When I was in university studying human-computer interaction, the first paper that I ever wrote was a review of automation issues in the design of aircraft cockpits. One paper I cited was by Don Norman, then a cognitive psychologist at Northwestern University. Where other researchers at the time were arguing that automation had come too far, too fast and that we needed to put the brakes on development, Norman argued that the main problem of automation was that it hadn’t come far enough. He observed that the advanced automation of the day was still unable to provide the rich and nuanced feedback required for it to be a true partner with pilots in the cockpit. This argument made sense to me, but my conclusion at the time was that Norman’s perspective would be difficult to apply in the early 1990’s. As my freshman pen put it, “Norman’s solutions lie in the future.”

Now, fourteen years later, Norman and I are still in a dialogue about automation…