What a great coincidence getting to read this book for two courses simultaneously. We used this as our coursebook for both Human-Computer Interaction as well as Design Thinking and Electronic Prototyping, which, I suppose goes to show the central role of Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” in design and related fields and I can certainly see why. As easily the most engaging coursebook I have ever read, mostly due to not being a textbook, it is a very easy, quick and effortless read that still leaves you with many new and useful perspectives as well as some highly applicable concepts for describing your frustrations with poor design that permeates everyday life. That is because, as Norman points out, great design in terms of usability is often invisible.

The book champions human-centered design with its core tenets revolving around an iterative design process in close collaboration with the users. It discusses various interesting topics from human perception, cognition, action and error to the paradoxes of technology and automation, “featuritis” and complexity and derives various design principles, concepts and processes from these. I particularly enjoyed many of the examples and the discussion on real-world design processes addressing practical constraints, competitive forces and usual incrementality of innovation that paints a significantly more realistic picture about applying the design processes and principles discussed in the book. However, the main takeaway of the book should be chapter 5: “Human Error? No, Bad Design”, the title of which sums up its contents quite well. Its central message is about assigning blame correctly on the root causes of error, which are rarely the fault of the operating persons, and designing for error with the help of resilience engineering. Error assessment is often way too shallow and there is no point in punishing operators if a design fault is at question, as it is only a matter of time for the next person to make the same mistake. Just imagine the society where root cause analysis is properly performed and all errors are caught, reported and fixed immediately!

This book is very easy to recommend but because all designers have probably read it already, I will target engineers and managers. A lot of the content is kind of common sense in a way but not everyone has had the time to sit down and actually think about everything discussed in the book and therefore reading it should provide to be very beneficial for all kinds of cross-disciplinary teamwork and communication. Everyone has different requirements and expectations for design, whether in creating consumer products or sculpting societies but all would greatly benefit from a shared language and increased mutual understanding, particularly on the types, causes and remedies for error, which I would argue is the most important point of the book. Therefore I would highly recommend it to everyone involved in designing, planning or building anything – after all, everyone engages in design all the time, starting from one’s daily routine.