Season 1 Finale: Design for a Better World (w/ Don Norman)

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What happens when human-centered design is no longer enough?

Designers are trained to make things easier to use—but what if ease and elegance are no longer the point? What if the systems we need to change go far beyond screens and interfaces, touching global structures and collective futures?

Our guest, Don Norman, coined the term "Norman Door" to describe a door that gives the wrong signal about how to open it—pull vs. push—highlighting poor affordances and feedback in everyday objects. 

This simple yet profound observation helped launch a new era of design awareness, making him one of the most influential voices in the psychology of design. His decades-long career has shaped the fields of human-computer interaction, design thinking, and usability. He is the author of the seminal book The Design of Everyday Things, and now, Design for a Better World, a work that challenges us to design for the full complexity of human and planetary needs.

WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

• What makes some errors easy to catch and others dangerously hard to detect
• How decades of design decisions have shaped today’s global challenges
• What it means to shift from human-centered to humanity-centered design
• How co-design empowers communities over outside experts
• The surprising design lessons learned from nuclear accidents, faucets, and guinea pigs
• The role of failure in progress—and why we should embrace it
  
  

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Designing for ease is not enough—today’s challenges demand designing for systems and long-term impact.
• User-centered design can fall short when it fails to consider environmental, societal, and ethical dimensions.
• Human error is not always a failure of attention—it’s often a byproduct of bad design.
• To scale real change, we need dandelion models—spreading seeds of knowledge and training others to do the same.
• Participatory design ensures that communities are not passive recipients but active creators of their own solutions.
• The service economy offers a path toward sustainability—if companies rethink profit and longevity.

The future of design psychology isn’t about better buttons—it’s about understanding people so deeply that we can redesign society itself.

Find The Design Psychologist on your favorite podcasting platforms (or share this link with a friend): https://designpsychologist.buzzsprout.com/2395044/follow

Transcript

Welcome to The Design Psychologist, the show that helps you use psychology to design
better experiences. I'm Thomas Watkins, your guide to becoming a more powerful
psychology -informed designer. What happens when the goals of design expand far beyond
ease of use and desirability and instead toward ethics and systems and responsibility.
Why might focusing solely on the user limit our ability to solve far -reaching world
problems? And what should we make of the decades of experience from a real
originator, the grandfather of design psychology? Today, I am honored to share a
conversation I had with Don Norman, who I'll introduce momentarily, together we
explore questions like what are the invisible psychological forces that make everyday
things either usable or frustrating? How can user -centered design fall short of
certain goals, and what does it mean to design for humanity instead? How has Don's
thinking evolved across decades, and what does he believe designers must urgently
prioritize now? What are the enduring lessons about perception,
affordance, and error that still matter maybe now more than ever? By the end of
this episode, you'll walk away with timeless principles, a renewed perspective,
and a challenge to expand your role as a design psychologist for the sake of the
world that we're all shaping together. So let's have a listen as I introduce and
speak with today's guest. Welcome to The Design Psychologist. Today I have the
absolute honor of welcoming to the show the legendary Don Norman. If you've spent
any amount of time in the world of usability, human factors, UX, software and
product design, design thinking, you have felt the impact of his work, whether you
know it or not. Don's journey is remarkable. He started off as a STEM student at
MIT, studying electrical engineering, but his curiosity about human thought and
behavior led him to pursue a PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
No, no, no. - Good story, I'll correct it when you're finished. - Do you want me to
start over? - No, I think it's much more fun, the audience to hear this. - Okay,
okay. - It wasn't my innate curiosity. People were nuisance,
I used to design circuits and things and people, they got in the way, it worked
just fine if people didn't come there. And so, I wanted to study computers, but
this was, I'm very old, so this was in the days when there were only a couple
computers in the world.
I got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MIT, and then I went to
University of Pennsylvania where the first computers had been built. Wonderful. That's
where I can learn about computers because they weren't teaching it to undergraduates
or even masters at MIT yet. So at Penn, all the people who did the computers,
they had left and started a company called called UNIVAC.
So I got a master's degree and then what? Well, suddenly the psychology department
changed. I heard him talk by the new chair.
His degree was in physics. He didn't have any psychology background.
I heard him give a talk and I said, "Well, gee, I want to study kind of big
intelligent machines and I can't do it here. They tell me I should wait."
And I tell people later on when I say you have to understand human behavior, I say
don't ask a psychologist or an anthropologist or sociologist. Academics are so
specialized. I have a PhD in psychology. You know what I'm an expert at? How the
ear works. Well, it's good to know and so on, but it's all mathematics. It was,
in fact, I just used my engineering training in psychology and everybody thought,
"How brilliant you are," and I'm saying, "No, I take the most elementary concepts in
engineering and apply it to psychology, and it seems insightful." I found that now
you take the most elementary things in psychology and apply it to design, and it
seems insightful. The fields are so narrow that they don't know what the other
fields do. That's changed a lot, and we'll come to that. I've interrupted your bio,
but now let's you continue from there. So, okay, I got myself a PhD in what was
called mathematical psychology, and my first job was, "Well, the way you got a job
in those days," is my advisor, his PhD was mathematics, by the way. He said,
"So, where do you want to go, Don?" And we talked about it, and we decided
probably the best was to go back to MIT or maybe to Harvard. And he said, OK,
and he arranged appointments for me at both places, so I could interview them and
come back and say which I preferred. And I said, well, MIT I'm familiar with.
Harvard looks quite different. I'll go to Harvard. And I went to Harvard, and I
hated psychology. the normal psychologists from the Americans. It was all behavioral,
it was all Skinner, it was all operant conditioning. And I was working for,
my mentor was George Miller, who was wonderful, but he introduced me to the faculty
of the psychology department and B .F. Skinner, the world's most famous psychologist,
stood up and denounced me. And I consider that a compliment. That's an honor.
That's an honor except he clearly wasn't, he didn't know me. He was clearly
denouncing George Miller and this is his way of doing it. But in any event,
I got interested in memory and I discovered that all the psychology stuff about
memory was horrible and the only interesting people were the people writing in
England. And so I got and discussions and arguments with people, which at Harvard is
a good thing. They love arguments and started publishing like mad. And pretty soon
this new school like California opened up, the University of California, San Diego,
and they hired me. In fact, they hired me as an associate professor with tenure.
Later on, they said, "We made a mistake. "We thought you were more experienced than
you were.
But there I started a field which we call Human Information Processing, which I
wrote a textbook.
I can't see what this looks like in just a minute while I change my computer. For
everyone, for all the listeners, he's holding the book up to the screen and trying
to make sure he sees D.
And there's me with the beard on the bottom.
And what I did was Peter Lindsay and I, we actually used computer programming, you
show how the eye worked, you could look at... We did all sorts of wonderful things
in that book, and it was really quite a revolution in psychology. Our goal was
instead of memorizing the works that people did, you learned the fundamental
principles And then you just derived what was needed. That's how engineering works.
And so that's my beginning. And now, and that's probably enough to start with,
I have a longer bio, it goes on and on and on. But the question you should ask
me is how did I get into design? So, how did you get into design? Oh, that's a
good question.
I started studying memory, and I used what was called single detection theory to
analyze it, receiver operating characteristics and so on. One of the very first
people to do that, apply it to psychology. And then I also studied human attention,
which there, the best work was being done by by the British and a woman named Ann
Treisman in England and a man, Danny Kahneman, who is Israeli but an American.
It's kind of amusing because I knew both of them while I was just starting and
they were still kind of graduate students and starting. They ended up marrying each
other and Kahneman ended up winning the Nobel prize. But that's a longer story.
And I also, my mentor at San Diego, George Mantler,
who was the chair of psychology who hired me,
I used to go to his home and he would drink. And he told me that one day he had
reached in the closet to pour himself, didn't get a bottle of scotch. And so he
took out the scotch and he poured himself a glass of scotch and he put the glass
back in the cabinet and walked off holding the bottle. And he said, "Oh, I guess
I'm really getting old." And I said, "No, I make those kinds of errors." And that
got me really interested in human error. And so what I did is I asked all my
students and everybody I knew to collect errors. Whenever you make an error, write
it down immediately and tell me what the error was, how you discovered it, and then
what you did, and how you discovered it turned out to be very, very important. As
a result, I wrote a major paper in the Psychological Review,
the major journal of psychology, still is, I think, about human error,
in which I said it was called categorization of human errors. And I took the
hundreds of errors I had, and I typed each one and the information about it on a
little piece of paper, and I spread them all out on the floor, and I stared at it
for days, and it's what we do today with post -it notes,
right? And And I simply, and I organize them into categories, and I realize that
there are two different classes of errors, major classes. One of them is a slip,
and that's where I intend it to, well, pour myself a glass of scotch and drink it,
and then I then put the wrong thing away in the cabinet and walked out with the
other thing, but that's easy to discover because it's not what you intended to do
and as soon as you look down at your hand or decided to take a sip, you realize
the error.
And this, by the way, I call a description error because notice that both of those
are containers and they're both round and they're very similarity in the two
different things. You don't make that error when different things have very different
characteristics.
And the other kind of error is where you, it's, I call it a mistake,
which is where you make the wrong decision. You diagnose a situation and incorrectly
and make the wrong decision, but from then on, you're doing everything that's correct
according to the decisions you've made. So those are very difficult difficult to
discover. And they're especially difficult because when you make a wrong decision,
it's not a chance random one. It's based on the information you would need to make
the right decision. So, usually, what you did, oftentimes the first few steps you do
are appropriate for the correct act,
and so that makes it even harder to detect. And so now to continue the story,
that paper was actually quite well known. And after the nuclear power accident called
Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee established a human factors
committee to go in and look because they said the operators were really stupid. They
made all the wrong, they didn't detect it, they didn't understand it, They made the
wrong interpretation. So I want you to tell us why, what kind of training do we
have to do to do this? We went and we studied it and we ended up saying the
operators were actually quite intelligent. They were really well experienced. They made
very sensible decisions. The plant, if you wanted to design a plant to cause errors,
you could not have done a better job. And so I realized that my work, oh,
design, I never heard of that concept. I mean, I used to be an engineering
designer, but I didn't know about the human factor.
And I know psychology, yeah, I guess. And I know about technology.
So yeah, so that's how I started becoming design, and I started studying accidents
actually with NASA. I did research for NASA, the NASA AIMS,
which is in the San Diego region of California. That's where a lot of the human
factors work is done.
Because people forget that people think NASA is space exploration, but the N /A,
the A is aeronautics, national aeronautics. So,
that's how I became a designer, really. I was still a psychologist. But it came
from real use cases of, because then I'm glad you mentioned the human factor,
designing to build the engineering, you know, whatever, the machine you're engineering,
there's a design for that, but then there's designing for the human factor. That's
right, that's right. And in fact, well, a few years later, I went, I had took a
sabbatical leave and was in England. And at the home of all the papers that I
really loved, but the building which they were in was impossible. I couldn't work
the doors. I couldn't work the lights switches. I couldn't work the water taps. And
England was all a mess and people didn't care. You There's a universal rule about
water is that hot is on the left side and cold is on the right. Well, not in
England. That was still the rule, by the way, but it wasn't done. And they didn't
have mixing faucets either. We have the hot water and the cold water, you mix it,
so it comes out at the right temperature. No. So you put your hand, you go between
the two spouts, you go back and forth to try to get the average, so I wrote a
book, I didn't expect to write a book, but I wrote a book at the end, which was
called The Psychology of Everyday Things, and later on we changed the book to The
Design of Everyday Things because psychologists didn't care about things,
and so that wasn't very good for those sales, and Designers who did care about
designing your things would never have thought of looking in psychology.
What happened is this book got a review in the New York Times book review, which
in the United States is the most important book review journal, at least was at
that point. The review was, "What a stupid book. Can't imagine who would ever want
to read it or learn anything from it." It went on and on and on. That convinced
my publisher that they should just give up on it. And so what happened,
though, was another publisher said, "Oh, we liked the book. So you're not interested,
so can we buy the paperback rights?" And so they bought the paperback rights and
said, "We will change the title to Design of Everyday Things." And I said-- How did
they fix it? Well, and I said, "No, I would would do that. It's such a nice title
poet." And they said, "Yeah, you're an academic. You like to back as POET, poet,
yeah." But, you know, most people, when you go to the bookstore,
they only see this, the, you know, the sort of the little end of the book.
And so the title has to be, has to attract their attention. And it has to be sort
of an abstract of what the book is about. And a design of everyday things is what
it's about. Well, I didn't believe them, but I believed in data. So I went off to
bookstores and I asked people and everybody, oh, they were enthusiastic. The bookstore
managers, even the clerks, they said, "Yeah, yeah, the book is now in psychology.
Nobody looks there." So, yes, it really did. That's when the sales started booming.
Because people could make the connection. Do you think that would be the same case
today? Do you think people would still have that gap in their understanding of the
world? I guess it would be interesting to test. Well, yeah, there are lots of gaps
and they might have had that still gap.
clear and now the book is so well known it's hard to do an experiment. But it is
true that psychology has always had this problem that when you're trying to explain
things to engineers about why you should use psychology and why this, this, that and
the other and every engineer is trying to tell me what we have is so logical.
I can't imagine why anybody would ever have trouble. And I say, "We don't think
logically." Logic was invented by mathematicians and philosophers. It's not how people
think. And I always have to say, "You have to take people the way they are,
not the way you want them to be." And it's a hard push for engineers sometimes.
And to also say that a lot of and so on. And, you know,
have you ever done some research on something you want to buy and gone to the
store to buy it and ended up with something different? Because, you know, maybe the
forum attracted you and you said, "Oh, that's neat." And you bought it.
Yeah, everybody admits that that has happened to them. In fact, even sometimes you
do a lot of research to buy a camera or expensive or a car, even more expensive,
and you still end up buying a different car or a different camera because this car
was, "Oh, wow, yeah, I really like the way it looked." And yeah, so our emotions,
what do you like, our subconscious, really drives everything.
And so... Right. Even when we use logic to make a decision, the core decision
itself is driven by lots of other factors that are coming from emotion.
And right, and often we recognize the difference. I really should do this,
but I'm in love with that, Dandy Kahneman. In the early days,
he was studying attention and memory and so on. But then he was with Amos Tversky,
sorry, doing microeconomics, decision theory, and I even did some experiments myself
with Amos Tversky, and after,
you know, they lived this interesting life where the two of them were together and
almost all their papers were joined, and it was interesting
Well, the Nobel Prize was given to that work, but Amos made a mistake and didn't
get the prize. He died. It turns out if you're dead, you don't get a Nobel Prize.
But it was interesting because his wife, Antrie Spinn, was actually more famous than
Danny for most of their career, chiefing up the United States President's Medal of
Honor or whatever it was called, maybe it was Medal of Science or Technology.
But the Nobel Prize wrote, said, "Oh, yes." Which is interesting because the first
Nobel laureate who was to do what's called today behavioral economics was Herb Simon.
Herb Simon was everything. He was a psychologist, he was a computer scientist,
he was a political scientist, He was in business.
He helped invent the term artificial intelligence. He had new and written books on
problem solving and decision making.
He got the Nobel Prize for his work in economics. When I went to tell my economics
friends, I was under a car driving home in San Diego and I heard that Herb Simon
Nobel Prize, and so I rushed to tell my friends in economics, "Hey, Herb got the
Nobel Prize," and they said, "What a waste to the Nobel," because he wasn't an
economist. And then, of course, neither was Danny Kahneman an economist. And it took
a while before they finally, an economist, finally got a Nobel Prize for his work
in behavioral comics, which is interesting because he, Rich Thaler,
was at the University of Illinois,
and I was then working, I was at Northwestern University in Chicago. And so one day
he showed up in my office and said he had just written his book, and could I be
interested in writing a blurb for it because it really was a psychology book. It
was a design book and a psychology book, book, he said. And the book is what's
called Nudge, which you may know about. And so that's the way these ideas spread.
And so finally, economists are now accepting behavioral economics, but they've
simplified it because economists don't understand people. And we'll come back to that
because that's sort of the heart of what this broad podcast is about, how somebody
People need to understand people, and they think they do. I started off to say that
psychology and design have a problem that didn't badly misunderstood. Psychology,
oh yeah, I'm a person. I understand people. I don't need to learn psychology. Or
I'm a designer, oh, design is making it look pretty.
So we'll call on you when we're all finished building it, and then you can make it
look pretty.
Right. The classic problem. I mean, there's so much you touched on there. Everything
from the behaviorism. I just want to touch on the behaviorism thing before we get
into the other stuff, because there's so much stuff. The behaviorism, and then for
the audience, if you're not totally familiar with psychology history, it kind of took
over a lot of psychology. But Largely in America, like Europe didn't have the same
problem that America did of being 100 % obsessed with behaviorism. And then by the
time the cognitive revolution came around, right, later, and you were a little bit
in the mix, mixed up with that, right, where there's - Well, this book, Human
Information Processing, was sort of this, I like to think, what are the stars of
the cognitive revolution? And then Ulrich Nyser wrote a book where she called
cognitive psychology, and that's where the name came from. And it was also an easier
book to read and shorter. So, but yeah, I was right there at the very beginning.
I've been at the very beginning of many fields, actually. - And then Chomsky came in
with the linguistic stuff, but then you came in from that side. - Well, it turned
out when I was at MIT, I had to, we had to take courses in the humanities.
And one of the courses I took was this by this new professor who had just arrived,
and so my roommate wanted to take it because we had to feel one more course for
graduation. He said, "Let's take it from this new person," and it turned out to be
Noam Chomsky teaching his first course, and it was based on his thesis. And Chomsky
was very confused by us. He said, Well, I use a lot of mathematics in mathematical
notation and state theory and so on. And when I taught this at Pennsylvania,
the linguistic students, they had no idea what I was talking about. But the
philosophy which I was talking about, they loved that. And here, you guys don't
understand the philosophy one bit. But what I thought was the hard part, the
mathematics you think is trivial and easy. And that's, here we go again, the
differences between what you learn in different fields. So no one was a friend of
mine for a long time. Maybe he still is, I don't know. I haven't seen him for a
while, so I don't know. - You have a quote in the book and you're calling on
designers early on. Why do I talk so much about the role of design?
Because more and more the role of designers is to act as the interface among
technologies, policies, and people. Design.
that is the focus of this book. Is this something that you always wanted to write
or wanted to write for a really long time and kind of now is the time to get
into it? - No.
Again, you touch on many things I could talk about. Why I'm against STEM education,
for example. I'll do that quickly. And then I'll tell you why I wrote that book
and why that statement was in it, maybe I shouldn't have said no,
I should have said kind of.
Because this is the book I really wanted to write for a long time, but didn't know
it. The design of everyday things. In fact, I say that in the preface. This is the
book I've always wanted to write, except I didn't know it.
And so a lot of the ideas in this book and a lot of things that you just quoted
came from all my work starting with this book. This book was first published in
1988, but the principles are still true and therefore it wasn't until 2013 that I
decided it was time to revise it. But I didn't change the principles, I changed
simply the examples.
And So the book has been very popular, so I don't know how many copies. I know
it's over a million, and it's been translated to lots and lots of languages.
But what happened was that I've been thinking more and more about, well,
you know, my impact on the world and the world itself, and I'm very old, I'm 89
right now, I've retired five times. And on the fifth retirement,
which that was in 2020, where I was my second retirement from the University of
California at San Diego, and I had started a group called the Design Labs. So at
San Diego, I started in psychology. I became chair of it eventually.
I then started at the field called Cognitive science and was the first chair,
perhaps the first department in the world on cognitive science. But then is when I
got interested in actually applying my stuff and I had already been consulting for
Apple and Xerox. Xerox is where the very first machine that today is called the
Macintosh was developed. And so I took an early retirement and I went up to Xerox,
I'm sorry, I went up to Apple and started working and that's where the first time
I discovered real designers.
And I helped establish this book and the work I was doing at Apple helped establish
the field that today is called human -computer interaction. But you might note that
if you look at the proceedings, it's called human factors in computer design or
something like that. So, Human Factors is in the title of the conference.
In fact, when it came time, when they finally said, "We maybe should start a
society," and they had a big meeting in Boston, the very first meeting, I was one
of the speakers, and afterwards there was this big debate about, "Should we join
some other existing society?" And I thought they should join the Human Factors
Society. But the computer scientists kept insisting it should be joined at the
Computer Science Society. The society is called the Association for Computing
Machinery. It's an interesting society for the machinery, which is one reason I don't
like STEM. STEM is science, technology, engineering, mathematics are all very
important, but there are two problems with it. First of all, there's nothing about
people. And aren't all these fields supposed to be to make things better for people
in society? How come there's no people? And second, what do you mean you're going
to teach science? Science is how many different fields? Engineering is how many
different fields? Each of these fields is many different fields. And they're divided
into little slivers of specialties where people in one specialty don't understand
what's going on in the other specialty.
And so I say we need to know, if you're academic,
you want to publish papers, that's how you get promoted. And so it's good to be
the world's expert in some very, very narrow topic, like my Ph .C.
thesis, the quantum theory of hearing.
You've never even heard of it, and it's no loss that you've never heard of it. But
how do people behave? No, if you want to know how people behave, you should go to
a novelist. You can't write a novel about people without really making it feel real
and understanding how people act and what they're thinking privately inside.
So that's why I'm against STEM. I think we should teach projects, Because when you
do a project, you have to go across all these disciplines and learn to work with
other disciplines. And so I'd like to change teaching. But to get back to what
happened after I retired for the fifth time and what am I going to do, people
often ask me what kind of a designer I am. And the answer is, well, I design
designers. I'm an educator. And yes, I have worked for companies building products
and shipped products and all that, but in the end, my most important things have
been my students and my books and my lectures.
So I was saying, well, none of my books are all about making things easier to use
and easier to understand. That's important, but it's not going to change the world.
So I thought I would write about the problems in the world, but every problem I
could think of Lots of really good people have written about them and I didn't see
anything I could add Well, I should write about the solutions. Well, same thing.
There's lots of solutions out there. I didn't see what I could add But wait a
minute. We aren't doing those solutions. Why is that? Ah human behavior,
among other things, and so I decided that maybe that's where I,
you know, by then I would have been a business executive, and I even have testified
before the Federal Communications Commission. I helped get the very first Wi -Fi band,
and for due that I had to go to Washington for a couple weeks and work with our
lawyers and go up and down the halls of Congress and talk to Congress people, and
And more important than the Congresspeople are their staffs because they're so busy.
They don't have time to read anything And there's also no way that any individual
would know all the complexities of all the different topics They have to vote on
and so their staffs are very very important And the best way to tell how whether
it's a really you're a good congressperson or not is the quality of their staffs
and Many of those staffs are very, very high quality, really good experts in the
fields. So I also helped get the high -definition TV standards in the same way,
which was another political fight. And so that's what I put into the book, and I'm
proud of the fact that in many ways there's nothing new in the book, and that's
because if I'm complaining about the problems or I'm suggesting solutions, it's nice
to say it's not just me being crazy, making the suggestion. These are done by
reputable people, they're well tested, they're good ideas. But as you've read the
book and see you notice, what's important is the perspective I bring, which is quite
different than one that anybody's ever, was quite, in fact, it was very, it's a
book that's very different than any other book I've written. - Yeah, and you, the
thing is You dive surprisingly deep in the first part, when you talk about problems,
you don't say, "Oh, there's this societal problem on this surface level." You go
into human history and question extremely core things like the way we perceive the
concept of time and calendars and clocks and making that point the artificiality
point I thought was powerful to around us in the idea, the world is artificial,
and therefore it's changeable, and kind of walk through how design interfaces with
the problems that we see all around us. - There's a really good example of that
just happened. I have a charity, we may talk about that later.
It's called the Don Norman Design Awards, And we give it to young early career
people trying to do really good societal programs. And we have a conference in
November. Last year it was San Diego. This year it will be in Singapore. So,
it's a charity. It's what's called a 501 (c)(3) charity in the United States.
And we have a board of directors and the CEO, who's was saying that people have
been asking him when you must get applications in. And he would say something,
"Well, we haven't set the right date yet, but it'll be in the summer." And I said,
"Anil, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere,
that's the winter. And if you live in Singapore, they don't have seasons.
It's the same weather all year round. So they don't have that. They sometimes think
that of the, sometimes it's the rainy season versus the dry season, but they don't
have real seasons. And yes, and he laughed and said, "Yes,
so I should know that. I've traveled all over the world, but you're right. I grew
up in India and now the United States, and it just, the way you grow up,
makes things seem so natural, you don't realize it's different elsewhere. And this
one was simple because it was based on geography and the sun. But others have to
do with how you behave, how you eat your food, what foods you eat, even in what
order you eat the food, and all sorts of different things.
My wife was just telling me about, Learning about in Peru They love to eat pig.
Well, we eat a lot of pig meat, but but there they serve the whole pig It's a
guinea pig a small pig. They'll serve the whole pig with in with the body and the
head on the plate and yeah but Well,
you know and I as I travel I beat no sorts of things and you know I've eaten
insects in many different places. They're actually quite nice because they're usually
deep fried and they're just crunchy and you don't even taste, it doesn't have a
taste, it's a wonderful feeling though. Right. Once something's deep fried, that kind
of overtakes any other aspect of the food.
So, you know, but the point is here that there are deep fundamental aspects of
society around us. One thing that it brought my mind to is, you know, you have
that whole, there's that dichotomy of structural determinism where people think that
everything around you has to be that way. And, you know, I can't change everything
that happens is because the structure around you, then there's a reconstruction as a
view where I can change things the world is there for me to act on. And, And to
me, you know, the guiding philosophy throughout this book is we can change the
world. We don't. And there's reasons for that. There's a lot of problems that get
into the way. If you're trying to change things, then here's how to solve them. And
you walk through a lot of examples of how to handle that.
But one thing I thought about Don, too, is, you know, in the design profession,
folks come out of humanistic fields, you know, might be social sciences, behavioral
sciences, or it might be the arts on the other side. And through dealing with the
business world, we have to learn a more cold and pragmatic way of dealing with the
world. And I felt like reading this book kind of brings one back to those
humanistic roots. I think because of the emphasis on STEM,
humanities are having trouble surviving. Universities are closing down humanities
program, but in many ways it's the humanities that are the most important because
they're all about, well, humanity, about people and about society and about how we
live, and that's what we should be living for. In fact, I've argued in economics
instead of having companies emphasize the stock market value and how much profits are
making, how about quality of life? There are countries actually that try to measure
the quality of life in their country as opposed to gross domestic product because
gross domestic product is how much money the country is spending, whether for good
or for bad, it counts the same way. I would love to change it to quality of life.
And the same with companies that emphasize quality of life. When we buy our, when
we buy stock in companies, we would have rated by, do they make life better for
people? Not, oh, do they have make outrageous fortunes for people? - Correct.
And then you, while we're talking about terminology changes from human -centered design
to humanity -centered design. Well, I've been criticized for that a lot,
and I keep saying, look, first of all,
human -centered design, abbreviated HCD, has been developed by many,
many different people. I think I was one of the people who helped start it. I call
it user -centered design to start it with, and then I changed a human. I'm sorry
that I changed a human. I should have changed a people. 'Cause I said, I don't
call you a user. I call you a person. But I called, you're a human being,
so I made a human centered, but I really don't call you a human. I call you a
person, right? But, and what I was proposing was that we follow human centered
design. I tell people, This book is wrong. Now what's wrong about the book?
For the audience, he's holding up the design of everyday things. Yeah. And it's
nothing wrong about the book. Everything in the book, I believe in and still teach.
What's wrong is what's not in the book. And what's not in the book is the kind of
destruction we're doing to the environment, to all living things, because we're part
of a very complex system in the world. And so we don't even know the relationships,
but basically living things depend upon other living things. And they communicated, if
one species dies, it has unknown side effects. Eventually, we discover them because
some tiny little insect dies or something, you know, a whole set of birds die out.
And a bird die out, then in fact, maybe mammals die out who eat and then maybe,
et cetera, et cetera. So we have to be very careful. We now even know that trees
communicate with one another over great long distances, both not just chemically, but
also electrically, that's a new finding. I didn't realize there were electrical
signals that went through the roots.
And it's complex and we have to think about that. And the other thing is, so First
are take the very same principles of human -centered design and expand them. Just
look at the system -wide and expand the system that you're thinking about. And so
that's why I call it HCD plus, human -centered design plus more. But there's one
other point. Designers are like colonialists. That colonial country goes to another
country and says, "Oh, you're not doing things the right way, which means the way
we do it. So let me show you how we do it. In fact, we'll run your country for
you so it'll be better, right? And we'll give you our religion or not,
your religion and so on and so forth. Well, designers, we send in,
design students love to go off to Latin America, Africa, Asia,
spend a few weeks in some remote village, come back saying we discovered this
problem and develop a solution and they get prizes for it. But if you actually
build it and employ it in the village where you discovered the problem, it probably
wouldn't work. And in every case it does, you do that. It either doesn't work or
it works until it breaks and then they don't matter fix it. So, you know, the rule
is if you really want to make something that's universally fixable, make it out of
bicycle parts. In the United States or in the western part of the world,
the technology part, we just assume that we have air conditioning and refrigeration
and electricity and clean water. That's simply not true in many parts of the world,
especially the parts that need something.
So, the point about the book is we should do what's called collaborative design, co
-design or sometimes participatory design. The design has to come from the people.
They understand their own problems. They understand their abilities, and on top of
that, not only does this guarantee that whatever is built is something they can use
and that they like, but even what you designed was perfect for them, they them,
they could understand it. If you gave it to them and told them to use it, it
would not be accepted. Whereas if they come up with even the very same ideas, yeah,
they have ownership. So that's the fifth new principle that I've added to Humanity
Center design. That only applies for working in communities. If you're making like
the microphones you and I are using, which are meant to be used by millions of
people, then you have to do more traditional human center design. So, to be clear
on that, you're talking about projects really big and small, but largely large
multidisciplinary projects that are addressing some kind of a societal need,
or kind of the design thinking scope of things that... No. No.
Some of the projects that won awards in the DNDA, Don Norman Design Award,
were communities simply gathering together for depressed people and just treating them
by treating them well, by sinking with them, forming bonds around them,
taking care of them, smiling at them, and that a quite a number of people actually
recovered. Recovered enough to start becoming, they could walk around, they could do
things, they could become more of an asset to the community instead of a liability.
And this wasn't multidimensional. It was all done by the society. And so it wasn't
multidisciplinary. Now in some sense it was, yeah, they were doing what we today
would say is social work, maybe psychiatric assessment,
et cetera, but not by the professionals. It was done by the villagers. And so there
are cases. There's a case in Ghana, which we also awarded, where what they did was
they found-- they took people who had disabilities and they simply taught them about
modern technology and how they could use the technology to build tools that would
make their lives better. So they built them themselves, but this was a case where
We simply brought them into using modern technology and if you look at the tools
There's a picture on our website and it looks pretty clunky with this person wearing
something over his head but he had very bad vision and It made him Functional
again, and he and he built it himself Right, so it's it's almost making design a
culture or you know It's a is a different approach to the practice where anyone can
do it and we're just there as facilitators and enablers. - They couldn't have done
it without the professionals who first of all explained how to do it, but what the
process was, how things worked. And so I kind of all had the money to buy the
equipment and the training facilities. But the real end up,
the end result was what they did. - It's part of your hope with this book, with
this whole effort, that we as designers who have been trained with these unique
skill sets that are trying to solve problems and for human usage, that we can take
that and expand it, grow it, to bigger problems than just the little projects that
we work on from day to day of designing a product for a corporation, that we can
take this and sort of export it and expand it to a bigger target?
Yeah, because there's a lot of foreign aid that has been wasted by,
which we spend billions of dollars, but we send in the experts. The experts come
back with a plan, a big, thick book, and give us $10 billion. And in my 10 or 15
years, we will have done all new, you know, soups.
There are people in foreign aid who've been preaching this as well, but it hasn't
gotten far. Foreign aid is a complex area anyway, and I won't bring up today's
politics, but it's getting even worse.
The sort of thing I'm looking for is relatively small groups of people helping
themselves. And What I am concerned about is the scale because these are all small
projects and the world is filled with problems and we're a fairly small thing and
so I'm thinking we need a scale and there are several different ways of scale. One
is that we get bigger and bigger or we attack bigger and bigger problems. Well, I
don't want to do bigger and bigger problems because that requires a large company
and I would love to be able to help other companies develop the skills to do this.
That's not what our foundation is trying to do.
The way the way is, we get bigger and bigger, and so we launch more and more
projects all around the world, but that becomes, again, I'm afraid that if we get
very big, we become a bureaucracy. Because as you start having, If you have 20
workers, that's easy, but you have 50 or 100, that's harder,
and you get more than 100, you do not remember the names of all the people, and
then pretty soon you have to have some sort of managerial structure, and that's why
large companies often don't even know what all of the people in the company are
doing, it's very difficult. So the other way of scaling, I learned this from a
friend in India, Sanjay Perlhit, who runs a center called the Center for Exponential
Growth. So a good way to do exponential growth without these downfalls is like a
dandelion. I call it the dandelion model. One dandelion has hundreds of seeds,
maybe thousands, and they go off into the world and only a small percentage bloom
and become more, you know, new dandelions, but each data line that actually becomes
out, it has its number of seeds, and so it spreads. And before long, we have a
field of dandelions, and that's what, so education is like that. If I educate
people, or I reward early career people, and one of the things we're going to ask
them to do is to train others, I teach people, they go up and do good things,
but they also teach other people and those other people teach even more, that's how
you have a big impact. We aren't doing that yet. This is the year, we're only
several months into year two, but that's our dream. So let's talk explicitly about
some of the, those projects that you're working on and some of these programs so
that listeners will be, um, make sure that we find those. - Okay, but careful. I'm
not working on projects. - Gotcha, 'cause you're retired. - We're asking people to
say,
all you have to, here's the requirements. You have to be early in your career,
which means this can't be, you could do other projects like this, but no more than
two others. This is your third or so, first, second, or third approach. Second of
all, that's it. It has to Second of all, it has to be one of the projects that
is covered in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
They have 16 explicit goals, which cover almost anything you could think of for
societal issue. They actually have 17 goals, but the 17th goal is kind of what I
just explained, that These are such big issues that the only way that we can really
cover them is for all the groups together to band together. And so that's kind of
what we are doing, number 17. But these others will be one of the other 16, and
they have to use humanity -centered design principles. They don't have to have that
name. And they don't have to be designers. We don't care if they could be 70 years
old and still early in the career for this. And they don't have to be trained by
designers. They can learn enough to do good work. And in fact,
so last year we had a couple hundred applications and they came from 27 different
countries. And so we didn't say what they should be. And there are a lot of the
projects surprise us. And we didn't recognize that. And one of them was a podcast.
And I said to watch a podcast.
Well, because a podcast is informative, I hope this one is, but that didn't seem
like the kind of tool we were talking about. We are also supporting educational
institutions that teach people to do this thing. So that's what they said, we're
kind of an educational institution. And it's a weird podcast, it comes out of
Finland, but it's in Spanish. It's people from Spain. Well, not from Spain,
I think Argentina.
And to my great surprise, well, I have advisors from all around the world and
judges to judge the projects. And so one of them who lives in Switzerland, but they
had come from Argentina, say, "Yeah, we've been on the podcast and We highly
recommend that you listen to it, Don, and so I first read the proposal,
I rejected it. I said, "No, there's no way." And the next day,
I had the second thought and said, "Well, you know, I'm trying to be creative,
right? And if I get something doing something that's really that I never thought of,
don't throw it away. Look at it carefully." I went back and looked at it carefully,
And then the more I learned, the more we liked it. That's what they're really
doing. They're reaching a wonderful group of people. So let's make sure we mention
the names of things so that people who are listening can become a dandelion seed in
the broader scheme of things. So actually, the name is very simple because it's all
on our website and it's called the Don Norman Design award,
D -N -D -A. So the URL is d -n -d -a dot design.
So on the concept of failure, from teaching so many designers and design departments,
what have you learned about early career professionals and failure? The early career
people to realize that if they failed, "Well, yeah. These are hard problems." Even
the most experienced groups fail.
I've always thought the failure was a very important thing to do. I discovered in
India there's a conference they tried to run called the Failure Conference, but they
couldn't get the Indian government to come and they couldn't get big companies to
come. Why would they want to do something that says failures are good? I used to
run the research group at Apple, and so all the researchers, all the people who ran
research groups in the Silicon Valley, we would get together if you want to talk
about the common problems we faced. And the joke was that we tried to explain to
our management that most of the projects we're going to do fail.
You're lucky if 10 % are successful, and they would I'll say yes, we understand
that, but we don't want you to do the ones that fail. Only do the ones that
succeed. Yes.
Right. It doesn't work like, yeah, because failing is part of, it's learning. It's
an active learning. Besides, you don't know, obviously everything we're doing, we
think is going to succeed. That's why we're doing it. What are your thoughts on the
environment and what the solution about it would be? We are now destroy the
environment in many different ways in mining, and the solution is called the circular
economy. And the circular economy says we're going to reuse, we're going to make the
things last longer. And I say, but the objection to it is a good one,
that we make our money by selling products. And yes, the products only last two or
three years, actually. I won't tell anybody, but secretly that's on purpose. So,
we can sell, keep more products, and so, you're telling me that I have to last
longer and I'll go out of business. I understand it's good for the world, but it's
bad for the company, and I say, "There is a solution. It's called don't sell
products, sell services." Because all of your products are really a service. A camera
by itself is worthless, so the whole point about the camera camera, it captures
experiences, it's a service as providing. Everything that we sell is, when you think
about it, it's providing a service. And so, call this a service economy, but it is
true, you'll have to charge differently, and the way you pay usually is by a
subscription rate, and people don't like that. But it will turn out, it's not that
much more money. And let's think about your cell phones, your mobiles.
It already is being sold that way, except they don't tell you that. It used to be
in the old days when you wanted a telephone. You went to the telephone company and
said, "You wanted a telephone installed in your home." And they said, "This will be
so much dollars a month." And they came in and they installed the telephone,
including the telephone. And if anything went wrong, they'd come and fix it for you.
And You paid a monthly fee. Well, that was a monopoly in those days and that was
stopped and so that doesn't happen. You now have to buy your own set and all that,
but you don't... When you buy it, most people don't buy it by cash.
You trade in your old phone and then they charge you so many dollars a month,
which includes the service itself plus the phone and they don't divide up how much
is from which and which. And then every two years or so, they'll let you get a
new phone by where you traded in for the old phone. So leasing a car is the same
way. And so those are services. So the point is we already have this model.
And that's a way of changing the business model in a very effective way. And it
saves the planet at the same time.
- Wow, I hope that because there's an optimism buried in a lot of the, you know,
you had to get real in the book. You went through a lot of the doom and gloom
scenarios because that's the reality that we have to accept. But there's an
undercurrent of the optimism that this stuff is fundamentally changeable and
addressable and it's just a mentality thing at that point.
That's right. Don, this interview's been so good. Do you have any closing thoughts?
Well, first of all, it's clear we could talk for several hours more. It's hard to
say what's the closing thought, but the work that I've seen in this last year has
excited me more than anything else I've ever done in my career. It's been hard
work. It's been more than a full -time job time job, and it's hard for me to keep
up. But when I started seeing the applications come in, we just made it all
worthwhile. I started crying in some of them, because it was just so wonderful. And
done by people with little resources and little training, and I think,
and a lot of my design friends say they wish they could do this. But The major
thing stopping them is that it's money, actually.
It's not that they want to be wealthy, but they do want to be able to feed
themselves and live someplace and feed their family. It's very difficult to find
money for these activities, because it's not a profit -making activity, and that's how
companies sustain themselves. They do something of you would say sell, which gives
them enough money to keep going. And so the profit motive is a good one,
making a small enough profit to keep yourself going and paying everybody sensible
salaries is important. But when you're doing things for society, most of the people
you're working for don't have any money themselves, and it's very difficult to get
support from foundations or governments. But But I have hope and one of the things
I am trying to do is I'm talking to lots of the other groups that I have found
that are doing similar work and I'm trying to join up with them. And again,
we may be, we'll be a stronger, more powerful, if we don't remember,
we're going to keep our independence, but as a group, we can show that there's a
lot that can be done by small societies with relatively small amounts of money for
each of them. - I encourage everyone to get the book, Design for a Better World,
Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity -Centered. It's got lots of great examples of theory
on how to apply things. - And it's coming out in multiple languages at them point.
It's primarily the moment is Italian and in Taiwan, so it's complex characters in
China. Coming out with simplified characters from mainland China, it's in,
I lost track of all the countries that are translating it. Oh, Japan is one of
them. So thank you. This is, I enjoy talking to you. Thank you for joining me,
Don. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. So, to wrap things up, this
conversation was a rare chance to learn directly from one of the original architects
of design psychology. Don Norman reminds us that great design does not just emerge
from tools or trends. It comes from deep understanding, understanding of how people
see and attend to things, how they think and remember, how people make mistakes,
how they move through the world. We revisited ideas like affordance and constraints
and feedback loops, and how even the smallest design choices ripple outward into
larger systems of behavior and interaction. We stepped into bigger topics like how
human -centered design has helped us build better products with a central consideration
of the human in the system that's being designed. But how today's challenges demand
something even broader. Humanity -centered design calls on us to zoom out and to
think longer term and to consider our impact on people, communities,
and the planet. It was discussed in this interview and in Don's book, Design for a
Better World, that the problems we face in the world today didn't come out of
nowhere. They were designed by humans a long time ago,
in some cases decades ago and other cases centuries ago or millennia ago.
This includes things ranging from our energy industry, the religious ideas we pass
down to our children, or how our lives are ruled by clocks and calendars,
our idea of truth based on scientific precision. A whole countless range of things
could be added to this list. And in many cases, these things have flaws in the
ways they were initially conceived and in the ways they were designed. They may have
been designed with a narrow vision or based on assumptions that worked for the time
but have since become outdated, but the design itself hasn't been replaced yet.
The point here is not that all aspects of society are all wrong. The point is that
we created it, and therefore we can change it. We can redesign it.
Redesigning the world would certainly be a very multidisciplinary effort,
to say the least. And at least one of those disciplines would involve design
psychology. Imagine an expert design psychologist who sits as part of any given team
on a project to improve a community or the world and imagine that her job is to
provide the larger team around her with an understanding of what we would expect the
human to do in any given situation, how we would expect the human to think and to
feel or what they would need at any given moment in time. As the design
psychologist, she might draw on her knowledge of humans, or at other times,
she would lead a research team to pursue discovery on the specific psychological
questions they're working on. They might be questions like, what's the best way to
deliver this learning material? What's the best way for this interface to come
together? How should this small community of people handle this one particular social
need. And no matter how much our world becomes managed by artificial intelligence or
other technologies, as long as humans exist within a system, there will always be a
need to understand human psychology within that system. Correspondingly,
there will also be a need for someone or something to design for it. As design
psychologists, We are armed with science. We're also guided by empathy and social
awareness and a constantly growing understanding of what has and hasn't worked in the
past. We are well positioned to shape systems that serve not just function and
systems that care and not just operate. We have a lot of future impact to feel
good and excited about. It's a huge responsibility, and that responsibility gives us
the gift of purpose. So I ask you, in this moment,
to look at yourself as I truly and sincerely thank you, the listener of this
podcast, for joining me on this journey as the design psychologist.