Imagine you go in a hotel room, all this stuff is written in Chinese, you just woke in the night with an urgent natural need, and you just want a light on right now! So you have to read a sign with "go to bathroom"?
I think the idea of Don Norman is actually good for a big shared meeting room, were different people will have to change the lighting occasionally.
But for homes (and hotel rooms), just place your switches in a logical place and avoid too many lamps, that should be enough.
Or maybe this: have switches on main light at the doors of a room, and then each individual lamp has its switch on its cord. Wouldn't that be good enough?
Code in the various US cities I've lived in generally requires switches for a room be at a certain height and a certain distance from egress-ingress doors. I think it may have something to do with handicap accessibility, but generally there's a reason in most modern homes, you don't have to think about where the switch is.
For homes that's okay. Except overhead lights are not as nice as lamps, so turning on all the lamps you use with one switch is cool. Modern high efficiency LED bulbs can have odd lighting so having a few of these in lamps gives a much nicer effect.
And we want to encourage people to turn off lights when they're not being used, so a single switch is again useful. This might be saving tiny amounts of energy, but we want to move to a world where this kind of behaviour is built in.
Imagine you go in a hotel room, all this stuff is written in Chinese, you just woke in the night with an urgent natural need, and you just want a light on right now! So you have to read a sign with "go to bathroom"?
I think the idea of Don Norman is actually good for a big shared meeting room, were different people will have to change the lighting occasionally.
But for homes (and hotel rooms), just place your switches in a logical place and avoid too many lamps, that should be enough.
Or maybe this: have switches on main light at the doors of a room, and then each individual lamp has its switch on its cord. Wouldn't that be good enough?