The Design of Future things: Chapter 3

The Design of Future things
Donald A. Norman

 This chapter focuses on natural interaction.  Most machines now days use one or many signals, either visual or auditory, to communicate back to humans. The amount of signals machines send to us now can at sometimes be overwhelming.  It is really easy to get mixed up on what machine is signaling as well. A washer and dryer of the same make often have the exact same auditory sounds in there control system. Yet it is still easy to figure out which one is signaling you due to natural sounds.  Why can't more of these natural sounds be incorporated into modern machinery.   One popular example of a natural interaction is a tea pot.  When the water starts to boil, the tea pot starts to whistle and thus provide a natural auditory feedback to notify the user that the water is boiling.  Some designers have even made it to where the tea pot makes a pleasant musical chord from the steam.  Natural interaction is something inventors should try to maintain in this modern age.  As the auto industry shifts to electric cars, vehicles are becoming more and more quiet.  This can be a big problem especially for blind people.  Since they rely heavily on sound, not being able to hear a car can be extremely dangerous.  Even for the driver, the lack of noise in the car takes away a part of the natural feedback cars use to give us.  Machines and users need to complement each other.  If they could do this, the interaction would be much more appealing to users and safer overall.

I think natural interaction is a nice thing because it allows communication on a deeper level.  Machines that have the ability to communicate with their users on deeper level will be infinitely more useful.  Having that natural interaction allows the person to understand their machine a lot better.  For example, world war II pilots use to be able to know exactly when their plane was going to stall just based on the whine from the engine.  That natural communication gives the pilot an increased sense of control over the airplane.  This is similar to how some mechanics can tell what is wrong with a car just by listening to it.  These auditory clues, however, are usually only detectable by extremely experienced people.  This kind of understanding should be pursued in today machines.  People are very good at understanding how to use machines or devices before they even know what they are.  It shouldn't be to hard to use this understanding to help facilitate natural interaction between people and machines.