As Norman ponders on the root of the numerous failures in human-machine interactions, he claims that it is purely the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people, and so it is the machine and its design that are at fault. Now, as Human-Centered Design has gained wide popularity, designers seem to have been imposed much more responsibility compared with users.

True, poorly-designed machines can cause much trouble, but humans are likely to make mistakes even with well-designed machines. Despite the Human-Centered Design, we should also remind ourselves of the importance and the duty of the user side in human-machine interactions. After all, miscommunications can arise even between two people, then who should we cast blame on?

Human-machine interaction is an interdependent process—while machines should definitely cater to people, people have to understand machines as well. As Norman says, “machines have no leeway or common sense”, but humans are good at learning novel things. Certainly, it would be beneficial to make machines more understandable to the users. However, merely using more and more affordances and signifiers does not guarantee the effectiveness of the human-machine communication. As the emergence of new technologies have brought about innovations with more and more functions and increasing complexity, sometimes this can go beyond one’s general knowledge and thus requires people to adapt to the device so as to minimize the inappropriate actions (learning to drive an automobile, for example). Consider a layman sitting in even the most well-designed cockpit of an aircraft, passengers would still panic as he/she lacks the essential knowledge to control the plane. Therefore, to some extent, educating users—helping them with a good conceptual model of the machine—can be more efficient than simply pursuing better designs. With the rapid development of technology, machines will better serve humans, provided that we are willing to adapt to machines as well.