success) and design as scientific discipline (usually taught in CS or engineering depts, often using cognitive efficiency as a metric of success). So Norman's trying to be a peacemaker by reconciling engineers to the value of nonquantifiable factors like emotionality and aesthetics in creating successful products. He's trying to explain why "poorly designed" (from an engineering POV) products often do so well in the marketplace. Which is laudable, as far as I'm concerned.

The problem is that in promoting art-design values to an engineering audience, he implies two crucial misreadings of the lessons (I, at least) have learned as a designer. Since I haven't read the book, I'm willing to admit that I may be misreading him, and that many of my complaints may be based on the way authors often simplify complicated arguments in order to fit them into an hourlong speech. Still. I think his pedagogical mission is better served by fully explaining fewer concepts, rather than breezing through a laundry list.

1: Design is universal

Norman relies too heavily on evolutionary biology to explain good design. Knowing that people avoid bitter foods because many poisonous plants taste bitter just doesn't help me design a better permissions system or coffeemaker. Complex aesthetics are culturally dependent. In fact, relying on reductionist "evolutionary biology" might make one unwilling or unable to see how cultural standards for good design differ between continents and even cities -- thus producing more unusable products.

So when Norman categorizes design as "visceral," "behavioral," and "reflective," he starts trying to separate concepts that are at best inextricably linked within each user's experience. Here's my best guess at what Norman means by each term:

Visceral: design that stimulates an immediate physical reaction
Behavioral: design taps into basic subconscious understandings of function
Reflective: design that has cultural status or meaning to oneself

While it's helpful to imagine aesthetic appreciation as occuring simultaneously on three registers (thanks, Don!), his cause is hindered by using three examples to demonstrate the three modes. Why? Sadly, "function" is not reducible to physical efficiencies. It's a shock to have someone as thoughtful as Norman seriously advance the idea that "purely functional" objects exist outside of culturally validated ideas of what "functionality" means. Is a Porsche more "behavioral" than a Toyota? Depends on what you think a Porsche is for. Or we can try to understand another Norman rhetorical trick: can we really say that a Porsche is an example of reflective design, a Toyota an example of behavioral design, and a Hummer an example of visceral design? (Norman used three brands of bottled water to make this point, but I think you see the fallacy more clearly by adding another example.)

Or, to ask a different question of Norman, why is "reflective" design more logical and/or conscious than "visceral" design, given that our conceptions of self are founded in genetics, chemistry, environmental conditions, etc. Whenever I hear anyone tell me that certain interfaces are more "naturally understandable" than others, an alarm bell goes off. My prejudices and assumptions about how the world works have been formed by social and genetic factors I have no control over. Nature and nurture have combined to make me instinctively dislike Hummers, anything colored light pink, and Phillippe Stark's entire body of work. Products exist within a given cultural context that determines why they're created and they'll be used.

2: Design is easy

I think Norman wants to get engineers to give the affective properties of design some respect for once. The problem is that he spends a bit too much time, as indicated above, trying to make emotional reactions sound "scientific" and generalizable - ie, easy to understand. Sometimes, making difficult processes seem easy is a good way to get otherwise uninterested observers excited about a new approach. And sometimes, making difficult processes seem easy is a bait-and-switch that eventually ends up pissing off your audience when an "easy" concept turns out to be very slippery indeed.

Norman is trying to make something that's very, very difficult - designing attraction - appear to be a consequence of universal, comprehensible human reactions. He does this by assigning design objects into discrete categories, and suggesting that those categories are somehow divisible. Designers can certainly create desire - Norman does a wonderful job of analyzing user reactions to alarm clocks and coffeemakers - but the process isn't quite as predictable as I think the keynote suggests. Norman makes design - as the production of a commodified aesthetic - sound much simpler than in my experience it has ever been. It's the strategy of a good salesman, but a poor teacher.

Norman's best points were about the essential illogic and unpredictability of the human experience. So here's the part I liked:

3: People seem to think that aesthetically appealing environments, objects, and services actually work better. The sleeker car seems to go faster and the nicer-looking magazine feels better-written. That's why it's important to pay attention to the aesthetics - they affect perception.

I find it interesting that Norman's sense of how user perceive the results of design is so nuanced when his take on how designers should perceive the act of design is so blunt. That subtext to his keynote becomes even more interesting in context of the other talks on users, functionality, and confusion at the conference, such as danah's talk on user willfulness and Wil McCarthy's talk on quantum dots and programmable matter.

But I can't think anymore. I'll deal with it tomorrow on the plane.

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This page contains a single entry by Liz published on February 15, 2004 5:24 PM.

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