 | Almost depressing in its convincing summary of how pleasure is hard to find, fleeting, and crushed by the abundance of choices and options. But Barry Schwartz distills the principles and offers guidance for managing them, and how we can trick ourselves into satisfaction...if we can only ignore that opportunity cost accountant in our head! Every designer should understand hedonic lag and adaption, which is essentially the process by which we adapt to our conveniences - and inconveniences - rendering us both immune to the wonderful comforts of our current expereinces, but also masking the surprising inconveniences which we adapt to and blindly accept. I feel that if we can understand and map these fields in the products that we develop it will help us identify disguised weaknesses, and thereby create a potential road map for a product's future pleasure obsolescence. Add speculation and prediction, and you may be able to engineer a path to a surprising first. (that must be how Apple does it!) I found the book hard to get through in a continuous read..but snacking on chapters has enlightened me in a lot of ways.
You may not love it....but it will make you better. Get it...The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less 
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the paradox of choice... |