NONFICTION - June 21, 1992

TURN SIGNALS ARE THE FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF AUTOMOBILES by Donald A. Norman (Addison-Wesley: $21.95; 256 pp.). Donald Norman is a technological gadfly, and proud of it. Fortunately, he knows whereof he criticizes. As a professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego, Norman spends a lot of time thinking about the way people interact with the material world, especially the material created by man. In this book he finds many of the man-made elements greatly wanting, and he lays much of the blame at the doorstep of technological designers. Norman, rightly, finds poor design everywhere: in movement-actuated water faucets, bureaus with hidden handles, digitally operated bathtubs, kitchen countertops without significant overhang (how else can you scoop crumbs into your hand?). Norman can make mountains out of molehills--his riff on a lifelong, personal electronic assistant he calls “the teddy” will make your eyes roll--but some of the design flaws he discusses are truly life-threatening, as those in airplane cockpits. The cockpit, Norman shows, is frequently planned according to the needs of the designer, not the user, so the pilot may have no place to put his coffee cup and no easy method of determining by sight whether the landing gear is down (a problem which led to a fatal crash outside Miami in 1972). Norman’s writing style is so casual it can be hard to take him seriously, but one hopes the designers who read this book will.