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 It reads as part speculative science fiction, part historical document twenty years on.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.