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Psychology of Industrial Design

In his book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman describes many of the psychological aspects that interact with industrial design..

An important aspect of Industrial Design is using psychological research to increase the functionality of the design of products. There are three important principles according to Dr. Donald Norman: the importance of visibility, appropriate clues, and feedback of one's actions. These principles constitute "the psychology of how people interact with things" (p. 9).

The study of affordances of objects is the beginning of a psychology of materials. Affordances are the "perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support and, therefore, affords sitting." (p. 9). Affordances tell users the actions they are supposed to take to get a certain result. For example, a knob means to users that they must turn it and a plate on a door means to users that they must push.

"A psychology of causality is also at work as we use everyday things..." (p. 9). When a user presses a button and an action results, the user assumes that he or she caused this action; however, this is not always the case. If a user presses the space bar of his or her laptop and the laptop’s operating system crashes, it does not mean that pressing the space bar makes it crash. On the other hand, if when using a word processor, a user begins typing a sentence, and the screen does not show that it is registering the input sentence, the user will continue pressing the keys repeatedly, causing an unwanted response. Good design will not allow any kind of false causality to occur.