I love Don Norman. He is the curmudgeon we all need. 83 years old and still spritely. You know he (and Tim Shallice) also developed one of the most important theories of executive functions and working memory?
His Human Information Processing textbook is still one of the best intro-to-psych textbooks out there.
He ran the first cognitive science department in the world -- brought in Geoff Hinton at the beginning of his career.
And, he always writes with the hope that people will disagree with him. That's his jam.
Yes, he is. I'd heard the name, mostly in the context of The Design of Everyday Things. But going through his publications, there's a hell of a lot more there:
> When I was at Apple, I watched many innovative products fail. Badly done? No, simply ahead of their time. For example, from 1992 to 1994 Apple developed one of the first commercial digital cameras, the Apple QuickTake 100, one of the very first smart pen-based computers (the Newton), and innovative software applications (e.g., CyberDog, Activity Based Computing, OpenDoc). In my consulting practice I helped develop the first digital picture frame and an extremely high quality distance education system for MBA courses. All failed. Were they bad ideas? No. Were they badly implemented? No. All were excellent concepts: they were ahead of their time. The first company to make automobiles in the United States failed. The first commercially sold computer that used a graphical user interface and that helped develop many of the ideas now central to today's world of computing, the Xerox Star, failed. The second commercial attempt to use a similar philosophy, the Apple Lisa, failed. The third attempt, the Apple Macintosh, almost failed, saved only by the fortuitous arrival of Adobe's development of Postscript and Canon's introduction of low-cost laser printing.
This can't be understated. The Mac Was 10 years too early. As was the NeXT cube. The CPUs and RAM quotas were too anemic. Too expensive and slow. Windows 95 was right on time. Likewise, the idea of the smartphone was firmly in place by the early 90s. There were thinkpieces in the New Yorker talking about the essential idea. The technology had not caught up. General Magic, Newton, too early.
The whole piece is a good read and often mirrors personal thoughts I've been having recently.
I think it's fair to say if something is before its time then it's poorly implemented because it doesn't address any audience. Sometimes newer tech compliments older tech but "before it's time" almost feels like a euphemism in that case since it's all hindsight, it could have well turned out differently.
It could be excellently implemented, but if it's too expensive for the market, the market won't buy it. Look at NeXTSTEP. Today it's powering a billion iPhones and millions upon millions of Macintoshes, but for its first 15 years, it was sitting in a box that was too expensive for the market to bear. Carmack and Romero loved them and they built Doom on them, but the market went for commodity x86, MS-DOS and Windows 95.
The components simply weren't commoditized to a level of being cheap enough to address a large enough market to thrive.
His Human Information Processing textbook is still one of the best intro-to-psych textbooks out there.
He ran the first cognitive science department in the world -- brought in Geoff Hinton at the beginning of his career.
And, he always writes with the hope that people will disagree with him. That's his jam.