Design Is a Sculpting of the Environment

Design is the science of the artificial, but what makes for good design? 

Everything designed is man-made, but not everything man-made is designed. There are ways to study and teach good design theory, but implementation and human use is needed to refine and inform the field to make things more efficient and intuitive. 

Donald A. Norman is a professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego, who has also taught at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is the founding Director of the Design Lab and was a member of the Nielsen Norman Group. Don is also the author of several books. His latest book on design, Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered, will be released in early 2023 and joins a large library of other notable books he has written on the subject, including The Design Of Everyday Things, Living with Complexity, and Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things among many others.

Don and Greg discuss Don’s work at Apple and how design thinking has evolved over time. They talk about what it means to think of design in human-centered or people-centered ways and how optimal design can be different depending on the user and the needs of the space. They talk about how design has spread from product design to service design to even business model design. Don recounts resistance to design thinking in his business school classes and why the students have difficulty reframing the way we all think of this essential element of the world.

Episode Quotes:

On the integration design doing and thinking

55:38: The problem was design thinking was good in the sense that it taught people that design is not just making it look pretty. It's much deeper than that. But it also made it look too easy because these courses were so much fun, and they say, "Oh, now I understand." No. In fact, the hard part is design doing not design thinking. And if you try to implement or do things, you discover your thinking wasn't complete. So you need to integrate doing and thinking.

23:15: Simplicity is in the head, not in the world. If you understand something, it's simple, and if you don't understand, then it's complicated.

The trade-off between costs and service quality

45:35: Most people who look at productivity and cost look at the short term. They don't look at the long term. And the long term includes, yes, everything is more efficient and faster, but you make and get errors along the way, and the cost of repairing the error more than makes up for all the savings.

The important component of humanity-center

20:25: Human-centered is an important component of humanity center. It's just that it isn't enough. We have to worry about climate change, the environment, the loss of species, the loss of natural habitats, and the way we've treated all the disadvantaged people in the world. And what does "disadvantage" mean? It means we've treated them badly.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Tesler’s Law | Laws of UX

Guest Profile:

• Professional Profile at Nielsen Norman Group
• Donald A. Norman’s Website 
• Donald A. Norman on LinkedIn
• Donald A. Norman on Twitter
• Donald A. Norman on TEDTalk

His Work:

• Donald A. Norman on Google Scholar
• Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered
• The Design Of Everyday Things Paperback – Illustrated
• Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
• Living with Complexity
• The Design of Future Things
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
• The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution
• Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions Of Automobiles

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