This is a crosspost from my other blog (10th of 524)
I’m almost done with Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. It’s my first design book to read which took me more than a month to peruse and well, breath it. I’m hooked! Very much! It is by far the most interesting book that I had the pleasure to read this great year of calamity. It gave me a lot to think not just about design, but how it is literally around us every single day. In general, designers created every experience that we are “experiencing” (redundant, but there’s no better word for it) in our planet right now. Notice that I did not use the world ”built” to convey on physical matter, because designers rarely go there. Other teams could have made the building process happen- but the way we use things and interact with the physical world around us- there’s almost always no doubt that a designer thought of that even before that product, tool, or item was built. These experiences are very important because at some level, it contributed to who we are now and how we view the environment around us.
This encompasses every single piece of tool that we use. For example, pens. Before pens are manufactured and engineered, the designer would have thought of ways of how we would use it. They thought how the experience of writing would go from our first word, to our last dot, until that moment we need to put the pen away. Those insights were incorporated wittingly on creating the mighty pen, that by the way, billions of us use today. Brilliant, right? What’s your favorite pen? More importantly, why?
I’m sort of rambling right now, but I’m planning to have a proper synthesis post after I’m actually done reading. The ending’s always the best part of these kinds of books. Not because it’s ending and I can start a new one, but like a plane going from one destination to another, authors build up excitement to start the conversation. Then they take their passengers on a high of elevated knowledge and sight, and then just right before landing, they finish off softly by putting limitations on the ideas that they opened up in the earlier chapters and then completely stopping to always and always give you a challenge and a piece of advise to be better. Neat right?
I’m on the final descent. The limitations are being discussed and time can only tell if I would be a better designer to challenge these limitations to another round of flight. Who knows.
Thanks for dropping by!
