Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman

Some more data has just been released regarding emotional design!

That sounded umm... well... melodramatic at best.

Reality is though, I really loved the book Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman. When I first read the book, I did a post on my learning blog trying to articulate what his book was doing for me, but I failed. Yet again, I found that he articulated much better what I was trying too than I could. There are two sides to how we think.

• We need freedom, safety and low stress in order to develop breadth to our thinking
• We need restriction, fear, and high stress in order to bring depth(Focus) to our thinking

The former is exceptional for generating massive amounts of creative ideas and novel solutions to problems. The former allows us to actually get work done.

But I guess, I will let him say it.

Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book was an amazing discussion of the psychology behind the stuff we love. I particularly enjoyed how much it spoke to our social networking tools. Our desire to connect with tech is discussed. The chapter on the future of robots also spoke quite a bit to educational design. the author, was a Cognitive and Computer Scientist who studied how well things work. During this his time studying this he noted the frustration and devotion people developed with certain products.



My most valuable lesson from this book was the importance necessity of considering the affective and emotional side to design. This is especially vital in designing learning experiences. Learning is very much an emotional endeavor. We learn stuff that tugs at our emotion. We learn because we value the skill or information. All in all a terrific book that if you are a designer, educator or technologist you really ought to read.



The book is very accessible despite the academic credentials of Donald A. NormanDonald A. Norman


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