Zatera Ul

Creating a Beautiful Home, by Alexandra Stoddard. I had given a copy of this to my friend that we stayed with last weekend, and seeing the book again made me want to read it again. Luckily, the county library has it. I also checked out a couple more books by her–books to help me think about the esthetics of our home. With some inspiration from them, I’ve been making little changes around the house.

I also found, to my surprise, that the library also had a copy of The Psychology of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. This book was talked about quite a bit in the class I just finished, but wasn’t assigned reading. It has lots of amusing (and all too familiar) examples of poor design in everyday objects. A good example was of door hardware–having a Pull-type handle on the Push side of a door can confuse a lot of people, even when it’s labelled Push. The mall where we used to live had doors like that–I would always get it wrong the first try, because I would take my cue from the shape of the hardware, rather than the label.