Just read the Scientific American piece and I get the mild feeling that the author of the article prefers the kind of recipe books that offer guidelines and advice rather then food for though. Although I do not know the man personally from his writing Don Norman appears to me to be a gentle form of a scientist, offering insights and plenty of fodder for the grey cells of his readers and unlike Jakob Neilsen and Edward Tufte he does not engage in incessant marketing of himself or his ideas he just puts them out there like a good scientists should.

Ad Beth pointed out there is more to the book then machines with emotions but interface designers especially the webbish kind see the world through the eyes of a web browser and human computer interaction. But interface design of web systems should go beyond that we all know (or should know) that the architecture of a web site goes beyond the graphical interfaces that mediate between the computer and the human. The “computer” is made of a web server, application server, database, operating system, hard drives, etc. each of which need to interact with the other components and has a form of an interface.

Think of Hard drives as IBM has been doing for years and think of the advantages of an “emotional” hard drive where failures or high loads would be reflected as stress which will cause the drive to seek some help or offload data and activity because if it doesn’t it will suffer a breakdown. Such an “emotional” machine would save lots of headaches to the administrators monitoring the equipment because there will be less of a need for constant care. The same logic could be applied to web servers, etc.

In the design of everything there are no simple rules only though choices and the more insight you have the better, sure life is easier when you refer to the certification guide or the laws of x number of clicks and number or the noise ratios of powerpoint presentations but it is far richer when you take the time to think about what you are doing, even when your customers don’t care.

To quote Charles Darwin "I always make special notes about evidence that contradicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying!" I hope all the people who preordered the book on amazon will take this line to heart because new ideas are what keeps us alive, if they want confirmations they should simply reread their copies of the psychology of everyday things.