If you were forced to rely on only two target audiences to guide
all your future design work, I’d strongly recommend using
astronauts and toddlers. Fortunately, the connection between
them goes beyond the design of their underwear to the nature of
perception and expertise, and in what we treat as valid data,
and what we choose to ignore as “noise”--the extraneous details,
out-of-category input, the anecdotal tidbits. As it turns out,
noise is much more valuable for useful design insights than you
might think. First, the astronauts. One little-known quirk of
the Apollo moon landings was the difficulty the astronauts had
judging distances on the Moon. The most dramatic example of this
problem occurred in 1971 during Apollo 14, when Alan Shepard and
Edgar Mitchell were tasked with examining the 1,000-foot-wide
Cone Crater after landing their spacecraft less than a mile
away. After a long, exhausting uphill walk in their awkward
space suits, they just couldn’t identify the rim of the crater.
Finally, perplexed, f