Comparison between "Emotional Design" and "Design of Everyday Things"

It's hard to remember that "Emotional Design" was written by Norman, the same author as "Design of Everyday Things" while reading it. Where Everyday was scientific, Emotional is subjective. Where Everyday appealed to the strict functionality of devices, Emotional throws it into a "gut-feel" blender to produce what simply looks nicest. In many ways it even appears as if the ideas between one book contradict with the other.

That is, of course, not to say that one is "wrong" while the other is "right". I like to think of the two viewpoints as separate schools of thought, with Norman convincingly selling the reader on both points simultaneously. Is this an evolution of his own personal theories of design? Or is he simply adopting the "voice" of the advocates of each philosophy and treating them as if they were his own, so as to not give seemingly preferential treatment over the other? I personally think it's the latter.

These two are the kinds of design philosophies that can't exactly always coexist, but they can still run in parallel the rest of the time. Emotional design that focuses strictly on the aesthetically pleasing will eventually yield better brainstorming and significantly better devices that work on a visceral level with the users. On the other hand, emotional design can lead to messy results that at a glance might seem to be intuitive but in reality are anything but. I'm sure someone at Apple thought the Home button was simple and intuitive (yes, I'm going to keep harping on this), but the reality is that it violates many of the basic principles outlined in "Design of Everyday Things" that in many cases renders that particular button as simply poorly designed.

There's certainly a balance to be stricken between the two. This is the reason why I do not believe Norman was truly convinced of one philosophy or another, and why it makes the existence of the two books fascinating. It adds a certain new "dimension" to "Design of Everyday Things", where now Norman has added somewhat of a dissenting opinion with an equally valid approach that can be used just as well. The three different levels of processing, for instance, are in stark contrast to those of the six levels of action of "Design of Everday Things". What used to be a rote, almost dry method of action outlined in the latter book is replaced with three simple levels, beginning with significantly more emotional and vague words like "visceral". This regard that Norman has of intuition to the point where it becomes one of three fundamental pillars of how humans interact with their world is vastly different to the approach that was taken in Design, where such as a "loose" word would have never been mentioned in a positive light. It's in this sense that the seeming dichotomy between the two books' philosophies that invites further scrutiny of both. Without Norman explicitly dismissing one philosophy over the other in either book, it's clear there's some overlap hidden between the lines. In this sense it could be said that the reading of both demands a far bigger level of attention paid to these ideas than had we read any single one without touching the other.