BOM – The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Well, welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing… I’m your host, Victor Menasce. Happy first of the month! On the first day of each month, we review the book of the month. Now, to be considered worthy of ‘Book of the Month’, the book must meet very simple criteria; it has to be impactful enough that it will either change your life or your perspective on the world. Of course, whether it does or not is entirely up to you. If you consume it as a piece of entertainment, you’re missing the point. But if you internalize its messages, you have a realistic shot at lasting growth.
Our book this month is absolutely worthy of the ‘Book of the Month’ title. It’s called “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. If you’ve been listening to me for a while, you’ll know that I come from an engineering product design background. I view the world through the lens of product design, where a specific product is designed for a specific customer. So, if you want to buy a rental apartment building and decide you’re going to lease it to tenants, this is still a product designed with a specific customer in mind.
It is human-centered design, and this book is all about that. Don Norman’s book, “The Design of Everyday Things”, is not merely about industrial design. It’s a profound philosophical treatise on the relationship between humans and objects that populate the world. First written in the 1980s and revised again in 2013, the book’s core message is as relevant today as it was three decades ago. Norman argues that everyday struggles with technology, such as fumbling with confusing remote controls and poorly designed effects, are not the user’s fault, but the designer’s fault. This simple but revolutionary premise forms the book’s backbone. It’s become essential reading for anyone involved in product design and user experience, understanding the human-to-computer or human-to-product interaction.
The key insight is that good design makes signifiers obvious and unambiguous. The user instinctively knows what to do without needing to think about it. The book features several key concepts, such as The Language of Design, renowned terms like “Affordances” and “Signifiers”, “Feedback”, “Conceptual Models”, and “Constraints”. These principles lie at the heart of this work.
This book matters. It’s not just a technical guide; it’s a call to action to change our perspective on the world. When delivering a product to the end user, be it a rental apartment or anything else, we need to think it through from a measure, from a functional perspective to understand how the human interacts with it. You will find yourself noticing small design triumphs and failures in your daily interactions. It’s a reminder that design is not just about aesthetics or making life easier or simpler. It’s about the seamless integration between how people think naturally and use those particular products intuitively.
As you think about that, go and get a copy of “The Design Of Everyday Things” by Don Norman, and have an awesome rest of your day. Make some great things happen! We’ll talk to you again tomorrow!
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