The Design of Future Things

by Don Norman

  John Lee’s chapter on automation in the Salvendy volume (referenced above) is excellent, but while you are there, also look at David Eby and Barry Kantowitz’s chapter on human factors and ergonomics in motor vehicles. Alfred Owens, Gabriel Helmers, and Michael Sivak make a strong case for the use of user-centered design in the construction of intelligent vehicles and highways in their paper in the journal Ergonomics. They made their plea in 1993, but the message is just as cogent now as it was then—actually, it is even more cogent because of the many new systems that have been introduced since the piece was written.

  Bishop, R. (2005). Intelligent vehicle technology and trends. Artech

  House ITS Library. Norwood, MA: Artech House.

  ———. (2005). Intelligent vehicle source website. Bishop Consulting, www.ivsource.net.

  Eby, D. W., & Kantowitz, B. (2005). Human factors and ergonomics in motor vehicle transportation. In G. Salvendy (Ed.), Handbook of human factors and ergonomics (3rd ed., 1538–69). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

  Lee, J. D. (2005). Human factors and ergonomics in automation design. In G. Salvendy (Ed.), Handbook of human factors and ergonomics (3rd ed., 1570–96, but see especially 1580–90). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

  Owens, D. A., Helmers, G., & Sivak, M. (1993). Intelligent vehicle highway systems: A call for user-centered design. Ergonomics, 36(4), 363–69.

  Other Topics in Automation

  Trust is an essential component of interaction with machines: without trust, their advice will not be followed. With too much trust, they will be relied upon more than is appropriate. Both cases have been the cause of numerous accidents in commercial aviation. Raja Parasuraman and his colleagues have done essential studies of automation, trust, and etiquette. John Lee has studied the role of trust in automation extensively, and the paper by Lee and Katrina See has been very important to my work.

  Etiquette refers to the manner of the interaction between people and machines. Perhaps the most popular work in this arena is the book by Byron Reeves and Cliff Nass, but also see the paper by Parasuraman and Chris Miller. These topics are also covered in the general references on automation.

  Situation awareness is a critical issue here as well, and the work of Mica Endsley and her collaborators is essential. Start with either of Endsley’s two books or her chapter with Daniel Garland in the book edited by Parasuraman and Mustapha Mouloua.

  Endsley, M. R. (1996). Automation and situation awareness. In R. Parasuraman & M. Mouloua (Eds.), Automation and human performance: Theory and applications, 163–81. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  Endsley, M. R., Bolté, B., & Jones, D. G. (2003). Designing for situation awareness: An approach to user-centered design. New York: Taylor & Francis.

  Endsley, M. R., & Garland, D. J. (2000). Situation awareness: Analysis and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  Hancock, P. A., & Parasuraman, R. (1992). Human factors and safety in the design of intelligent vehicle highway systems (IVHS). Journal of Safety Research, 23(4), 181–98.

  Lee, J., & Moray, N. (1994). Trust, self-confidence, and operators’ adaptation to automation. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 40(1), 153–84.

  Lee, J. D., & See, K. A. (2004). Trust in automation: Designing for appropriate reliance. Human Factors, 46(1), 50–80.

  Parasuraman, R., & Miller, C. (2004). Trust and etiquette in high-criticality automated systems. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 47(4), 51–55.

  Parasuraman, R., & Mouloua, M. (1996). Automation and human performance: Theory and applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  Reeves, B., & Nass, C. I. (1996). The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  Natural and Implicit Interaction: Ambient, Calm, and Invisible Technology

  The traditional approach to the study of how people interact with machines is being rethought. The new approaches are called implicit interaction, natural interaction, symbiotic systems, calm technology, and ambient technology. This approach encompasses Mark Weiser’s work on ubiquitous computing, Weiser’s work with John Seely Brown on calm computing, and my earlier book titled The Invisible Computer. Ambient technology refers to work on embedding technology into the surrounds, the environment, and the infrastructure so that it pervades with its ambience. Emile Aarts, with Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has put out two lively, well-illustrated books discussing this approach, one with Stefano Marzano, the other with Jose Luis Encarnação.

  Implicit interaction is highly relevant: Wendy Ju and Larry Leifer of Stanford University show how implicit interactions play a truly important role in the developing field of interaction design. Interaction is tricky, though: it requires acknowledgment to be successful. Automatic equipment must be able not only to signal its potential action but also to attend to the person’s implicit response: a tough job.

  While writing the book, I visited the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola. I found the research groups there highly relevant, both for the content of their work and for the philosophy of their approach: see the paper by Gary Klein, David Woods, Jeffrey Bradshaw, Robert Hoffman, and Paul Feltovich (Klein and Woods are at Klein Associates and Ohio State University, respectively). An excellent overview of this approach to sociotechnological systems is provided by David Eccles and Paul Groth.

  Aarts, E., & Encarnação, J. L. (Eds.). (2006). True visions: The emergence of ambient intelligence. New York: Springer.

  Aarts, E., & Marzano, S. (2003). The new everyday: Views on ambient intelligence. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: 010 Publishers.

  Eccles, D.W., &Groth, P.T. (2006). Agent coordination and communication in sociotechnological systems: Design and measurement issues. Interacting with Computers, 18, 1170–1185.

  Ju, W., & Leifer, L. (In press, 2008). The design of implicit interactions. Design Issues: Special Issue on Design Research in Interaction Design.

  Klein, G., Woods, D. D., Bradshaw, J., Hoffman, R. R., & Feltovich, P. J. (2004, November/December). Ten challenges for making automation a “team player” in joint human-agent activity. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 19(6), 91–95.

  Norman, D. A. (1998). The invisible computer: Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  Weiser, M. (1991, September). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265, 94–104.

  Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1995). “Designing calm technology.”

  ———. (1997). The coming age of calm technology. In P. J. Denning & R. M. Metcalfe (Eds.), Beyond calculation: The next fifty years of computing. New York: Springer-Verlag.

  Resilience Engineering

  I have long been influenced by the work of David Woods of Ohio State University, especially by his recent work with Erik Hollnagel. Resilience engineering is a field pioneered by Woods and Hollnagel, the goal being to design systems tolerant of the types of clumsy interaction between people and automation discussed in my book. (Woods coined the term clumsy automation.) See the book edited by Erik Hollnagel, David Woods, and Nancy Leveson, as well as the two books written by Hollnagel and Woods.

  Hollnagel, E., & Woods, D. D. (2005). Joint cognitive systems: Foundations of cognitive systems engineering. New York: Taylor & Francis.

  Hollnagel, E., Woods, D. D., & Leveson, N. (2006). Resilience engineering: concepts and precepts. London: Ashgate.

  Woods, D. D., & Hollnagel, E. (2006). Joint cognitive systems: Patterns in cognitive systems engineering. New York: Taylor & Francis.

  The Experience of Intelligent Products

  As I was in the final stages of completing this manuscript, David Keyson of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands kindly sent me a draft of his chapter “The experience of intelligent products,” which is highly relevant to all discussed in this book. I am thankful
to David for sending me the chapter and for the wonderful tour I had of his laboratory at Delft, including the very peaceful, serene, intelligent room he has constructed.

  Keyson, D. (2007). The experience of intelligent products. In H. N. J. Schifferstein & P. Hekkert (Eds.), Product experience: Perspectives on human-product interaction. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

  Acknowledgments

  My books always owe a large debt to many people and institutions. During the several years of research on this book, I corresponded with many helpful colleagues and visited research laboratories across the United States, Asia, and Europe. This allowed me to experience firsthand much of the work discussed here, to drive in numerous automobile simulators, including several full-motion simulators, and to visit numerous experimental deployments of smart homes, ambient environments, and automated assistants for everyday living. I am very appreciative to everyone who assisted me. My apologies for the fact that I will probably fail to acknowledge everyone’s contribution.

  I start by thanking the several classes of students at Northwestern University who suffered through early versions of my material, offering their critiques in many different ways, but always most helpfully. Ben Watson, now in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University, cotaught a graduate course with me titled “The Design of Intelligent Systems,” which had a dramatic impact on the material in the book. My colleague in design studies at Northwestern University, Ed Colgate of the Mechanical Engineering Department (and codirector with me of the Segal Design Institute), has been most helpful, as has Michael Peshkin, who codirects their research lab (see my discussion of their “Cobot” in chapter 3). Larry Birnbaum and Ken Forbus have contributed their expertise about things artificially intelligent, and my graduate student, assistant, and colleague Conrad Albrecht-Buehler has been a great help in the development of my ideas (and the running of my classes).

  Michael Mozer, a colleague and former student now at the Computer Science Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder has graciously allowed me to poke gentle fun at his “smart home,” even though I knew it was a research project to study the potential capabilities of neural networks, not a suggestion for how future homes should be constructed.

  My collaborators during the symposium “The Social Life of Machines,” presented by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania on my behalf, included Judith Donath of the MIT Media Laboratory, Paul Feltovich of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Rand Spiro of Michigan State University, and David Woods of Ohio State University. Beth Adelson of Rutgers did all the work behind the scenes, and Jeff Bradshaw (from IHMC) participated by e-mail. This led to a subsequent visit to IHMC in Pensacola, Florida, where I was graciously hosted by its director, John Ford, along with Paul Feltovich and Jeff Bradshaw. The work there is wonderful to behold.

  My work always benefits from the critiques of my long-time friend and collaborator Danny Bobrow of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Jonathan Grudin of Microsoft Research (Redmond, Washington), another long-time collaborator and friend, has provided a continuing stream of e-mails, thoughts, and deep, insightful discussions. Asaf Degani of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center spent time with me and Stuart Card (of PARC) discussing formal methods of assessing the role of automation in the cockpit, cruise ship, and automobile. Dagani’s analysis of the grounding of the cruise ship Royal Majesty and his book, Taming HAL, are important contributions to our understanding of automation.

  It is difficult to keep track of all the universities and research laboratories I have visited. I spend a lot of time in the Human-Computer Interactions laboratory at Stanford University with Terry Winograd and Scott Klemmer. In addition, there are Chukyo University in Toyota, Japan, where Naomi Miyake, Yoshio Miyake, and the university administration always provide a warm welcome; Akira Okamoto’s Research Center on Educational Media at the Tsukuba College of Technology, Japan; Michiaki (Mike) Yasumura’s laboratory at Keio University at Shonan Fujisawa, Japan (where the president of the university, Naoki Ohnuma, fed us lunch and provided my wife with valuable advice about hearing aids).

  Stephen Gilbert was my host during my visit to Iowa State University, where Jim Oliver spent the entire day with me in his newly inaugurated Virtual Reality Applications Center. (Brett Schnepf, an X-Box “evangelist” from Microsoft accompanied us and took the photographs of me inside that facility that appear in chapter 7.)

  Kun-Pyo Lee at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejon was a gracious host during my visit to his Industrial Design Department (where he promptly made me a member of his external advisory board). Similarly, Pieter Jan Stappers, Charles van der Mast, and Paul Hekkert of the Delft University of Technology (TUD, in Delft, the Netherlands) hosted me on several different occasions. Pieter Jan Stappers has been a valuable colleague. David Keyson’s work at TUD has been especially relevant to the work discussed here. Kees Over-beeke of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands) has also been a frequent collaborator and host during my visits to Eindhoven. Jan and Marleen Vanthienen kindly guided my wife and me through many cities in Belgium and waited patiently in Bruges while I took photographs of horse-driven carriages and their drivers (see Figure 3.2). Jan was then my host during my visit to the University at Leuven. David Geerts from Leuven gave me the wonderful advertisement “Transaction refused” in chapter 7 (see Figure 7.2) and helped me track down the permission required to reproduce it here.

  Frank Flemisch, Anna Schieben, and Julian Schindler were my gracious hosts during my visit to Flemisch’s laboratory, the Institut für Verkehrsführung und Fahr in Braunschweig, Germany, where we discussed at length his development of the “H-metaphor,” or horse metaphor (see chapter 3), and where I was able to drive his automobile simulator that implemented the H-met-aphor’s loose- and tight-rein modes of controlling the “intelligent” automobile.

  Neville Stanton and Mark Young of Brunel University, Uxbridge, United Kingdom, provided me with a continual stream of stimulating articles about the role of attention in driving, especially underattention (discussed briefly in chapter 4). I promised them a visit, so this is a reminder to them that I haven’t forgotten. I had several gracious hosts during my visit to the Microsoft Research facilities in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where I gave a talk at their “Intelligent Environments Symposium,” in particular Marco Combetto, Abi Sellen, and Richard Harper—and Bill Buxton, who for over three decades has continually and mysteriously appeared in the places I visit.

  In the United States, I have visited far too many universities to remember which I visited for which book. Ed Hutchins, Jim Hollan, and David Kirsh from the Cognitive Science Department on the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) continually provide inspirational ideas and publications. Hal Pashler of UCSD’s Psychology Department provided valuable discussions of the role of attention in driving. Bob Glushko, now at the University of California, Berkeley, was my gracious host during a visit and listened patiently and understandingly to my discussions. MIT provides a constant source of people for me to interact with, the relevant ones for this book being Tom Sheridan, Roz Picard, Ted Selker, and Missy Cummings.

  Many people from the automobile industry have been especially helpful. I thank the staff at the Toyota InfoTechnology Center (ITC) for their assistance: Tadao Saito, Hiroshi Miyata, Tadao Mitsuda, and Hiroshi Igata from Tokyo, Japan, and Norikazu (Jack) Endo, Akio Orii, and Roger Melen from Palo Alto, California. Venkatesh Prasad, Jeff Greenberg, and Louis Tijerina from the Ford Motor Company Research and Innovation Center provided ideas, discussions, readings, and a full-motion simulator. Mike Ippoliti of Volvo has been most helpful and provided introductions to Ford. The story that opens the book took place at the Nissan Motor Corporation’s advanced planning and strategy facilities in Gardena, California, in a meeting organized by the Global Business Network.

  Ryan Borroff, former edit
or of the magazine Interior Motives, convinced me to write a column for automobile designers and was my host during a visit to London.

  Jo Ann Miller, my editor at Basic Books, kept her faith through more iterations of these chapters than either of us can remember. And, of course, my long-term literary agent, Sandy Dijkstra of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency in Del Mar, California, deserves much credit for her constant encouragement.

  The people who suffer the most, and benefit the least, from the writing of a book are always an author’s family, and this is no exception. Thank you!

  Note: I have a research contract with Ford Motor Company through Northwestern University, and I am on the advisory board of Toyota ITC (Palo Alto). Microsoft and Nissan (through the Global Business Network) have been clients of mine via the Nielsen Norman Group. They have not screened the material in this book; nor are they responsible for its contents—which they may or may not agree with.

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  16 “The Sensor features detect . . .” Manual for General Electric Spacemaker Electric Oven, DE68–02560A, January 2006.

  17–18 “Human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly . . .” (Licklider, 1960).

  22 “H-Metaphor.” (Flemisch, et al., 2003; Goodrich, Schutte, Flemisch, & Williams, 2006)

  25 “Charles Stross’s science fiction novel Accelerando.” (Stross, 2005)

  27–28 “Researchers say robots soon will be able to perform many tasks for people . . .” (Mason, 2007).