Once again, I'm assuming that I need to post a response to Norman's The Design of Future Things. This time, I'm looking at Chapter 4 called "Servants of Our Machines". One of the first quotes that stood out for me in this chapter was that "people have become slaves to their technology, servants of their tools" (p.94), which seemed to be a fair assessment of modern life. Many people seemed tied to their machines, for some people its their computers, for others their communication devices. I recently saw pictures of a wedding on Facebook (I'm friends with one of the people in the wedding party) where I counted at least 4 or 5 people with their bluetooth earpiece in the photos. In some cases, they were even wearing the silly thing in their ear in the official wedding photos. It seemed a little silly to me for the father of the groom to be wearing the bluetooth headset throughout the wedding, but maybe I'm being judgmental.
Norman also discusses cars (again) being a "computer of wheels", soon to be able to communicate with other cars around it on "ad hoc" networks for cars. Norman talks about the future potential of cars that drive themselves and that these "swarms of cars" might potentially not even need traffic signals since they'd be able to signal their intent and path and other cars would just go along with it and not hit them.
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