Assignment #4:  Ch. 1 of Emotional Design, by Donald Norman

A comparison between two of Norman's books.  One of which tells you how to hack your brain into working like you want it to.

Well, this reading was educational.  Contained within the chapter was the knowledge I need to control how I solve problems in the future, and explanations for why certain things look nice, or why my boss over the summer was so chill about figuring out how to solve various problems.  And all we have to do is trick our brains into feeling a certain way.  Man I wish I knew this stuff sooner.  But that's not what this post is supposed to be about...

"The Design of Everyday Things", also by Donald Norman, has a very similar style.  He writes in a fairly relaxed tone, which makes both books feel more casual, like I am, in fact, reading the book for leisure.  When more convenient, he uses first person descriptors, another trait that gives the book a more conversational tone.  Also just like before, there is an abundance of examples and anecdotes that help illustrate his point.  In fact, in the first chapter alone, I think I saw two examples that were present in both "Emotional Design" and "The Design of Everyday Things".  And I liked the first chapters of both books, more so than the following chapters of TDOET.

Considering the fact that we only read the first chapter of the book, it is a little difficult to accurately gauge the difference between the two books.  That is what I thought at first, but after re-scanning the first chapter of TDOET, I realized that I can make some decent generalizations.  First, I felt like in TDOET, I was already learning terminology, such as mapping, affordances, and conceptual model.  In ED, once you learned what the three layers of processing were, you could just sit back and enjoy the following expansion on the three subjects.  

In addition, TDOET has a more technical feel to it; the examples are quite specific, and reference particular objects and actual scenarios to prove whatever point is being made.  ED is more general, and while it still has concrete examples, many of them are just hypothetical situations and lists that Norman speculated on, and then wrote down.

Also, TDOET had more pictures.