Donald Norman’s Videos for “The Design of Everyday Things”

Mads Soegaard from Interaction-Design.org has published a set of restored videos from a 1994 CD-ROM edition of Donald A. Norman’s book, “The Design of Everyday Things.” In these videos, Norman explains key concepts from his book.

It’s odd to think that, from a human’s point of view, the videos are only 17 years old and at the same time, in Internet time, are already 17 years old. But as it says in the video captions: “Vintage video from 1994 – still highly relevant today” — highly relevant today, indeed!

Videos: 17 years old — Video Contents: timeless

Among the videos, I’ve found two favorites: Video #1, which addresses “affordances,” the abstract concept that may be a bit difficult to understand — until you see the video in which Norman explains it.

And video #6, “Conceptual Models of File Systems,” which provides a wonderful example for how easily the user’s mental model can depart from the one that the designer had considered to be perfectly obvious and appropriate.

On his own website, Norman himself provides a bit of background information about these videos.