Don Norman Reversing Axioms
From Björn Hartmann’s interview with Don Norman in the second issue of Ambidextrous:
One of my standard approaches to a problem is to take the fundamental unexamined axioms and reverse them. I was just interviewed about the dangers of interruption and distraction. My take is that we have evolved to be interruptible and distractible. I think of it not as distraction, but as attention to change. The problem isn’t that we are continually interrupted, but rather that the technology of interruptions has far too much overhead. The overhead is often fare more onerous than the content. So let’s make the interruptions have more content – make it easier to resume afterwards.
(The full interview is available at the Ambidextrous website.)