The Design of Future Things by Don Norman Read Free Book Online Page A

improving performance. This is true for all autonomous, intelligent systems, animal, human, and machine.
The Rise of a New Organism—a Hybrid of Machine+Person

    F IGURE 2.1
    Car+driver: a new hybrid organism. Rrrun , a sculpture by Marta Thoma.
    Photographed by the author from the Palo Alto, California, art
collection at the Palo Alto Bowden Park.
    For years, researchers have shown that a three-level description of the brain is useful for many purposes, even if it is a radical simplification of its evolution, biology, and operation. These three-level descriptions have all built upon the early, pioneering description of the “triune” brain by Paul McLean, where thethree levels move up from lower structures of the brain (the brainstem) to higher ones (the cortex and frontal cortex), tracing both the evolutionary history and the power and sophistication of brain processing. In my book Emotional Design , I further simplified that analysis for use by designers and engineers. Think of the brain as having three levels of processing:
    â€¢ Visceral : The most basic, the processing at this level is automatic and subconscious, determined by our biological heritage.
    â€¢ Behavioral : This is the home of learned skills, but still mostly subconscious. This processing level initiates and controls much of our behavior. One important contribution is to manage expectations of the results of our actions.
    â€¢ Reflective : This is the conscious, self-aware part of the brain, the home of the self and one’s self-image, which does analyses of our past and prospective fantasies that we hope—or fear—might happen.
    Were we to build these emotional states into machines, they would provide the same benefits to machines as their states provide us: rapid responses to avoid danger and accident, safety features for both the machines and any people who might be near, and powerful learning cues to improve expectations and enhance performance. Some of this is already happening. Elevators quickly jerk back their doors when they detect an obstacle (usually a recalcitrant human) in their path. Robotic vacuum cleaners avoid sharp drop-offs: fear of falling is built into theircircuitry. These are visceral responses: the automatic fear responses prewired into humans through biology and prewired into machines by their designers. The reflective level of emotions places credit or blame upon our experiences. Machines are not yet up to this level of processing, but some day they will be, which will add even more power to their ability to learn and to predict.
    The future of everyday things lies in products with knowledge, with intelligence, products that know where they are located and who their owners are and that can communicate with other products and the environment. The future of products is all about the capabilities of machines that are mobile, that can physically manipulate the environment, that are aware of both the other machines and the people around them and can communicate with them all.
    By far the most exciting of our future technologies are those that enter into a symbiotic relationship with us: machine+person. Is the car+driver a symbiosis of human and machine in much the same way as the horse+rider might be? After all, the car+driver splits the processing levels, with the car taking over the visceral level and the driver the reflective level, both sharing the behavioral level in analogous fashion to the horse+rider.
    Just as the horse is intelligent enough to take care of the visceral aspects of riding (avoiding dangerous terrain, adjusting its pace to the quality of the terrain, avoiding obstacles), so too is the modern automobile able to sense danger, controlling the car’s stability, braking, and speed. Similarly, horses learn behaviorally complex routines for navigating difficult terrain or jumping obstacles, for changing canter when required andmaintaining appropriate distance and coordination with other