The results are available in their May, 2009 issue, and of course, on the internet.  (The internet article has two commentaries for each faucet, the first by me, the second by Dwell. Unfortunately, both are labeled "What we think."  I have asked them to correct this.)

http://vimeo.com/2963837

Scary meals, scarier bugs--why on earth would anyone go back for more?

This text above is the start of my essay "Selective Memories" published by Metropolis Magazine. The full article is available on their website.

My talk from 2003 is on "Design and Emotion"  (based upon my book "Emotional Design").  My earlier talk is not available.

When TED was first started, under the direction of Richard Saul Wurman, the name TED stood for "Technology, Entertainment, Design." Now it is under the direction of Chris Anderson, who has opened up the doors and moved to a larger auditorium. The name TED is so well known now that it no longer need stand for anything except the conference and website.

How do I sum up this book? "Witty and sophisticated," or is it "seriously funny." A deep penetrating look at the ever-perilous battle among the competing forces of art, fashion, and practicality that designers face. Sudjic examines the role of design in culture, society, and its continuing battle with art, neatly sandwiching in a marvelous treatment of luxury and fashion. Difficult to read because I was laughing so much, I kept losing my place.

Pointer to book at Amazon.com:
The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects

The two major quality design journals that I know of are Design Issues and Design Studies, but these are only available by subscription. In addition to the long established journals in design and related fields (e.g., human-computer interaction), I'd like to welcome one new, truly excellent journal, The International Journal of Design, edited by Lin-Lin Chen, Dean of the College of Design at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. This is available on-line, free.

(I'm not going to discuss the many excellent HCI journals because these are well established, well known, but at the end of this note I provide two pointers to excellent lists and descriptions of them.)

The International Journal of Design has amazed me with the high-quality of its articles. The main purpose of this note is to welcome and recommend this new source of high-quality, refereed articles on design. (Note: I am on the editorial board, but I don't take any credit for the excellence of these issues.)

Interactions magazine, the official magazine of the CHI organization, is high-quality and always interesting, although not scholarly . The articles are reviewed but not refereed. So think of them as opinion pieces, but written by really good people. The editors are excellent. For example, they often reject my pieces, scolding me until I do better. Finally, many (but not all) of their articles are freely available on the internet. Finally. Their host organization, ACM, doesn't seem to understand this internet publishing business. They still think it is all about money, even though they are a non-profit, scientific organization. (My friends in the ACM will rush to tell me that "non-profit" does not mean "losing money.")

I am certain I have left out valuable resources. Please write to me with suggestions (don at AskDon dot jnd dot org)

Summary hotlinks: items marked with * require subscription or payment

Design Issues *

Design Studies *

ID Magazine *

Innovation *

Interactions magazine

International Journal of Design

Journals in the field of Human Computer Interaction are listed in the HCI bibliography site and also on Prof. Matthias Rauterberg's site at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

HCI Bibliography list of journals

Rauterberg's list of journals

An engaging tale of the product development process, this time following the developments in laptop computers, mostly focusing upon the efforts of the ThinkPad team from Lenovo to develop their lightweight X300 portable. Steve Hamm is a senior writer for Business Week, with good contacts and a good sense of drama. The book covers the aims and history of portables from Alan Kay's dream of the "Dynabook" through today. The story demonstrates that reality is very different from dreams, and the quest for perfection with the need to hit a product price and delivery schedule is daunting. The story also reveals much about the international nature of product development: Lenovo is a Chinese company, but the development team was in Beijing, Tokyo, and the United States (North Carolina).

Those of you who only know the product development process as taught in our universities will discover how different it really is once you get out into the real world. The book is a pretty accurate picture of the rough scramble that really takes place, and how brief the moment of victory, for no matter how good the result, the competition will match it immediately: the race never ends.

I was interested to see David Hill's review of the book on Amazon.com: He is VP of Design at Lenovo's Morrisville (North Carolina) site and he played a major role in the X300 development (and in the book). He liked it.

Pointer to the book at Amazon.com.

The book recommendations just added are:

Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut feelings: the intelligence of the unconscious. New York: Viking.

Groopman, J. E. (2007). How doctors think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Hallinan, J. T. (2009). Why we make mistakes: How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure that we are way above average. New York: Broadway Books.

Hamm, S. (2008). The race for perfect: inside the quest to design the ultimate portable computer. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Isbister, K., & Schaffer, N. (2008). Game usability: Advancing the player experience. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Schifferstein, H. N. J., & Hekkert, P. (Eds.). (2007). Product Experience: perspectives on human-product interaction. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Sunstein, C. R. (2006). Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Vanderbilt, T. (2008). Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Weinstein, L., & Adam, J. A. (2008). Guesstimation: Solving the world's problems on the back of a cocktail napkin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

This is an excellent set of essays about all aspects of the game experience. Despite the book's title, the analysis ranges far beyond "usability" but includes all aspects of research during the development of a game, with special attention to the experience being generated by the people playing the game. There are 23 chapters covering a wide range of topics and approaches.

Randy Pagulayan and Dennis Wixon's Foreword describe the challenges nicely: "the next evolution in games research will be .. focusing less on cognitive states and emotional taxonomies, and more on opportunities for player behaviors. Games can become complete worlds for our users, so now more that ever we need to understand the interactions between the player and the environment, understand the player's behavior within a virtual world, and understand the player's ability to detect the infinite possibilities created for them." (Page x). Well said.

Even if you are not a game developer, this book should be part of your arsenal: everything we design, everything we build, should incorporate fun, delight, exploration, and surprise. Our devices become part of our lives, not just virtual worlds, but real worlds. Game developers learn through understanding how people interact with the real world: Application developers learn by understanding how people interact within game worlds.

Link to Amazon.com entry for this book.

Too bad I didn't know about this book when I wrote "The Design of Future Things": It would have enhanced my book immensely.

(The two books seem to have been written simultaneously, so I didn't know about his, and mine gets an obviously last-minute mention as a half-page long footnote to the last chapter, but with no actual reference within the chapter text. Amusing how it works.)

Vanderbilt covers the myriad aspects of the driving experience. He is a journalist, not a researcher, but for this book, he did his research well, talking with all the major people, uncovering folk lore and scientific lore I never ever heard of, and providing a witty and informative tour of both driving and the role that the auto and modern technology has on society. If you are involved with automobiles, driving, or the design of complex, intelligent products, you must read this book.

Link to Amazon.com for this book.

This is a fun book, demonstrating how just a few simple principles can give approximate answers to puzzling questions. How far does a soccer player run during an average game? How many people are picking their noses right now? And if all the people on earth were crammed together in one place, how much space would they occupy? What fi we gave each person a house and a small plot of land.

To figure these things out you need some basic information, but no worry: Weinstein and Adam tell you how to estimate even that information. A great book, useful too. Students would be far better off if they learned these estimation techniques than some of the other stuff that they are forced to memorize which will never be of value later on; Estimation skills are always valuable.

(Answers: the players run around 20km or 12 miles; ten million people are picking their nose (so stop it!). Everyone would fit (but uncomfortably) into a city whose land area was the size of Los Angeles. To give everyone a home would still only fill up 1% of the earth's surface)

Link to Amazon.com for the book

Why do we make mistakes? Here's my blurb for the back cover of the book:

"Yup, people make mistakes all the time. In his engaging book, Joseph Hallinan entertains us while simultaneously informing us. There have been decades of science devoted to understanding real human behavior, much of it buried in the complex terminology of technical journals. Hallinan brings the science to life, showing how it applies in everyday life to everyday people."

The subtitle covers the major themes well: we look without seeing, we forget things in seconds (unless we pay special attention), and we are all pretty sure that we are way above average. This book provides a modern review of the behavioral science research on everyday behavior.

Link to Amazon.com

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Here is the blurb I wrote for the back cover of this book (it got edited a bit, so the actual blurb is shorter.)

This is a great book: engaging, informative, and thoroughly delightful. Imagine: deep thoughts in an easy read, with social and legislative suggestions to improve everyone's well being through a constructive, non-coercive (libertarian) social policy. It doesn't matter whether your politics are left or right, up or down: Thaler and Sunstein provide important lessons for structuring social policies so that people still have complete choice, but are gently nudged to do what they wish to do. Well done.

I stand by the review: This is an important book for researchers, designers, and perhaps most of all, those who must implement social policy. Rich Thaler and Cass Sunstein's original title was supposed to be "libertarian paternalism," but fortunately reason struck and they discarded it. But they tried out that title because it does reflect the underlying principle of the boo. How can we get people to do what is best for themselves (such as to take out health care or save for retirement) - this is the paternalism voice - yet without forcing them and still giving people the choice to do as they wish - this is the libertarian voice. Note that standing back and doing nothing is not an option. The environment is always rigged so as to nudge people towards one choice or another, so as long as that is true, why not nudge in the most beneficial direction?

The principles apply in a amazing variety of situations. The power of gentle nudges.

Pointer to book at Amazon.com

Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have published a compelling series of books about the roles of simple heuristics, the environment, and now, "Gut feelings" in decision making. (Quick, which city is larger: Berlin Germany or Waldorf Germany. You probably don't know the population of either, but there is a powerful heuristic that can help - familiarity. Berlin is a lot more familiar than Waldorf, so it is very likely that it is larger. (Berlin has 3.4 million inhabitants: Waldorf, corporate headquarters of SAP, has about 14 thousand.)

I first discovered their work in the book written together with Peter Todd called "Simple Heuristics that make us smart" (Deliberate takeoff on my book "Things that make us smart": peter Todd spent some time with my group in San Diego). Ever since, I have been a fan. This last book is written for the popular audience, so it is the most accessible of all, although the others are easy and fun to read as well. The power of simple rules of thumb in making us all appear far more smarter than we are was long neglected until 1999 when the first book in the series was published. No more: If you want to understand how normal folks cope with the complexity of the world, read the book. Learn about the role of heuristics, instincts, the environment, and how they come together into our "gut feelings" that are usually right, but not always. Knowing when is critical.

Pointer to book at Amazon.com