The Interfaces Interview: Donald Norman

CHANGES
In twenty years, much has changed in the world of design. Designing for people has become paramount, even if still neglected by many. Whether this is called “User-Centered,” “Human-Centered”, or even “Empathic Design” (favored by the business, marketing community), the emphasis on designing for the people who use the products or services, is finally taken as normal. It is still surprising, however, that appropriate procedures are still not widely known. Traditional marketing and engineering still dominate, so that featuritis and poor design still dominates. Nonetheless, our products and services have definitely improved: things are far better today than they were a decade or two ago.

TERMS (WORDS)
When words become popular, they lose their meaning. I certainly have found this to be true of the few words that I have coined or (in the case of affordance) introduced to the design community: Cognitive engineering, user-centered design, human-centered design, affordance, and user-experience.

All have become popular, all have radically changed their meaning so much so that I hesitate to employ them. User experience now means anything. Affordance, a term that describes what actions are possible by a person upon an object is so badly misused that I am trying to substitute “signifier” to indicate that what is important is the communicative power of the design. I have even heard the word “ethnography” used to describe any aspect of design or marketing that touches a real person – passing out surveys is now called ethnography. Shudder.

INPUT DEVICES
Long live the body, the physical world, reality. The world of computers led to an unfortunate diversion away from reality to the confining sterility of screens and keyboards, mice and other artificial animals. We lost touch with our bodies, lost touch with the real world. Cheers for the disappearance of this artificial emphasis on artificiality. We human beings have bodies. We evolved in a three-dimensional world with three-dimensional sounds, sights, objects and experiences. So hurrah for the return to the physical world, of gestures and touch, haptics. Of real objects, real movements. It’s about time.

THE CHALLENGES OF DESIGN
The real challenge of design is to become a sustainable, legitimate field. Today, it barely exists in academia. It resides primarily in art and architecture schools, and even in the few major universities that have design, the field is inside the humanities, or underneath architecture or art. Design needs to have a strong basis in science, with repeatable, verifiable results that can help sustain a cumulative body of knowledge. Instead, design is mainly a trade or an art, where instead of cumulative knowledge we have independent works. This is the challenge. To become accepted as a true discipline, it must have a firm, solid basis.

WHAT NEXT?
I wish to help establish a science of design: to help develop a sustainable set of design principles. This is what will occupy my time in the near future. As for the far future, I never predict. I only know what I am doing after I have finished doing it. And once I am finished, I am no longer interested: I am attracted by the areas that I do not understand, by the questions I cannot yet formulate. As for now, I am busy enough, living six months of the year at Northwestern University near Chicago, six months of the year in Silicon Valley, California, and two months of the year at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, S. Korea. Teaching, writing, consulting, serving on boards. What else? Who knows.



ABOUT DONALD NORMAN
Don Norman is the Breed Professor of Design at Northwestern University, cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, and former Vice President of Apple Computer. He serves on many advisory boards, including Encyclopedia Britannica and the Industrial Design department of KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology where he is Distinguished Visiting Professor. He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. He has honorary degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the Technical University Delft (the Netherlands). He is the author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” “Emotional Design,” and “The Design of Future Things.” He is now working on a book tentatively called “Sociable Design.” He lives at www.jnd.org.

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