“When a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed.”
Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 4, p. 87; regarding doors labeled "Push" and "Pull".
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Donald A. Norman 29
American academic 1935Related quotes

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Walesa's Wife, from Practicalities (1987, trans. 1990).

"Appendix II: MITE for Morons," The Odyssey File (1984), p. 123
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Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 48

"Legislators of the world" in The Guardian (18 November 2006) http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1950812,00.html
Context: I'm both a poet and one of the "everybodies" of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry — it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.