Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine
At a Best Buy store in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Norman was previewing a scene about to be re-enacted in living rooms around the world. — He was playing with one of this year's hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak.
Context & Ripple Effects
Donald Norman spent a December afternoon at a Midtown Best Buy playing with Kodak's digital photo frame — confirmed as one of the year's hot Christmas gifts — to preview a scene he expects to re-enact in living rooms everywhere: a machine trying to be smart and irritating its owner in the process.
The stakes for Kodak are company-sized. Under CEO Antonio M. Perez it has been struggling to reinvent a film-and-print business model ever since vowing in 2000 to lead in digital cameras, so a flagship digital product landing in millions of homes this holiday is a direct test of that pivot. The column also extends a thread the Times has been pulling all year, from January's bargain-or-obsolete question about how quickly gadgets age to May's argument that Apple's lesson for Sony's stores was simply to connect things properly.
First-order effects
- Kodak's frame hits peak retail visibility as a top gift while the company is still mid-reinvention, making holiday user experience a live referendum on the Perez-era digital strategy.
- Norman's in-store demonstration converts a design complaint into mainstream criticism at precisely the moment networked gadgets are entering ordinary households.
Second-order effects
- Retailers like Best Buy become the de facto proving ground where smart-device complexity gets judged by shoppers, tilting merchandising toward products that work without a manual.
- Every rival putting intelligence into a consumer device now competes against the expectation Norman sets: added smarts must earn their keep or they read as friction.
Third-order effects
- If smart features keep outrunning usable design, device makers face a structural choice between piling on intelligence and keeping products legible to non-expert owners — a tension that will shape which companies consumers trust with connected hardware.
- For heritage brands like Kodak, the pattern suggests digital hardware alone cannot carry a reinvention; the interaction model matters as much as the pivot itself.
The trend: Consumer electronics are adding networked intelligence faster than their interfaces can make it feel simple, leaving usability — not capability — as the deciding factor for mainstream adoption.