Things That Make Us Smart

Defending human attributes in the age of the machine

Donald A. Norman, Addison Wesley 1993

Today we live in an information-based technological world. The problem is that this is an invisible technology. Knowledge and information are invisible. They have no natural form. It is up to the conveyor of the information and knowledge to provide shape, substance, and organization. The irony is that too much of our artificial world is oversimplified, overabstract, thereby taking away our most powerful capabilities. (p.104)

Grudin's Law: When those who benefit are not those who do the work, then the technology is likely to fail, or at least be suberted. (p.113)

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