I thought this book was definitely better than the other one of his books we have read so far, "The Design of Everyday Things." And I thought he brought up some interesting ideas, like the car swarm and your kitchen telling you what you should eat. He references Minority Report, which has some of those things that he talks about in it, like automated cars. But some of the stuff just doesn't seem feasible. At least I don't see a car swarm working on the roads we have today, I think there would have to be brand new special roads built that work with the cars. I believe I saw this idea once somewhere before where the road would have like some junk inside it that would help automated cars along the road with traffic and things like that. Almost like it was running on a track, but it seemed more like it was just sensors or something that relayed messages about the other cars on the road.
Overall, it was a pretty interesting read only to become disturbing at the end when he eats shrooms and talks to the Machine Archiver. Where apparently he gets inside the head of a sentient machine and tries to figure out how machines would design things for humans.
4 comments:
I felt that this book was certainly a better read than his last as well. Personally, I do not like the idea of my fridge telling me what I can/can't eat. Some things he mentions seem feasible, but highly impractical. If you take the last chapter by itself, Don Norman just seems insane. The way it was laid out really didn't even fit in with the rest of the book.
The stuff about car swarms was by far the best part of the book. I can see real use of that idea, but some of the other ideas I cannot. If my toilet starts telling my doctor about my urine I think I will move into the woods. Call me old fashion, but I would like to retain a little control over my life. The book was good though, I agree.
I also agree that there needs to be an infrastructure update before self driving cars become a reality. There have been some test tracks that had some sort of wire under the road that the car was able to sense and follow but it is still in development.
As long as you can choose to disable some of the control your house has over you, then it might not be too bad. It would save money to have your house be your doctor.
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