Donald Norman is ’smart’ about human-centered design as opposed to machine-centered design- which is what drives most technology development. This is a pretty good way to orient one’s understanding of the application/adaptation of technology to educational settings. Technology should “serve us”, as he puts it. And not the other way around.
Norman is concerned about the design of technologies to make us “smarter”, then and writes at length about his understanding of cognition and learning. He makes an essential distinction between reflective (rational, logical, deductive, scientific, paradigmatic) cognition and experiential (reactive, sensory-based, situated, and also refers to Bruner’s narrative mode of thinking) cognition. HOWEVER, Norman is arguing against the experiential (unlike Bruner) and for the reflective.
But this is a somewhat gross and not cleanly cut distinction that simplifies the experiential to something that I don’t think Bruner would agree with. I think, Norman is taking a reductively information-processing (cognitivist) view of cognition. Accordingly, he sees the experiential as an order of simple information processing, and the reflective as a more complex processing schema (a kind of cognitive flexibility model). Quote: “In the terms of cognitive science, reflective cognition is conceptually driven, top-down processing” (pg. 25).
To be fair, Norman is also critiquing this distinction, and argues that “much of our technology seems to force us toward one extreme or the other. With proper artifacts, we can enhance each mode”(pg. 26).
Norman is arguing for using technology to build integrated and transparent tools that aid the appropriate kinds of cognition, so that the benefits of experiential are coordinated with the benefits and necessity for reflective cognition. The worst case, and one that Norman thinks much technological artifacts have come down to, is exploiting the experiential mode at the expense of the reflective. Seductive engagement, i.e. entertainment without any learning.
Norman talks about 3 phases or types of learning too, that move from an accretion or information “accretion”, to “tuning” or the stage of practice with coaching and expert reflection, to the level of “restructuring” which sounds something like Piaget’s accommodation stage. But he also brings in here the point about Motivation and the Optimal Flow state (Csikszentmihalyi). Norman is somewhat equating the state of optimal flow to optimal learning, where reflection and experiential cognition work seamlessly.
Informal learning settings are so far where one can find optimal flow states of learning- whether in the best, interactive and meaningful science exhibits, or while engaged in game-play. The point is to try to design multimedia tools that can facilitate successful learning- by creating the conditions for the coordination of experiential and reflective cognition, the 3 stages of learning and optimal flow.
My comments so far: useful analysis of the problem of “machine-centered design”, but a reductive in his view of cognition.
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