Don Norman
Design for a Better World
In this episode of Brave UX, Don Norman shares what's important to him right now ⏰, why stupid questions matter 💡, what it means to design for a better world 🌍, and why he’s okay with changing his mind 🦉.
Highlights include:
- Why are our users not who we think they are?
- What needs to change and what can stay the same?
- Why did it take you so long to change your focus?
- Should change be incremental or wholesale?
- How does design dogma distract us?
Who is Don Norman, PhD?
Don is the Co-Founder and a member of the Executive Committee of Future of Design Education 🎓, where he is helping to shape a global effort that will provide an in-depth, evidence-driven, academic foundation for future generations of designers.
Back In 1998, Don Co-Founded the influential Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen 🖥️, from which he has also recently retired and was awarded the title of Principal Emeritus.
Prior to co-founding NNG, Don invested five years at Apple, starting in 1993 in the role of Apple Fellow, as a User Experience Architect - the first use of the phrase User Experience in a job title 😮 - before becoming the Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group.
Until December 2020, Don was the Founding Director of Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego 🏄♂️, an initiative he started in 2014 to focus on complex socio-technical issues . For his contribution he was honoured with the title Director Emeritus.
Don is a Board Member Emeritus of the Institute of Design, a former IDEO Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 🏆.
He has also spoken in boardrooms and on stages across the globe, and has written over a dozen books, of which 📙 “Design of Everyday Things” is his best known. But it his upcoming book, 📘 “Design for a Better World”, that, perhaps, he hopes will be of most consequence.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, brave UXers and welcome to this 100th episode of Brave UX and what better guests to celebrate this milestone with than Don Norman. Before we get to the episode though, just a quick update from me. It has been a great personal joy. It really has been a personal joy of mine to bring you these conversations every week with the best and brightest in UX, design and product management. We have certainly covered plenty of important ground together and I've learned more interesting and useful things than I could possibly count. I've also met many wonderful people and grown in ways that I could not have imagined when I pressed record for the first time back in October of 2020. However, as with all things, things change, making Brave UX hasn't come without its sacrifices and with some new things in my personal and professional life on the horizon, I have decided to take some time to reflect on whether the series will continue and if it does, what shape it will take.
- In the meantime, you will see some previous episodes of Brave UX in your podcast app, perhaps even one or two that you haven't heard before. While I get my ducks in a row, I really appreciate your patience. Speaking of appreciation, for those of you that have reached out to me over the years and let me know how much the series has meant to you, thank you. Podcasting is a funny one-way medium. So your words, your words of support and encouragement have made it all the more worthwhile. I'll be in touch.
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture.
- You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX, though it is my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Dr. Don Norman. Don is the Co-Founder and Member of the Executive Committee of Future of Design Education where he is helping to shape a global effort that will provide an in-depth evidence-driven academic fit foundation for future generations of designers. One that is fit for the mighty challenges of the 21st century. Until December, 2020, Don was the Founding Director of Design Lab at the University of California San Diego, an initiative he started in 2014 to focus on complex sociotechnical issues for his contribution. Upon his retirement, Don was honored with the title Director Emeritus of the UCSD Design Lab.
- Speaking of emeritus, in 1998, Don co-founded the influential Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen, from which he has also recently retired and was awarded the title of Principal Emeritus. But it doesn't end there. Don has been honored with the title Breed Professor of Design and EECS Emeritus from Northwestern University after his 14 years of leadership across a mixture of roles including as Breed Professor of Design, Co-Director of the Segal Design Institute and Co-Director of the Joint MBA and Masters of Engineering Management Program. He is also a Board Member Emeritus of the Institute of Design, a former IDEO Fellow, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has spoken in boardrooms and on stages across the globe and has written over a dozen books, of which design of everyday things is his best known.
- But it is his upcoming book Design for a Better World that perhaps he hopes will be of most consequence, I suppose I'll find out soon. For his valuable contributions, Don has received three honorary degrees, been awarded the Franklin Institute's Medal for Cognitive and Computer Science, and most recently, in October of 2021, received the Sir Misha Black Medal for distinguished services to design education. Jumping back to the nineties now. Prior to co-founding NNG Don invested five years at Apple starting in 1993 and the role of Apple Fellow as a User Experience Architect (the first use of the phrase 'user experience' in a job title) before becoming the vice president of the Advanced Technology Group. After Apple, Don became an executive at Hewlett Packard, for a brief moment in time. Don's work in design has been simply prolific and no doubt I'm at risk of leaving many of his achievements out, including his degrees in electrical engineering and PhD in mathematical psychology. So let me summarize by saying that if there was a prime in the field of user experience design, it would most likely be Don. Don, it's a real pleasure to welcome you to this 100th episode of Brave UX.
- Don Norman:
- Thank you. The list of all that stuff is first of all boring. And second of all, not important because I don't think that the degrees and the honors really matter. What really matters is what difference have I made in the world and from my experience, the most important things I've done have been coming from my students and my books. So basically, although I consider myself a design theorist and design thinker and all that sort of stuff, mainly I'm a design educator. But what I'm trying to do in this new book is say this is more important than design and designers ought to be more important than they are. Cause designers today are in the middle level of things. Even in the university, the design department or school is never considered the most important. Usually buried in the arts and humanities or maybe a part of visual arts, the art department and in companies it's always in the middle level of companies.
- Very few designers are at the C-suite, the chief design officer level. Very few large companies have such and almost never our designers asked to say, well, what should we be making? No, designers are the beck and call of their clients, their bosses, whatever. And that's gotta change. What I'm looking forward to is not my past. I'm looking forward to the future and as you point out, I have a new book, which all my old books, they're all about making design easy to use, easier to understand, and that is important, but it is not going to change the world. I said it's about time design changed the world. Problem is most designers aren't up to it yet. So we have to change how designers are educated and how designers think. By the way, any of you're a current designer and say what you mean, it's too late for me. No, it isn't. You can educate yourself. They take six months or a year or so, but we'll get into that. All yours, Brendan?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, you said many, many interesting and useful things there and there are definitely many directions that I could take things. I do want to come back to retirement. You know, said earlier on there that none of these achievements in these titles mean anything compared to the impact that you're seeking to have. And clearly the new book is what you are trying to encourage designers to think about now for our futures. But I do wanna come back to making multiple retirements cuz you don't seem to get the hang of what most people think of when they think retire. When people retire, they're supposed to actually go out into the sunset and enjoy playing golf. But that's definitely not the approach that you've been taking. And I was wondering, I was discover, I discovered in my research for today that you actually were born on the 25th of December and your next birthday, I believe you'll be 87 years old. And I wondered how much of the passion and the intent that you've brought to your work over your 60 year career, how much of that do you attribute to sharing a birthday with a divine being?
- Don Norman:
- How would I know? No, I attribute it to curiosity. I'm just curious about everything. And so throughout my life I've switched. I started off as a electrical engineer designing circuits. I got a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and then I really wanted to do computers and computers didn't really exist in those days or five in the world. And I went to the University of Pennsylvania because in the United States that's where the first computers were built, INAIC and the EDVAC. But they weren't, those weren't, people weren't there anymore. There was no computers computer. There was one big UNIVAC computer, which is one of these massive things you could walk inside of. It had 1000 words of memory and it was considered the most advanced computer of its time. They said I was in electrical engineering and I was alright, had a master's degree and I didn't wanna continue in engineering, I wanted to do computers.
- So, well if you stay around, maybe we'll start a computer department and you could be the first student. But just then they changed a psychology department and I heard a talk by the new head who was a physicist and he said, you don't know anything at all about psychology, do you? And I said, that's right. And he said, good. And he accepted me because we were changing psychology. So I learned at side of psychology and what I called human information processing. My first job was at Harvard when I was introduced to the faculty, the most famous psychologist of the 20th, 20th century B.F. Skinner stood up and denounced me, denounced me in my field because I was going to study the mind. And he said, you can't study the mind because you can't see it. And I wondered to myself, how does he think chemistry and physics manager?
- So anyway, I helped start a whole new field there and I brought information processing into psychology. I joined in year and then after Harvard, I joined the newly started university in San Diego, uc, San Diego. There were only about, I don't know, 50, 70 faculty members and I don't know, well no students had yet graduated and it is turned out now to be one of the top ranked universities in the world and [laugh] because what they did was they hired, they started with Nobel Prize winners, then they hired senior faculty and then they brought in first post-doctoral fellows. That means people who had already had their PhDs, that's not the same as it is in the UK countries or even Europe. And then they hired senior faculty a fast way to grow. But I soon got tired of psychology. I said, soon narrow. And so I said, we gotta bring in neuroscience and we have to bring in philosophy, we have to bring in social sciences and sociology and anthropology especially.
- And we need of course to bring in computer sciences and AI days. So that was cognitive science where we brought 'em all together. So I keep changing and growing and changing my mind and changing my field. And after a while I was too successful in psychology in cognitive science. And so I quit. Actually I took at early retirement, my first five retirement and I went up to Apple and became, as you said, an Apple fellow invented the term my group did, invented user experience and became head of advanced technology, which was wonderful. I had 200 people doing all sorts of exciting stuff, including things I didn't understand at all, which was wonderful for me cuz if I didn't understand it well okay, I want you to come and meet with me every week and tutor me until I do understand. I ended up testifying before Congress, the United States Congress to get the wifi band, the first wifi band, and testified before the Federal Communications Commission to get the high definition TV standards established.
- And we had projects all around the world. I went to India to look at some of our projects in healthcare. We had school systems around the world. It was fantastic. So that's what I like, like being exposed to so many fields. And after that I did various things but retired on now from every one of them. So I've retired five times, including twice from the University of California at San Diego. But the problem with normal retirement is people under the sunset and they have no more pressures and they die. But what do they do? So some people manage to find things to do. The normal thing is I on a new language or they travel or they visit friends and so on. But I happen to really enjoy my work. So the main thing, which I have a rule which I violated, but I make her rule, which is I still wanna do my work.
- I love it, I just don't wanna be in charge anymore. Well, as much as possible, that is what is happening. I am in charge partially of the future design education, but that's over with. It will be finished. We're hoping to finish the end of this year. We're now in writing the final report phase. We probably won't make it in on the target date, but it won't be close. So that's over with. I wrote my book, well that's over with sort of that is just today I finished the very, very last entity, it's a third or fourth time around. So edited the book. They gave me page proofs we edited the page proofs they gave me and corrected them and gave 'em to me another time and I corrected those. And so now I was just waiting for it to come out, which I'm sure would then keep me very busy.
- And we're also the world design capital, Diego Tijuana. The first time two countries and two cities have been anointed idea is the world design capital by the World Design Organization. So I am heavily involved in that, which is why I'm learning Spanish. Yeah, I keep busy learning new things, doing new things by the way, that makes me multi-dimensional. And one of the things I discovered is I take some elementary principle and information processing that the people in information processing, oh well yeah, everybody knows come into psychology and I introduce it and they say, oh you're brilliant. What a great insight. And then I take the principles from one field that I'm in and apply it to the other field. And the reason this happens is because university education is too, is wrong. It's siloed. We hire the best professors in their field and their best means they are very narrow and very deep doing cutting edge research.
- But they don't even know what neighbors are doing. They don't even know what people in their own department are doing. They are the world's best in this thing. What those are siloed and you get promoted by being the best but real in the world. If you're the world's expert at one small thing, you can can't accomplish anything. Build something, which is what design does, which is why I love design. Design actually builds things that make a difference in the world. You have to cut across all of the disciplines and that's not rewarded in university. That's a problem.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well Don, let's come to your early years in university. I understand that when you were at M I T in the 1950s. And let's talk about this notion of silos and the dangers of keeping knowledge in those silos. I understand as part of your electrical engineering undergrad, you hated studying philosophy and history and you suggested that at the time that you were studying that during undergrad, that you literally didn't learn a thing from it. And you said about this later when you were reflecting on this time, you said sometimes people aren't ready for knowledge. Now clearly you've since developed a deep appreciation for things like history and philosophy. What was it that changed for you?
- Don Norman:
- Ru odor.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about that.
- Don Norman:
- Oh well it sort of just happens [laugh] look, one of my whole philosophies about teaching is that people teach wrong. Because what professors always do is they say, whoa, you can't understand this topic. Do you have the fundamentals, the background? And they teach you the fundamentals in the background and nothing is more dull than the fundamentals and background cause you have no idea why you're learning it. So what I like to do when I teach is I, on day one, I give the people a problem to solve and they have to report on it like the next week and they report on it the next week and it's usually a disaster. They don't know what they're talking about or they got all screwed up. And that's on purpose. I do that on purpose because now I tell them, oh this group, you know, ought read page of this book that we've assigned or here's something else you ought to do, et cetera.
- In other words, I start giving them the background because now they're stuck and they discover that what I ask him to read or listen to is exactly what they need. And so when you're ready for something, you love it and you grasp it and it makes sense. So when you're not ready, the very same information doesn't work. A friend of mine, John Carroll, used to study manuals how computer manuals, he was working at IBM at the time. He said you would give them manuals to people and they were thumb through it and they'd say this is just information, I don't know what to do with it. And what he really argued with, you should write a manual that says, okay, we're introducing you to a new word processor. Back in those days, they were very, so we're not going to explain everything and tell you about all the things it does.
- We're going to say, here's how to write a letter or here's how to write a little manual and just, that's all you need just to get started. And then if you write and you say, oh that paragraph is so good, how do I change it? Oh well here we'll tell you just how to change the paragraph we give you. It's just in time knowledge. Well, when I was a young kid, I was a nerd. I wanted technology. That's all I cared about. And this philosophy stuff, history, why do I care about that? As I grew older, I began to realize that those philosophers had a lot of really intelligence, sensible things to teach me. And so I made friends with people in the philosophy department, [laugh] actually, it turns out right now that my brother is a PhD in philosophy and two of my grand my, what are they?
- I guess niece nephews have PhDs in philosophy and for history, the same thing. The history. I talk a lot about that in my new book in which I say there's a statement that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Well that's false history does not repeat itself. This sounds like an aside, but it's not. One thing I learned in m i t was what Lord Kelvin said, if you can't measure something, you don't understand it. And as a result, every goal people go around measuring everything that the social scientists measure, even things you can't measure, they measure it anyway. And even scientists can't measure. So they measure something that's related to what they care about and they name it by what they care about. And then they forget that it's not really measuring what they care about. They're measuring something that's related crazy.
- But what they forgot, what people forgot was that isn't what Lord Kelvin said. Lord Kelvin started by saying in the physical sciences, now here's one of the points. It has to do with path dependence or independence, which really means history. If I have a pen and I drop it, it falls. And if I drop it again it falls. And if I drop it and all it falls the same way each time, the laws of physics don't care if it was dropped before. The laws of physics are path independent. How it got to this particular state, how it got here doesn't matter. Well that's not true of people. If I pick you up in the air and drop you or you'll fall in a particular way. But if I try to do it again a second time, uhuh [laugh], it isn't going to happen that our history really matters. So it isn't that we repeat ourselves, but the way we think, what we believe, what we understand is based on the history of not just ourselves but the group that we grew up in, whether it's a religion or a country or tribe, whatever. So history becomes very, very important. And you have to look at many versions of history because who writes history? It's people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And history is playing out right now in a place that back in 2019 you spoke at and that is in Ukraine and you delivered your talk 21st century design at the Cooper Conference, which unfortunately this year and probably for the foreseeable future will not be happening as a result of Russia.
- Don Norman:
- Well it's surprising, just a week ago I gave a podcast to people in Kiev, [affirmative]. It was recorded, inky. And afterwards we talked a lot about the situation they're facing and they were incredibly upbeat and optimistic and how we don't have electricity. So we all bought generators and mm-hmm fuels to keep it going. And we use Sky link satellite for our internet and communications. Now they were optimistic I think cause they have no choice except to be optimistic. But it's a very sad story and I'm really hoping that that gets reversed.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- As am I. In your conference talk, you said some really very pro provocative in a good way and very meaningful things, one of which I'll quote you on now, you said, I've decided that I'm not going to continue practicing or writing about the design of consumer goods for two reasons. One, I've said everything I think I have to say. But second, I don't want to continue to destroy the environment and our world. So I'm going to start looking at important issues like hunger, education and health. Now at the time of that conference, you are around about 83 years old. And the question I'm about to ask you comes from a place of no judgment, just simply curiosity. Why did it take you so long to change your focus?
- Don Norman:
- A question I've asked myself. I think because I was too self-contained, I was in some sense siloed that the work that I've done about teaching people how to make things that are more usable and more understanding, it's important. And I was heavily involved in that. And I was also setting up a new design lab to see, to teach design differently. We actually have no formerly trained designers, the design lab, no, we have one person who used to be a design executive, but he wasn't trained in design. I wasn't trained in design. And so we're trying to do it differently. And among them is some of the students though who have taken this broader view of the world and the way that colonization has taken over. The explorers went out and looked at all the unoccupied lands and they claimed it for their country and the way, the reason they could call it unoccupied cause they were things there which they called savages, which gave him the right to do whatever they wish to do with the savages.
- And every occupied country has had that problem and the United States was occupied, right? Great Britain and then or whether England in those days. And we ourselves have become colonizers. And certainly you are in New Zealand and there's a history there whether you indigenous, but I was insensitive, insensitive to that at about that time the Black Lives Matter and the gender inequality that mattered and the Me Too Movement. And I realized that I should actually step up to it. I had to be educated. So it took me, that's why it took three plus years for me to write this book. Cause I had a lot of education. In addition while educating myself about the history I discu, I remembered an old book that I had read. It was written by Terry Winograd, Fernando Flores called Beyond Computers in Cognition. No, it was called Understanding Computers in Cognition.
- And so I talked, I read it again and I said, oh, now I understand this book. I've always known about the book and knew, but I never quite really knew what I should do with it. And I read it this time and it made a good sense. So I wrote to my good friend Terry Winograd said, Hey, this book ought be reprinted or reissued right now when people will understand his meaning. And so he talked to Flores, who used to be, he once upon a time was finance minister of Chile who was overthrown by the army. And so he spent years in prison and then he came to California, got a PhD in philosophy. And so he called me up and we started talking and I said, well Paul, what you're talking about, there's somebody I've been reading that you wanna read because it's almost the same thing that you're saying.
- And his name is Arturo Escobar. He wrote Design for the Pluriverse and Flores laughs and says, he was my student. So he decided that we should all get together weekly and discuss these issues. He said what we should do, they didn't wanna reissue the book, but maybe we could do a new book. But that was a very important educational. I have now three different kinds of points of view. And Arturo was particularly interesting. He does a lot of work and Columbia and Latin America and actually across the world. And his work has been very influential in the new movement looking at individual rights. And the whole point about the plural verse is that there are many different philosophies and cultures and people believe different things. And it's not though some are right and some are wrong, they're just different. And we have to make a world where that is allowed and encouraged.
- And all that was really important in my background. So I struggled with a book and I wrote a book called Four Maxims to Change the World. And it was wrong, it was wrong. So what I was able to do was to rethink what I was doing and restructure the material in that book in which I called designed for a better world. Basically a world that is meaningful, sustainable, and humanity centered. Those three things. The world has lots of problems and there are lots of people writing good books about all these problems, but almost none of them focus upon the individuals and the people. And the field of design is a perfect field. Cause first of all, designers don't have any content cuz design is not a method, not a body of knowledge, it's a body of methods. And one of our most important methods is that we're designing for other people, not for ourselves.
- And so we must understand the people we are designing for. And in fact, when we're going into a community, we shouldn't design for them. That's colonization. We shouldn't say, oh, we know what's best for you or do this, we should work with them. And they know what their problems are. So they're usually trying to solve it. And so we say, don't say, here's how you can help us. We say, how can we help you? Or at least that's what we should be doing. How can we help you? Or we can be your facilitator, we can bring in maybe be able to issue funds and facilitated resources that you, but all that took time to understand this and put it all together and go and look. And fortunately in my life, I've actually spent time in India, I've spent time in Latin America, I've been in Africa, I visited many countries and I've seen many, many disparate cultures. And I, sorry, you really put it together. And that's why in my forward of my book I say I wanted to do something that really impacted the world, but it takes advantage of, first of all, what is unique about what I can bring to the table is observations that are focus on human beings, but also a fairly broad knowledge of all the underlying technology. And I wanted to make it really touch the hearts of people. So I can keep going, but I'll let you ask the next question.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's pick up on this notion, you mentioned that the type of design, the way in which we would design for people as opposed to with them was colonial in its roots. And that is one of the more provocative things I feel that you have said in recent years. And I'll quote you again now, you said, if you design things the way I have taught you to design, that's acting pretty aggressively. That means you're a colonist. You go in and you send the design researchers in to study a society, to study people, to understand what their real needs are. And then we come back, we do ideation, we do prototypes, and we test and all that. And we come back and we tell the people, this is the solution to your problem. No, that is the wrong way to design. You mentioned that not that long ago as a result of Black Lives Matter, that you started to think differently about the ways in which you had been advocating for designers to interrogate, to make sense of and to create value for humans. Does it bother you? And again, this is out of the utmost respect and just out of curiosity, but does it bother you at all that there are now large parts of design and designers who operate in a way that you now feel is no longer appropriate?
- Don Norman:
- No. First of all, it's not their fault. And that's how I was right? And I still am to some extent, and I'll tell you why some of that old methods are still required. But mainly this is a whole new shift in everyone's point of view around the world that we have become so used to the way we grew up and the life place where we lived in and that we take as natural. In fact, I start my book by saying, I look out my window, that window right there in fact, and almost everything I see is artificial. Yeah, there's grass and there're animals, but the grass is artificial. It was planted. And actually I'm on the side of a steep hill, they call it a mountain which is really great for me. I get to exercise going up and down the hills, but it was, it's flat.
- My lawn is flat, which means they carefully artificially made it to be flat and artificially created the streets to go around artificially planted. We have lots of palm trees, big tall palm trees. They were planted there. They didn't grow naturally there. And I can see all the way down to the city of San Diego and there's a bunch of what's called Mission Bay. It's a bunch of water oak, big old water areas that's artificial. It used to be swampland and they turned it into a recreational area. And even in the distance, I can see the me, the mountains of Mexico. Well the mountains are real. But the way the people live in Mexico, which is reasonably different than how we live here, only it's within. I can see it. And I realize even the animals are obviously natural except we created the artificial habitat that allows them to live here.
- We have owls, we have coyotes, we just saw fox the other day. We have rabbits, we have lots and lots of different kinds of birds, et cetera. So gee, the more I thought about it that well, our lives are artificial. The history is artificial, was written by people who interpreted the events that happened. As we all know that even if you ask people immediately after an event, people who were there, they'll each give you different interpretations. So what about historians who come in hundreds or thousands of years later to try to write these? And the way we live, the way we are, we govern ourselves. The rules that we make, the laws, the notion of law are all artificial. And if they're led to the problem, which is modern capitalism and top-down government style, there isn't any democracy in the world that's following what we tend to think of as democratic principles.
- You can't, you can't, with a huge country. And even a small country is a huge country in terms of numbers of people. Hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions in a few cases, billions. You can't run it by a normal democracy. It has. But how it should be run it. Well, nobody knows what might be the best answer or you even a satisfactory answer. But if it were all, it's all been designed in the sense that it was created by people over thousands of years, not by professional designers, there was no such field. But if it was designed, maybe design can get us out of it. And I look at the problems and the most difficult problem today is human behavior. So now let's take a look at the traditional way that designers work. If we are making a product like a phone or even the computer systems that we're using the base, the basis of that are probably going to not change very much.
- When we are designing for lots of people, then the methods by which we design today are appropriate that I wouldn't change them. You can't ask people to design phones for themselves that just slight variation of that. There are groups that are redesigning the phones so that it is sustainable and less impact upon the world. So let me, I'll get to that in a second. But the basic principles are the same that we are designing for other people. And lots and lots of the stuff that we have designing for other people works. We're not unhappy with most of the kinds of stuff that we have. We're unhappy with if it's a fashion. So we're supposed to throw away our furniture every couple of years cause oh, it looks old. Or buy a new car every couple of years, even though the old one works fine, or buy a new computer or a phone, even though the old one works fine.
- But that's the business models now in order to make these wonderful, beautiful objects well you look at Apple computers, wonderful, beautiful objects. They're so small, so thin, so well polished. They've melded together different metals and different surfaces and different materials. You can't take them to apart easily. You very difficult to repair, weren't intended to be repaired. They're filled with exotic, wonderful recyclable materials and principle, but not in fact because it's too difficult to separate them. And so first of all, we destroy the environment in mining to get the materials. We destroy the environment in manufacturing as we spit out fumes and pollutants to the water, to the land, to the air. We destroy the environment as we ship it across the world. We destroy the environment in usage, we destroy the environment when it's all over with and we don't know, don't know what to do with it.
- And it goes into big trash piles of electronics. I've seen it in India where they're just burning because the batteries heat up and cause fire. And so it's big electronics and that's crazy. So designers have to design differently and there are ways of doing it. It's called the circular economy. We try to make things reusable so that we eventually should have no waste. That means we have to design differently. But I can't. So back in 1971, pap said there is no field more dangerous than design. Actually he said industrial design, but that was what the main field was today I would say design. Well, he was wrong. And here's why he was wrong. He was blaming the designers. And it's not the designers' fault that they build what they build. The fault is the designers are the middle level of a company and they have no choice. You can't tell the company, I won't design this because it's destroying the environment. You can tell them that, but you'll be fired. So what I wanna do is I present them with the alternatives, a way that you can convince your company. Cause I have a rule, don't criticize unless you have the answer. And so there are answers to these issues, but that's why I don't, I'm not upset about what current designers are doing. It isn't really their fault.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The nature of the challenges in particular around climate that you've been touching on there around creating a more sustainable circular economy. Just the pure scale and the strength of the status quo that exists when trying to exert new force on these systems. It's a, it's immense, right? It's sort of really large challenge. Now you've said, and I'll quote you again now, you've said we need to change how the world operates. We need to design sustainable systems and where designers done for and by everything, not just the few, but with sustainability and equity being the goals. So something that I have observed is that designers can sometimes fall in love with the future state. So much so that they neglect to acknowledge what might be working in the here and now. So I was interested in your perspective on how you think about, if at all, the tension that exists between conserving what we currently have and changing what needs to be changed as it relates to wicked problems like this that we've been talking about.
- Don Norman:
- I think the important parts of our lives can remain much the same as they are today. There are some people whose lives I would like to change dramatically. That's basically the people who very wealthy, who flaunt their wealth and do it in extravagant ways spending huge amounts of money in buying huge things that are really destructive in many ways. But for the average person the rest of the world, I don't think the lies have to change much. In fact, I would hope they would change for the better. But the things we build will change. And I think that are requirements to always be up to date with everything. No, if I buy something, if I furnish my house in a way that's comfortable and usable, why do I ever have to? But the companies have to behave differently and have to be more make things that are more sustainable.
- You can do that and still make similar products to what you're doing. Now there's some business model issues that companies do have to make money or else they go out of business. You have to make, shouldn't have to make enormous amounts of money. Kinds of billions of dollars of profit the companies make today is obscene. But you do have to have enough so that you can buy new equipment hire new people when necessary, pay the salaries of people. So you need a business model. And if we make well most, a lot of our products are made not to last because if I sell you a product and it lasts for your lifetime, then well gee, how do I save business?
- So what is happening is we're starting to move to services that I will sell you services that work well. And so yes, you'll be paying a subscription price, but it should have to be a reasonable and a fair one and will not amount to more money than you're spending now by buying the products will be maybe in smaller amounts but over a larger period. But the service model could work, but that doesn't change your life. It changes a company's way of structuring this business and they have to work harder to keep you happy because you're continually getting service from them. But it doesn't change your life necessarily in a major way. That's what I'm hoping for. Now, some things in life probably order change, but that's already, that's the way the political system works. That's really a political issue and it's the way for governments to maybe change and modify the way they govern. But every major company country, every major country in the world is actually continually tinkering with the way the citizens and the government itself interacts and works.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if we're to create an economy that is more circular, if companies are to either voluntarily accept or through Im position, except a new model of creating products and services, one that doesn't rely on fast fashion, fast food, fast, whatever. It sounds to me like there's going to have to be a fairly significant shift that happens in the way in which society's designed. I mean, this doesn't sound to me like an incremental approach is going to be satisfactory here. And I'm curious about this particular aspect in your perspective on it, because I heard you describe in a previous talk project that got a lot of praise in London, which was to do with the redesign of the way in which the ambulance service operated in London. But the project actually never came to fruition. And about this, you said that no matter what the solution, if it costs a lot of money, there are people who think we should spend it elsewhere.
- And if it's going to help a lot of people, it will also hurt some people. So what you should do is you should think about the solution and then you should wait for the opportunity, a small opportunity to do a small step and you'll learn from that. So on one hand it sounds like you're, you acknowledge the grave challenges that face humanity in the 21st century and the scale of those challenges. And on the other hand, there's this acknowledgement at least that there are some practical realities about what people are willing to accept when it comes to those types of changes. And I'm just interested in that possible tension that exists between holding those two things in one's mind at the same time
- Don Norman:
- As I point out in my book and which is interesting, all the other books that say how we can get rid of all the problems today, mostly our technological books, which they tell us all the wonderful technologies. And they often explicitly say, we're not going to worry about the politics. That's not what, but the issues are really political ones. The most important issues are political. And we can't avoid the politics. It's what politics should do. Because when you have to balance the rights of one group of people against the rights of another group of people or the rights of society against the rights of, that's a political issue and it should be decided by politics. One thing I've pointed out is that in the recent crises that we've had with our covid virus, people say, some people say, we should listen to what the scientists tell us and do what they say.
- And I say, no we shouldn't. We should listen to the scientists, absolutely. But in fact, we have conflicted goals here. One of them is to keep people's lives sensible, to keep them learning and keep them have employed, keep the economy going. And the other is the safety from the virus. So what the scientists say is that the best way to prevent the virus is to not let anybody who's caught or anything out of doors. Well that's what China does and it's been a disaster for China for their people. And if we don't isolate the people though, then we get what other proper cities have had the infection spreads and death rates go way up and the hospitals become so crowded and overworked that the physicians and the nurses and the medical people suffer from overworked. So a has to be a balance, but that's a political issue and it shouldn't be decided by a single field.
- It requires, yes, the advice of politicians, but yes, the advice of economists and yes, the advice of people who understand what people's lives are about. So first of all, the hardest problem is human behavior. And they are difficult, absolutely. But I believe that if we have to start now, because we'll get, it will take 10 or 20 years before we have significant change. But over a period of a decade or two, people's behaviors do change. One of the problems I also point out is that people there, there's several different problems. One is people, when there's a big calamity, people are actually really good at dropping everything and going into help, but they're not good at working to prevent the calamity in the first place. But that's also a common of your thing. We only react to things that we can see and understand. And one problem with the virus is you can't see and understand it.
- And the other problem with it's going to come back again, but I can't see anything or we have to be careful about the storms and the floods and the so on, but don't, there's nothing to respond to. So one thing I've been saying lately is the bad part about climate is that the problems are here already. They're causing floods and rainfall and drought and fires and windstorms and horrible difficulties. Good news is the change is already here and it's causing all sorts of difficulties in fires and droughts and floods and so on. So people are starting to take it seriously. And so yes, it's going to take a long time, but take the ambulance problem, you start it with, the problem was people didn't want the ambulances all throughout the city. They thought it would be really to great noise. And it was also difficult for the people who worked with the ambulances.
- But you know what, there's already an example of a service that does locate where the difficulties will be. It's called the fire service. We don't have one fire station in the middle of the town and then it has to rush all over the place to get to the fire. We put them scattered around so that when there's a fire they can get there, click quickly. So actually a lot of the paramedics, at least in the United States located, are located in the fire station. And that's basically what was, we were tried, what was being tried in London. I don't know the details, I wasn't there at the time. I just heard the story later on. Mayor loved it and other people loved it. But the people who lived there say, well, there's a name for it, not in my backyard. What you're trying to do is wonderful and I really like it, but you don't locate it here, please located. And almost always when you do that, where does it get located? It gets located where the people are poor and have no political power, and they're the ones who often suffer from all this utility and infrastructure being put where they are, which doesn't solve the real problem because it doesn't distribute it to the city, which is what is needed. And it also degrades the lives of the poor. Yeah, it's not, look, everything I talk about in my book is a difficult problem because if it weren't difficult, it wouldn't be a problem today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about the difficulty of these problems. And I know we are talking fairly high level here and I think it, it's almost necessary to keep this part of our conversation at this level because the complexity of the problems actually lead us to speak at this level. In these complex systems, there are more than one feedback loop. And these feedback loops often take some time to work themself back to a way in which you can understand whether the changes that you're making in one part of a system are actually leading to the outcomes that you'd hope for. And one example where this didn't perhaps go as intended was during the Covid pandemic where lots of central banks started printing effectively lots of money to try and see us through this period, but then it's had this inflationary effect or it's contributed to the inflation that we are now seeing play out in most of the world's economies. So from a design perspective, from the designers, the new designers of the 21st century that will have to wrestle with some of these issues in conjunction with their colleagues in economics or whatever other discipline may be useful to help solve them. How do we design or how do we understand what to design or where to design or who to design for in these systems that are in some cases global and of increasing levels of complexity as our world grows and develops?
- Don Norman:
- This is where the notion of incremental design is essential because there's a lot of people who worry about exactly the issues you talk about, and they usually develop all sorts of models so they can predict, they can see what the impact will be beforehand. But the models are faulty. It's not nobody's fault. It's that the model has to include basically everything that happens on earth. And that's simply not possible. You try to have the major factors that happen on earth, but even that's not quite possible because sometimes we don't know what all the major ones are, include ones that are minor and we miss ones that are major because they aren't necessarily visible or they happen once every thousand years. So we don't put it in. But the problem with things that happen once every thousand years is they do happen, as I like to point out, we have to be ready for unexpected events, but we don't know much.
- Here's what we know about unexpected events is that first of all, they happen. And second of all, when they do happen, they're unexpected and that doesn't help in the model. And finally, the models are all simplified. They have to be simplified because the mathematics that we use and the tools that we use require simplification. So I believe firmly that we try to understand the big problem. We try to model it as much as we can, but then we're very careful about doing small incremental tests. So that's part of the design philosophy is that when we design for people designing four people in the traditional way that I've been teaching and others, we don't understand people very well. So the best way to do it is do your best job and do a prototype. And I believe making it out of paper or a cardboard to start with, but slowly enhancing it, but trying it out with the people.
- And so as you do that, you learn what works and what doesn't work. And ideally we, I'd love to get rid of mass manufacturing where they make one product for millions of people, but rather make one platform for millions or billions of people, but that can be tailored to fit the particular needs of the group that is using it. But again, through incremental improvements in enhancements. So you have to do it in a small way. Now that's difficult to do in this world because politicians, it's, it's really hard to be a politician because you're faced every day with a huge motor, multitude of problems. And let's ignore the politicians who are just basically ignorant or elected because of the charisma. But the ones, a large number of politicians are very serious, are trying their best and are often quite expert in some fields. But the problem is you can't be expert in all the fields.
- So you have to rely upon a good staff. And so I always judge the quality of a politician by the quality of their staff. But even there, they're going to still be, the issues are too difficult to have an answer beforehand. But usually they only get one chance to do something for a problem. And they like to see these great big, wonderful, big projects that say, we'll solve the problem and just give us a huge amount of money and give us 10 years. And they do that. And now we can mow to some other problem. And that almost forces the people to do these big projects. And I wish they might say, here's a lot of money, but I don't want you to spend it right away. I want you to do all sorts of small projects. And as so you're modifying what you're doing as you go along. It's really hard to get that through today's political systems, any political system. I don't know of a single political system that would allow you to work them. And it's understandable too, by the way. But as a result, we take these big projects that cost tens of billions of dollars rose, they don't work, most of them fail.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't wanna set up a semantic argument here. This is not what I'm trying to do. But as design, the word design, is this the right word to use to describe the activity or the actions that are needed to address these issues? Does the word design come with too narrower focus or too much baggage to really communicate what the nature of this task is?
- Don Norman:
- It's amazing how many different people that I know who are good friends, who we all agree that the wrong word is designed, it has the wrong implications. People think it means one thing, and we are actually trying to do something that's quite different, but we can't think of a better word. Hey, don't avoid getting into an argument. That's where I believe in arguments among people who are trying to reach a better solution. And it so much as, not so much as an argument, as a disagreement about methods. And so it should be a discussion, a collaborative discussion where we may disagree, but if I understand why you're disagreeing, that may inform me. And my goal is not to win the argument. My goal is to learn so we create a better
- Brendan Jarvis:
- World. I suppose it was less of an argument that I was hoping for and it was probably more of a stupid question, an intentional stupid question, which I know that you have a perspective on stupid questions as well in their role in design. Let's come to something that you've just made me recall now, which is the role of provocation or critique or argument in design in particular in design education. And you've said something else that I thought was really useful and really interesting and really provocative, which was the way it's done today in design thinking is everybody comes out feeling happy and wonderful. I don't care if they come up feeling happy and wonderful, I care that they come out with a wonderful idea. So is the problem with design thinking perhaps in the enterprise environment and also or also in the educational, higher educational environment, is the problem with the way that we are doing it, our students egos today, are our egos in general more front and se center and more fragile when it comes to the discussion around an idea than they were say a decade ago or two decades ago?
- Don Norman:
- No, I don't think so. I think that first of all, the word design thinking, the phrase design thinking has been distorted in recent years. Designers have long talked about their methods of design thinking. And it's only recently though that well, to be precise, the D school at Stanford said, Hey, here's a couple of fundamental principles that we use when we do things at the company id. And they call that design thinking, but actually it's only a shallow part and not so much an essential part of how designers work. And I know the people at ideo, I'm friends with the founders and fellow for a while, let me tell you what they're talking about is not even how they work. So even in my book, I talk about the need or my design method is you first figure out what the problem is and make sure you're solving the right problem, and then only do you start trying to look at results, et cetera, et cetera.
- And I, the more I thought about that and the more I looked at real designers and even thought about how I do things, sometimes the first thing I do is I make a solution. Mm-hmm. Exactly the opposite of what we recommend. And we say, we don't do that because you can get stuck with your solution and then not, the first thing that comes to mind is not at all probably what ought to be. What is good about coming to the solution immediately is if you say, I know this is wrong, but let me build this well enough so that you can evaluate it. Because what that will do is I give it to people who I'm intending it for. I will get such good feedback, I'll now know what questions they ask and what questions. And so this thing that I built first I'm going to throw away, but it's, if you will, it's thinking by designing, I'm reversing.
- I design something and that gives me a prompt, which allows much better feedback than if I simply go in and observe a lot and try to imagine what the real issues are. So what I think design thinking is richer than the normal, than unfortunately, we now have lots of people who go around and teach seminars and design thinking. And it's always the fun part of design fun part is coming up with ideas. But you know what? The hard part is actually implementing them and making them work and making sure they actually deliver on what they promise and that isn't covered in these normal one week seminars or even weekend seminar. The hard part is making it happen. And actually even in our design schools, we often don't do that. The designers lead with their sketches and with their plans and then they turn it over to engineering and then they complain that engineers ruined him. No, they have to be part of the entire building and construction and delivery.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Dawn, this is a leading question and of course disagree with me as I know you will if it's not quite what you have in mind. But when you think about your own design practice, you think about all the world-class designers that you are in contact with and that you've come across over your time. Is it this ability to tear down one's own idea or be willing to have one's own idea to torn down, to actually iterate, not just gloss over that part of design? Is this the thing that separates the designers who have the most impact in the world from the ones that merely wish they had?
- Don Norman:
- I think so. In fact, I, a complaint I have when I go to academic conferences on design, they're really dough, a lot of them and a lot of the stuff is just not very practical. If I go to the practitioner's conference, I don't learn anything because here's what I want the practitioner to say, I have given this charge and here is how I approached it and here's what I did. And it was completely wrong and I had to step back and rethink it. I finally did this and that turned out not to work and I finally did this model and everybody liked it, but when we applied it, it was a disaster. So I backed up and I rethought it being David Kelly, the guy who started I D O and the school, one of the things he showed me was a telephone that he had designed.
- He was very proud of it. He said, isn't this beautiful and wonderful? And you know what, it's a disaster. It's hard to use it. It never made it. It was sold for a product for a while, but it was just a bad phone. And why is he proud of that? Because he's admitting we all make errors and we learn from them. But when you go to a design conference, that's not what they do. They say, I built this. And they show a slide. It was beautiful thing. And they say, and I did this and then and I did that and I did this. Well, all right, that looks pretty, but how do I know if it really works or what it is? But I wanna learn how you did it, what caused you. And so designers don't tend to do that. And again, a lot of the critiques that happen in design schools are opinions by the master and students don't get a chance to debate them and argue them.
- I would like to see it as more collaborative. And I would also like to see less emphasis on the individual work of students. Because in the world, almost nothing is designed by individual. It takes a team and you have to learn to work with other teammates. And some of the schools say, oh yeah, we put our designers together in teams. But no, they're teams of their fellow students in the same discipline. You have to learn to work with people from the business school and from engineering and sometimes from the political science department and so on. And those are where you have the trouble where the MBA say we're in charge and the engineers say, well you can't do it without us. Our ideas are best and the designers are open left. Where am I? And no. So I still remember my fondest times at Apple when we managed to get the user experience team to be equally treated with the engineering team, which was all programming in those days and the marketing team.
- So when you started a project, you had to have three briefs, usability team, the engineering team and the marketing team. And the executives would not rule unless they got all three and they were satisfactory and they could be modified. But what was really neat is I could go in the middle of the night and see them at work and I wouldn't know which disciplines they represented. They were working together and they would simply pitch into whatever part of the problem they had some ability to work on. So I didn't know which who in my group had PhDs and who didn't. I didn't know whether they were marketing, whether they were this or that or the other. And that's the way I want people to work. The PhD degree or the master's degree you have, nah, that's the way of getting started. But once you, who cares? Once you're working, I care about what you can actually do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You can understand why people often struggle with this cause and you're an educator, so you would know this more intimately than I do. But if I just reflect on my own educational history, the thing we're optimizing for is the right answer. And that almost ignores the process of actually demonstrating the thinking or engaging in the collaboration that is required to get an answer that isn't necessarily the right answer, but an answer that is good enough for the challenge. That's to hand. So I'm interested to,
- Don Norman:
- There is no right answer. That's the point. The kind of work that we do there is first of all, even if there is a right answer, we don't have to get it. Scientists love that the right answer, they want precision and we borrow the scientific method in doing practice. And that's wrong cuz we need something that's good enough. They do statistics to look for small differences. We should do statistics too. We don't wanna have to have biases implant, but we're looking for something that makes a difference like an order of magnitude, which means the statistics can be much simpler and we can be off. We don't have to be the best because mostly when you posted is a big region where the stuff is good enough. You're right. And I really think people have to be trained to work in groups and to be effective, but academic celebrate rewarded for that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You've spoken about the incentives in academia are always around the publication and high impact journals which are often, well your
- Don Norman:
- Name is first.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yep. I mean my wife's an academic, she's got both a PhD and she's a medical doctor and so she's contributed to a number of papers in her time. And you're right, it's not so much always about the value of the research that's being done and there's a underlying political system that exists behind the journals. And even more broadly, when we are thinking about not just in academia now, but in our systems, this optimizing for the right answer, it leads to some interesting human behavior which is a hiding from the risk or trying to avoid the risk of being seen to be wrong. And coming to stupid questions now, which I touched on earlier, which is actually something that you touched on in a number of your talks. You acknowledge that there's very real risk that exists in our current systems, in our social systems of who gets to eat the cookie in being seen to be asking stupid questions. But there's real value in those questions. So I'm curious to know through your observations throughout the years, what is it that the people who are most successful at asking stupid questions of which maybe you are one of them with intent, are doing that mitigate or manage that perceived risk of being seen to just be Provo provocative without cause or actually just being stupid? How can people be more effective in asking these kinds of questions that lead to unthought of factors?
- Don Norman:
- Well, if you're asking the wrong person, because my colleagues are not always supportive of the comments I make to a lecturer and the comments cuz I tell them what I think and that's not how you're supposed to do it. You [laugh] start off by saying how wonderful the work is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I wonder if you could tin of this, and I leave out the first part, but the reason I say the stupid questions, it's usually somebody who's new and doesn't understand the field and so they don't understand what you're going about. And they usually ask questions to get at [laugh]. A stupid question. Sometimes it's stupid, but that's okay. And what does stupid mean mean? Well if you would've thought a little bit harder, you wouldn't have had to add it, ask him or something. Most of the time the stupid question is asking about why we're doing it this way.
- And sometimes people will tell you a reason and then you say, well I don't understand for that reason. And then which you get to the some point where they say, well, we've always done it that way. And I always like to say when somebody says, we've always done it that way, aha, maybe we can change the way you're doing it and if you can change the way you're doing it, maybe all the other problems disappear. So a stupid question often gets at the fundamentals. And the reason people say it's stupid is they answer, everybody in the audience says, ah, everybody knows that. Well yeah, that doesn't mean it's right. And so one thing I try to do is I try to ask stupid questions, but in part to demonstrate to the audience that if I'm wrong or if I ask a silly question, also I try to teach my students and people that, well here's what I say.
- If I give a talk or give a presentation or something or a paper. And if you come up and say, oh that's really wonderful, well that's nice to hear, but I don't learn anything. If you say you are wrong and you have a reason for it and you debate it with me, I like that because first of all, if I'm wrong, I want to know because I don't wanna keep being wrong. So I love it when you've prudent that I'm wrong and sometimes no, I disagree. I think I'm right. But nonetheless, that cell teaches me something because if you think I'm wrong and I think I'm right, it means I'm not explaining well whatever about. And so I've learned something from that. And the other thing I do is I often, I know that when somebody uses acronyms or strange terms, that much of the audience is not going to understand it.
- And every so often I hear terms I don't understand. And so I interrupt and I say, excuse me, but what does F O I T P mean? Or [laugh], what does this word mean? And everybody thinks I'm interrupting. But afterwards all sorts of people come up to me and say, oh, thank you. I didn't know what that was. So the problem is we value being correct and being clever and that's the wrong value. The wrong right value is are we reaching, are we creating and wonderful things? Are we changing the world in a positive way? And if we make missteps along the way, yeah, do we recognize it? And then modify politicians by the way, are not allowed to change their mind, which I think is one of the stupidest things because if the politician changes their mind, then the public says, oh, you don't know.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In the political realm, changing your mind is seen as being wishy-washy. And I would like to think, and probably any other pursuit in life, if you change your mind and you've got a good reason for doing so, that's probably more likely something like learning has happened. And why on earth would you stay with an opinion or a perspective? And I know people do this all the time and I'm sure I've got plenty of these in my own person. Stay with a position that you've since found out is not correct or is not as correct as another position. I don't understand. Don, let's come to something else that you said earlier on in our conversation and that's around the business side of design where designers find themselves and the hierarchy of these organizations, the limits of power that places on design and designers as a result.
- I wanna start with something else that you've said that I felt was fairly provocative. It certainly made me sit up straight and I'm sure it got a bit of a reaction online actually. And then post that of yours that I'd read. And I just wanna touch on this, and that's your suggestion, that our users are not who we think they are. The people who use our products that we design, they are instead our bosses or our bosses boss. And I think when I was looking at the post that you've made about this and reading some of the comments, people heard what you were saying but didn't fully understand what you meant or maybe they didn't want to. So what did you mean by that?
- Don Norman:
- Actually a lot of the comments were positive, say, arise about time. Someone said that. And the real problem is what I, what I want to say is more complex in that simple statement, in the very short posts, that was a LinkedIn debate. So doesn't give you much time to explain because it assumed, like I was saying, we should design for our bosses and not for the people who use the product, which is not what I'm trying to say. We have a large number of people that are, that's important for this design. If you wanna be successful in the company, you have to make sure that you bosses are understand what you're doing. And so you have to design for them or explain what you're doing in the language they understand. Maybe that's a better way of putting it. It isn't so much that you design for them, but you make sure they understand in their language and their language tends to be spreadsheets.
- It has to be, is this a successful product because we can't afford to lose money? Cause then we may have to let the design group go or something or I may lose my own job. And so that's the point. We have to be sensitive to where we are and if you like, who's paying our salary. And it's not that you should be slaves of that, and it's not about money, but it's about having a company. Let's take the most positive company we can imagine just that is trying to do good products and do good for the world, nonetheless, it has to be successful or it won't last. And so you have to worry about the people who, the people higher up or the people who are not so concerned with your individual products, but rather with what makes the company successful. So what you have to do is learn that and try to help them.
- And sometimes that may mean even saying that, well the design group really wants to do this, but we shouldn't. That's not the right thing for the company today. And one thing that happens is for a person who takes this broad view is the person who gets promoted to management and that's where they have more power. I want more designers up in management, not because they'll always support design, but they'll support what's best for the company. And then what's best for the company, by the way, is what is best for the users, the people who buy and use their stuff. But by having a design background, that also means bringing in design methods to the governance. Cause I believe design's a way of thinking that can be applied to anything. Eventually it will benefit the design group as well. But actually good managers, good high level executives do not try to favor one group over
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Another. I know that we both know Matthew Holloway, who would be one person who I can think of who is in a role at a large organization to introduce those methods at sap when he was doing that. And I also had a recent conversation with Mauro Porcini who's the chief design officer at PepsiCo. And you've suggested what you've been saying there that before design can have, designers can have more influence and positive influence on the people that we are making things for humans, other humans, that we need to see more people in that C-suite. We need to have more designers that get there. So how do we make, if that's the right way of framing this, how do we make more of the moral pacini of this world? How do we do that?
- Don Norman:
- Yeah, Porcini is interesting cause he's chief designer officer at Pepsi. So he actually has the ear of the people who make the major decisions or more accurately, he's one of the people who make the major decisions. And you say, well, a designer of Pepsi, what is earth is he doing? But it turns out he's doing a lot of things in the sustainability area to try to make sure that the way that Pepsi works is more sustainable for the environment. And yet within not harming the saleability of Pepsi's products, you have to balance that. Well, we need to designers who are, stop being a zealot for design and start being more broadly based and more broadly informed. And that's the people that end up being and then in the top levels of a company. And it's not just your education, maybe it's your self education because look, who is it the company, most of them SAR is pretty narrow and they can start off, they can have any background, they can have better background in literature.
- And now they're the head of a technology company because they have this broad background that allowed them to do better than the person who was the expert at the technology but didn't understand the world. But you can train yourself, you can learn yourself. When I was at Apple, for example, we had a really good person working in my division and one day he came to me and said he wanted to leave and I Why would you do that? He said, because actually I'd like to have a higher role in the company. And so what I'd like to do is go to a different division and then after that, go to yet another division and learn more about the way the company works. And yes, that's exactly what we need in people who have that realize that whatever work you do is only one part of a large system. And if you wanna help direct the system, you better start to understand the system.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's pick up on that notion of the bigger system and zoom out of individual companies at the moment and think about markets, it's pretty common knowledge that publicly traded companies, the ones that are on the Dow for example, have to report quarterly on their performance. So they have responsibilities and accountabilities to the market, to their shareholders to inform them what the health of the company is like and what they think about the prospects for the future they have in doing that to keep Wall Street happy. Now, this is tightly tied to the way in which executives are incentivized to their bonus structure. And as a result of this, we see often critic, critic, they're often criticized for short-term thinking which is easy to understand why. And if all the incentives are aligned around the short term, then what are you going to get? You're going to get short-term thinking. So do you think that given the wider market economics that impact individual companies, that if we had a chief design officer in every company of note that is publicly traded, that we would actually see a meaningful change in the way in which companies interact with their broader environment?
- Don Norman:
- No, because if they stay within the existing system and you can get promoter drop up, you have different change the system. We have to change the system. We had to change the reward structure. So there's something that in the United States is called Type B corporation, where I think one of the evils was Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who said that a company owes its allegiance to its owners. In other words, it's shareholders, not to its employees, not to the people it's making products for, not to the community in which it's based. That I think is horrible. Fortunately, that has there are many companies now who are specifically saying, no, we are not going to operate that way anymore. We're going to support our community, we're going to support our employees. That's one thing. The company Patagonia is interesting too. Cause it just decided to give, its the company's now owned by its customers basically.
- And it's been a very successful sporting goods company. It's not one of the largest companies in the world. But why do you have to be large? I think a lot of these companies are much, much, much too large. They ought to be cut back into a whole bunch of smaller companies, which adds to competition, which actually adds to creativity and also makes for a better life because you can't manage a million people, you can manage 20. But these issues have been going on for a long time. One of the people I quote is Jesus who said, throw out the moneymakers. And the moneymakers were basically the money changers, the early Wall Street people. So I think that the, yes, we'd sometimes need cash in order to get something started and so on, but the economics and the cash are starting to rule life. And so what the problem with the Wall streets and the financial markets around the world is that they only are interested in this abstraction called money Optimize Money, money, money.
- No matter what the cost when I was at Apple was amazing that people would come to me and say, apple is worth a lot more money if you took it apart and did the individual parts, which the total of values of them was much greater than the value of the company. And I just was amazed by those comments that no, I mean first of all, it just offended me. So I didn't even know how to respond in economic terms, but I now know how. But it just offended me that they would destroy the company for the sake of the money. And the whole point was that you can't take it apart and still have it be effective. So actually the values of the individual parts were, because they were part of this whole, so that's the economic argument, but worse, they weren't even thinking about what good the company might be doing and the quality of their products and how it was the only company at the time that really made computers that we could understand and use. No, it was, we took it apart. Look at it all because look, the software section would be this price and this the hardware and this group and that group. Crazy. So you're absolutely right. It's the economic system. And I spend a fair amount of time by that in this book is what's wrong and what's driving us to decisions that are immoral. They're not immoral, but they just don't take a morality into account. It's all about enriching the rich.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about money then. One of my assertions is that in any change that's made of any size really of any size, whether it's at the gargantuan end of the scale like we are talking about, or a very small household household affairs that somebody has to pay. So for the types of positive changes to the systems that we've been talking about to hour economy to the way in which companies operate those sorts of things, who should pay?
- Don Norman:
- Well, I, I understand the question. Let me restate it slightly, which I think is the same question. I think the word who should pay is I think misleading. But when you make a change, a major change, even as I say incrementally move slowly, some people will benefit and some people will suffer. I think that's the same question. In many cases, I think we can avoid that, but in many cases we can't. If you take a look at the history of changes in technology over, I'd like to talk about the lu rights. The word ludite means somebody who's against technology, which is not the correct meaning. Cause the Luddites were not against technology. They were weavers in England when the factories were becoming mechanized. And so the weavers were going to lose their jobs. And so they were against the technology because they were, that isn't what they were against.
- They were against losing their jobs. And so they destroyed the technology, not because they hated technology, but because they wanted to keep their jobs. And guess what they were? They did lose their job. Now the economists and political scientists and so on like to say it's okay because these new technologies always end up increasing employment and increasing values in for people because the technology, the weavings, yes, a lot of weavers lost their jobs, but a lot of new jobs were created. And moreover, for the first time, clothing became inexpensive enough, the people around the world could have much better clothes. And there's a whole history of colonization as involved too with the British, because the British would take the cotton from India and Indonesia and then later from the United States, the early United States, not because that was right, but because it was cheaper there. And because they had the most powerful navy in the world and they would take the good goods from there and they would ship them off to Britain where they would get manufactured into products.
- But then the people needed to have, who's the bear to the mad power come to do all the work. It was you go to Africa and you give them the goods and exchange for the slaves at the war tribes in India and Africa's captured. And then you brought them, usually if the United States or the Indies where they helped grow the plants, which would give you the cotton, which you could ship to. It was a circular economy, but it was harmful to many, many, well, that's what we have to stop. And yes, it was that all these innovations helped people around the world, but it harmed not. And I think that if you take a look at today's ai, artificial intelligence that has, for example, I can now tell my program they're really good pictures. Would that put artists out of work? Well, when photography came, artists were concerned that it would put them out of work, but it didn't.
- What it did was it gave them, they just didn't no longer tried to paint realistic looking paintings as they explored. And I think photography didn't destroy artists. And I don't think that AI would destroy art or designer. And I've been experimenting with it. I've been saying been, well, I don't illustrate my books enough cause I'm really not good enough at drawing things. So I've been saying, oh I have some papers on Sandy in line and what you might do. And I said to the program, draw, not photograph, draw a picture of people standing in line looking unhappy. And lo and behold, I got some beginnings that looked pretty good. And then I tried a few other things and draw a picture of somebody breaking into the line and people arguing.
- But what it means, it's not easy to do this because you, it's like you hired a good assistant and you ask your assistant to do something and it's wrong. So you rephrase it and you have to learn how to phrase it properly. You have to learn how to use it. But in the end, it's a collaborative tool and you're collaborating with something to get your ideas out in a way. And so it doesn't prevent people from being designers. It gives them a new tool that could be very, very powerful generative tools. But will that put some people out of work? Yeah, we'll put the graphic artists who mostly do signs, posters. It might put them outta work, but it might actually enrich in a whole new set of people who could now do things they could not do before. But you're absolutely right. Question is who pays? And in this sense, I wish I knew a better answer, but I don't that there are people who will always be displaced and the notion, oh, we just retrained them. No, if you know something really well and you've spent your lifetime doing it, you're not going to learn some other very different skill or yes, you can learn a different skill that pays a fraction of the salary you were used to be getting.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost as if what you're saying is that human aspect of change is often not acknowledged because of the level at which we look at making these changes and the things by which we are measuring.
- Don Norman:
- Well, no, it actually is often quite acknowledged that there are, they're, but the people who acknowledge it are called rabble rounders and troublemakers or these young students are always picketing against something because it's the people who don't have the power. Mm-hmm. Who are complaining. But that's also wrong because these are real problems. They have to be faced. Mm-hmm. And they aren't being faced, but isn't it, they aren't recognized, they are known.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, they call it will willful ignorance sometimes comes to play. Don, I'm just mindful of time. So as we think about bringing the conversation to a close, your website address, which is J n d.org, I learned stands for just noticeable difference, which is a term as you describe on your website from psychophysics. And it means the amount that something must be changed for the difference to be noticeable. So about this, you've said, and I'll quote you again now, one last time. My goal is to make a noticeable difference, many j and d's worth and humid centered technology. So thinking about your life's work and all of your many achievements, what is the j and d that you hope you'll be most remembered for?
- Don Norman:
- Actually, there are two steps to what I say is that I want to make a meaningful difference and I want to have fun. Well, and I think I've succeeded in both of them. I think the major impact I've had has been on education, really the way that designers operate and the emphasis on human-centered design. And I'm hoping this new book will broaden that emphasis so that people will start to think about not just individual people, but about all of society, all of humanity. Hence the name Humanity Center Design. I didn't invent that term it, it's been around for quite a while, but it hasn't caught on quite yet. And I hope this might help. In fact, the first couple papers came out from a person who I had an employed originally to work with me. So there is some relative, there is a connection. But yes, I thought that, who knows how many books I have left in me, maybe none. And I wanted, if this is my last book, I want it to be the most important book because it addresses the real issues constructing us in the world saying what needs to be done by all people. But I think that design could play a major role in this. And I want this book to be read, not just by designers, but by decision makers. So that's my hope for the future.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Don, this has been a very special conversation for me. You've shared some important messages about the challenges we face and the opportunities awaiting those of us in design. And probably those of us that don't yet know where designers should we be brave enough to take those on. Thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing your stories and your insights today. And thank you for your lifetime of outstanding and unparalleled service to the design community. I am sure. I'm sure it hasn't been without its sacrifices and its frustrations.
- Don Norman:
- Yes. But I wanna thank you because it's not easy to do a good interview. You have to actually be knowledgeable yourself and know how to follow up. And the most important, difficult part of an interview is not just to ask a bunch of predetermined questions, but to respond to what the person has said before that you did a wonderful, excellent [inaudible].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, thank you, Don. That means a lot to me. It's definitely my pleasure. And Don, if people wanna keep up with the work that you are doing, you're still very active in the design community. And if they wanna be the first to find out when early next year Design for a Better World is released, your latest book, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Don Norman:
- Well, I have not been keeping my website up to date. So normally I would say my website, when it's time I got it up, website is jnd.org. But I can tell you when the book is out, it's March 21st, 2023.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Excellent. Well, we'll keep that in our diaries, and I will be definitely linking to your website and when the book's published, I'll update the show notes with a link directly to wherever people can buy it. Thank you, Don. And thank you everyone who's tuned in. It's been great to have you here as well. As I mentioned, everything that Don and I have covered will be in the show notes. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, where we get to real depth on the issues that matter to these fields, please leave a review on the podcast, subscribe so it turns up weekly. And also, let someone else, just one person who you feel needs to hear these types of conversations, let them know about the podcast as well. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis or find a link to my profile on LinkedIn at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.