The first half of the book was very interesting in terms of emotion and usability in design. All the sudden the book turned into a sci-fi study of robots. Don’t get me wrong, I love robots, but it wasn’t what I wanted out of the text.

Norman's first book focused on practical usability in everyday things. This time around he is concerned with their meaning and significance in people's lives. And it's another good read.

Took me a while to finish the last chapter (having a kid tends to diminish reading sessions eheh), but it is definitely an interesting read (and introduction) on cognition, emotion and design.

ini buku kelanjutan buku norman terdahulu "design of everyday things".
di buku yang ini dia cerita mengenai pentingnya disain produk itu memikat pengguna. karena -ini kesimpulan dari penelitiannya- disain suatu benda yang memikat, akan menigkatkan 'usability'nya.
selanjutnya sih, biasa-biasa saja, dia cerita berbagai benda koleksinya yang lucu, culun tapi juga menjalankan fungsi utilitasnya dengan baik.

This book would make a reasonably interesting essay, but it doesn't really have enough content for a book. Essentially, what it says is that in addition to designing for usability, people should design for affect and emotion, engaging people at the visceral (reptilian, sensation-based), behavioral (mammalian, use-based), and reflective (human, intellect-based) levels.

It says all that in the prologue, but then doesn't really expand much in the rest of the book. For all I know, such hackneyed examples as Csikszentmihalyi's flow, passwords posted on computer monitors, the questioning AI called Eliza, and Asimov's laws of robotics may have been less banal over a decade ago when the book was written, but by now much of the content was so commonplace that the analysis of it conveyed little information.

I recommend reading the prologue and skipping the rest.

As I enjoyed The Design of Everyday Things and Living With Complexity, I decided to buy Don Norman's back Catalogue. This book is honestly bizarre compared to those two.

The model of considering the effect of an object's design on reactive, intellectual, and reflective levels and providing case studies is very useful, and the way it's written is in Norman's characteristic dry and amusing approach throughout.

However where I deducted stars is the last quarter of the book, where he discusses how machines will need emotions to help us interact with them better. I fully appreciate the conversation on AI was very different in 2003, but this book either needs to be updated and re-released or followed up because that part is painful to read as someone who works in the field. It reads as part speculative science fiction, part historical document twenty years on. The rest of the book is smarised in the epilogue, but the section on emotional machines isn't, making it feel like an unplanned afterthought. The meandering tangents of this section are so different to the pointed psychology and philosophy of design throughout the rest of the book.

Overall, I'd say this book is worth reading, But that chapters 6 and 7 should be taken with a grain of salt, or even skipped altogether.

Review at https://stuff.graves.cl/posts/2024-02-27_06_11-book-review-emotional-design