At an electronics store in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Norman was previewing a scene about the world. He was playing with one of this year's hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak. It had a wondrous list of features--it could display your pictures, send them to a printer, put on a slide show, play your music--and there was probably no consumer on earth better prepared to try all of them.

Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been the master of gadgets since publishing The Design of Everyday Things, his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn't be opened without instructions, and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.

Besides writing scholarly analyses, Dr Norman has also been testing and building them for companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. One of his consulting jobs involved an early version of this technology on the shelf at the store: a digital photo frame developed for a start-up company that was later acquired by Kodak.

「This is not the frame I designed,」 Dr. Norman muttered as he tried to navigate the menu on the screen. 「It's bizarre. You have to look at the front while pushing buttons on the back that you can't see, but there's a long row of buttons that all feel the same. Are you expected to memorize them?」

He finally managed to switch the photo in the frame to vertical from horizontal. Then he spent five minutes trying to switch it back.

「I give up,」 he said with a shrug. 「In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.」

So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of 「user-centered」 design, people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas season.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a difficult transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, The Design of Future Things, what we'll have is a failure to communicate.

「It would be fine,」 he told me, 「if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies--machines that fight with us over how to do things.」

Until recently, Dr. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue isn't the answer, because we're too different from the machines.

You can't explain to your car's navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what your calorie limit is, but it won't be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cake.

To get alone with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists speed through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they're liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace.

「Behaving predictably, that's the key,」 Dr. Norman said. 「If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn't dislike them so much.」 Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they're doing.

Instead of beeping and buzzing mysteriously, or flashing arrays of red and white lights, machines should be more like Dr. Norman's ideal of clear communication: a tea kettle that burbles as the water heats and lets out a steam whistle when it's finished. He suggests using natural sounds and vibrations that don't require explanatory labels or a manual no one will ever read.

But no matter how clearly the machines send their signals, Dr. Norman expects that we'll have a hard time adjusting to them.

Even when the defects have been worked out of a new technology, designers will still turn out junk if they don't get feedback from users. Engineers have known how to build a simple alarm clock for more than a century, so why can't you figure out how to set the one in your hotel room? Because, Dr. Norman said, the clock was bought by someone in the hotel's purchasing department who has never tried to navigate all those buttons at 1 in the morning.

「Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,」 Dr. Norman said. 「Most of our technological difficulties come from the way we interact with our machines and with other people. The technology part of the problem is usually pretty simple. The people part is complicate.」

From 「The New York Times, SCIENCE& TECHNOLOGY: GADGET」 section.