Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans--from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools--must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.

Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker...

Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things is a valuable resource for transforming ordinary objects into the extraordinary. With over 80 solutions and bonus applications at your disposal, you will be ready for almost any situation.Do you know how to make something that can tell whether the $20 bill in your wallet is a fake? Or how to generate battery power with simple household items? Or how to create your own home security system? Science-savvy author Cy Tymony does...

Design Your Life is a series of irreverent and realistic snapshots about objects and how we interact with them. By leading design thinker Ellen Lupton and her twin sister Julia Lupton, it shows how design is about much more than what’s bought at high-end stores or the modern look at IKEA. Design is critical thinking: a way to look at the world and wonder why things work, and why they don’t...

This publication explores and analyzes a very special kind of design the phenomenon, as normal as it is wonderful, in which people with no formal training in design take things that have already been designed and reuse them, convert them to new uses, in short, "misuse" them in the very best sense of the word...

For folks who wonder why they keep tossing odds and ends in that junk drawer in the kitchen, Sneakiest Uses for Everyday Things offers evidence that technology doesn't always have to come from Best Buy, Amazon.com, or Microsoft." --U.S. News and World Report* Putterers, would-be inventers, and science-fair parents rejoice as Cy Tymony offers fifty new projects to bring out your inner MacGyver...