Product Description

Offers glimpses of IDEO's observation-based practice, featuring dozens of snapshots of people's everyday interactions with places and things.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160116 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Short But Sweet!
This little book comes packed with around 150 images based on and around "thoughtless acts" - images looking at the way humans interact with their surroundings and with each other.

The images are great little visual notes and observations of the way we interact. In the back of the book, at around 20 pages is a few short examples of the way that IDEO use observation in their work, one of the key features in the design process.

This is a great little book for designers and people who like to notice the smaller details in some of the unconcious thoughts we all have, and acts we do.

Very engaging, although i dropped a star because it's a shame there aren't more examples from the work of IDEO, and a little more text to pack out a book which is mainly image based.

Good but not great
The idea behind the book is key to great design practice - becoming really observant of the 'thoughtless acts' of real life users. The kind of insight that cannot be gained from thinking / focus groups etc. So as an aid to making you more aware this, the book is useful. However I would not recommend buying this book as I feel it offers very little else.

The Ideo brand at work
I'm extremely disappointed in this book. The vast majority of photos show completely inane examples of stuff people do every day. Seeing photos of someone using a table to lift their foot onto in order to tie a shoelace, or hanging their glases off the neck band of a tee shirt, or leaving litter in the basket of a bicycle provides little insight into good design. Some of the photos are so obscure that it's hard to work out what they're actually trying to portray.

This book has been marketed and sold on the back of Ideo's reputation as design experts. It's a shabby piece of exploitative publishing that is unlikely to lead to any actionable insights for it's readers.