Contents
I was a bit disappointed. The book doesn't come close to the former one I read which was coauthored by Terry Winograd: Understanding Computers and Cognition
Nevertheless, the ideas presented are sound and interesting. My concern is about restricting oneself to the context of software products, somehow closed upon themselves, well-packaged, with a user interface and so on. This context breaks down when it comes to reuse (wasn't this noticed?).
The same seems to hold upon attempts to separate design from engineering. I am suspicious about any such attempt to make long term global distinction, well in the tradition of this between analyst and programmer. The idea of such a separation is modeled on the analogy with the distinction between architect and engineer in building. This is just an analogy: there are other, equally valid, analogies...
The chapter I liked most is this by Donald Norman (see also his Design of Everyday Things).
p 12 Software Design and Architecture, Roles in Design and Construction
What properties of our software will make it remodeler friendly while preserving its firmness?
p 21 Design of the Conceptual Model, by David Liddle
People are good at recognition, but tend to be poor at recall.
p 90 The Consumer Spectrum, by Paul Saffo
We use tools to accomplish tasks, and we abandon tools when the effort required to make the tool deliver exceeds our threshold of indignation.
p 163 The Designer's Stance, by Kelley and Hartfield
When you're a kid and you don't know how to tie your shoes, there's no tension, because you aren't aware that other kids do know. Then, you get into the stage where you know that you don't know to tie your shoes, so you want to know. The thought of learning how to tie shoes moves into conscious awareness. The prior stage is unconscious.
p 170 IDEO
The point of a design methodology is not to have a recipe to follow, but rather to have a structure to fall back on.
p 195 Cultures and Prototyping, by Michael Schrage
Many organizations believe that manageability means predictability.
p 217 Footholds for Design, by Shahaf Gal
An analogy for the role of computers in a design environment is that of rock climbing.
p 238 Design in a Large Organization, by Donald Norman
People work well in small groups, so as soon as the size of the organization gets large, communication problems arise. Organizations are in a continual struggle against this problem, with repeated attempts to "reorganize", as though there were a perfect structure that would somehow solve all difficulties. There isn't.
p 276 Design for People at Work, by Sarah Kuhn
While TTS [Trouble Ticketing System] was designed to make job performance more efficient, it has created the opposite effect: discouraging the training of new hands, breaking up the community of practice by eliminating troubleshooting conversations, and extending the time spent on a single job by segmenting coherent troubleshooting efforts into unconnected ticket-based tasks.