Recommended Book

Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine

by Donald A. Norman, Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, paperback, reprint edition, 1994

At the time of writing this book, Donald A. Norman, a cognitive psychologist and founding Chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, was also a thinker employed by Apple Computer (called an Apple Fellow) and the author of other books on the psychology of everyday things. The italicized phrase is the name of a 1988 book by Norman and another popular title of his is Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.

In Things That Make Us Smart, Donald A. Norman explores the complex interaction between human thought and the technology it creates, arguing for the development of machines that fit our minds, rather than minds that must conform to the machines.

Humans as they evolved became different from other living species because they overcame their limitations through tools. Mankind's creations were not just objects to overcome physical liabilities but also "information artifacts" to assist cognition (that is to "overcome the limitations of brainpower"), first with simple tools, such as fingers for counting, through to filing cabinets and later to complex supercomputers.

Now we compare ourselves unfavourably to these machines because they can compute (calculate) and retain (memorize) much faster and to a much greater capacity than we can. The problem goes even further for just as we shape machines to assist with thought and memory, so those machines begin to shape how we think and what we value. We have evolved into a civilisation that creates machine-centred humans enslaved to technology.

Proof that we serve technology is evident in the slogan of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair:

Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.

Norman feels this would be much better rephrased as follows:

People Propose, Science Studies, Technology Conforms.

Instead of allowing computer software designs to dictate usage, we must apply our intelligence to design products that serve usage. The product should be shaped to fit the task rather than the task shaped to fit the already designed product.

Besides computers there are other external representations or "information artifacts" we use to assist our brains, such as writing, diagrams, maps, office-design and even television. However, these can be used with positive results. Dangers arises when the very "things that make us smart can also make us dumb". Norman warns it is the way we use and interact with these things that will determine their effect on our intelligence.

Norman is not the first and probably not the last to warn us of the reliance on the various cognitive artifacts we create. However, unlike those portraying only doom and gloom, Norman shows us solutions. In this book like his others, Norman illustrates that which does not kill us makes us smarter.

First we must reverse the machine-focussed design into a person-centred control of the things we use. We must develop technology so that it serves us and then use these machines for what they do best. In doing so we can be free to do those activities at which we are more competent, such as language, the arts, emotions and reflective thought.

The more we can unload to computers and the more conceptual knowledge that we can convert into what Norman calls experiential, and what knowledge management gurus would call explicit, through the use of powerful computer-based data knowledge representations, the more we will free ourselves for higher order reflective thought and human judgment. Is this not what knowledge management is or should be about?

Any thought leader in the area of knowledge management can benefit by reading this book not just for the history and impact of technology on society but also for the examination of the evolution of human thought and cognition. Educators and organizations can benefit by understanding how humans learn and how to tame technology and software to use it to assist learning rather than to shape thought and overturn cultural values.

Of the many things that can make us smart, Norman's user-friendly easy to read book is certainly one of them. Many of the needs he expressed, such as for a human-centred scheduler that could be shared (the palm pilot), have come to pass. For his more current views, read his 1999 book The Invisible Computer. (See Review)

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