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Norman, D. (1993). Things That Make Us Smart. Reading MA:
Addison-Wesley. Reviewed by Lorraine Sherry
Central message
Question: What makes us smart? Answer: Tools of thought. These cognitive artifacts are not mental models - they are external devices that stand for, refer to, or represent some event or thing that exists in the world. A cognitive artifact captures the essential elements of an event, deliberately leaving out the irrelevant details. External representations should be appropriate for the task and for sharing abstract ideas with others. Our "smartness" comes about because we can store large amounts of information as external representations, rather than relying on our limited internal information storage and processing. The knowledge thus generated can be shared throughout the culture.
Application
A representational system has two ingredients: that which is to be represented (an abstract concept like addition & subtraction) and a set of representational symbols (a cognitive artifact like Cuisinaire rods or Arabic numerals). Moreover, we can have metarepresentations - representations of representations. Metarepresentations help us generate new knowledge, finding consistencies in the representations that we fail to see in the environment. For example, Norman's figure 3.1 on page is a metarepresentation. It contains three elements:
Value
People aren't as good at logical, top-down processing as computers are, but they are excellent at seeing emerging patterns. For example, science students have trouble understanding data presented in equation form. However, in the CoVis project, the Climate Visualizer uses a complex mathematical model that allows students to display temperature as color, wind as vectors, and atmospheric pressure as contours, thereby enabling them to see the relationships on-screen.