This is a journalistic account of what is nowadays called UX design or human-centered design, and how it came about. It is heavily California-centric and very much an outsider’s perspective, perhaps illustrating how our discipline is perceived in (North American) society and business today. The book is potentially a useful read for students and others who are interested in deploying UX design in practice.

As technology has evolved, so too has our interaction with it. At first, inventions were made and humans were expected to adapt to them: this resulted in situations such as the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, where the design of the control room contributed to the delay in identifying the actual problem. As industry and society learned from such accidents, user-centric design became recognized as a valid principle. The authors of this book trace the history of design, how users became centred in design (at least sometimes), and how our interactions with our devices change, and change us.

The book is very well written and interesting. I found the chapter on personalization incredibly creepy — the idea of creating a frictionless world where vacationers at Disney World or on a cruise ship are having non-stop fun and excitement, and that technology enables staff to monitor people for signs of dissatisfaction and quickly stop them, is rather more dystopian than appealing. My perspective could at least partly be based on the fact that cruise ships and Disney World are already my idea of hell, but part of me figures we need to know how to deal with a range of emotions, including annoyance and impatience. People coddled by personalized tech sound like very emotionally limited people.

I would recommend this book if you’re interested in the history of tech, want to know about how our world is constructed, or want to know how people figure out what makes people tick. ( )

“A world that is lived without thought.”