Design of Everyday Things

Summary
There are a lot of great concepts in this book. It was impressive how many concepts that we have been seeing in the UIST papers and also in my own research were covered. Things like natural mappings, analogous actions, and mental models. Many of these ideas are things I've been researching for my senior capstone projects. The project will be exploring new multitouch gestures and we are currently in the design stage. I recently read a paper concerning alot of these same things and they referred to natural mapping, mental models, etc. as a group named "reality-based interactions". I have also been thinking about designing visibility in a different way than what he talked about, external visibility. External visibility considers the ability of others not involved to follow along with what the author is doing.

Thoughts
This book made me rethink everything about everything. Having read the book I now see errors all around me. He provoked a lot of new ideas about doors and phones. Being written over twenty years ago some parts were very funny. For example when he was talking about the small computer in his pocket that could keep track of his planner and his address book, then he said, "...and it would need to have someway to connect to a phone."

Questions
How will his ideas change on knowledge in the world vs knowledge in the head?

Are his seven steps on an action applicable to software?