Three interfaces, one shape#

A parking meter. An airport check-in kiosk. A hospital pay station.

• a stranger, not a customer with a relationship to the machine
• one attempt, under whatever queue is behind them
• no walking away once the attempt has started

The niche, defined#

This course studies machines that are:

• one-shot — you don’t learn it over repeated use, you survive it once
• captive — there is no alternative interface, or none in the time you have
• stranger-operated — designed for someone who has never seen it before and may never see it again

Don Norman’s toolkit#

The Design of Everyday Things (1988) gave this whole field the vocabulary it still uses:

• affordances — what an object’s shape lets you do to it
• signifiers — the cues that tell you the affordance is there
• feedback — confirmation that an action did something
• mapping — controls that match the effect they have

Point any of these at a bad parking meter and you get a real answer: the button doesn’t look pressable, the screen doesn’t confirm the coin landed, the arrows point the wrong way.

What Don Norman doesn’t ask#

Norman’s heuristics diagnose confusion — they explain why a design fails to communicate.

None of them ask who wrote the spec, and what that person needed the machine to do that had nothing to do with you.

This course asks that second question instead of the first: not “is this discoverable,” but “who profits when it isn’t.”

How the semester runs#

• twelve weeks, twelve machines — parking meters through pay toilets
• every lecture and session asks the same incentive question of a new machine
• two assignments diagnose one machine each; the final project tears one down and redesigns it

This week’s fieldwork#

Before session 1: find a parking meter, or the closest thing you have access to. Use it for a real transaction. Write down what happened, in order, before you diagnose any of it.

The moment you weren’t sure what to do next — keep that. It’s the specific thing session 1 is built around.