I have thought Donald A. Norman is really neat ever since I read The Psychology of Everyday Things back in grad school. This book is an interesting companion to that one. In this book, Norman stresses that technology and human beings have to work out better ways of communicating with each other. He writes: "as machines start to take over more and more... they need to be socialized; they need to improve the way they communicate and interact and to recognize their limitations. Only then can they become truly useful."
And, this is SO important in my opinion, "we must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to behave."
If you like thinking about human-machine interfaces or user-interface design (or even if you've just had a really bad experience with a piece of technology) you might get a kick out of this book!
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