Intro to the Design of Everyday Things

Everyone designs. Design occurs anytime you deliberately change an environment to make things better. When you decide what seat to take in an auditorium you’re designing your experience. When you rearrange the furniture in a room or draft an email, you’re designing.

This course provides a summary of key concepts from the first two chapters of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded Edition, November 2013) by Don Norman. It’s intended to be enjoyable and informative for anyone curious about design: everyday people, technical people, designers, and non-designers alike.

• Affordances and Signifiers
• Discover the various affordance you must account for when designing.,Learn about signifiers and how to improve the utility of your designs.
• Conceptual Models and the System Image
• Use conceptual models to improve your designs.,Learn how to design something so your users can develop their own conceptual model.
• Gulfs of Evaluation and Execution
• Discover what you are allowed to do, using the Gulf of Evaluation.,Get feedback on your designs with the Gulf of Execution.
• Design the User Interface for a Timebank
• Combine everything you have learned in this course to design the user interface for a Timebank.,Sketch a concept of your design.,Conduct user testing to improve upon your design.