Don Norman, the Godfather of UX Design and Cognitive Science’s foremost pioneer, joins to discuss his new book “Design for a Better World” and how human behavior can save the world from its dire predicament.
Debbie Millman:
The modern world has been designed by people, and pretty much everything around us has been artificially fabricated. Our world is also in deep trouble. Catastrophic climate change and species extinction threatens civilization itself. These two truths are deeply connected. We, intentional or not, may be the designers of our own destruction. Yet if we fundamentally change our way of being on this planet, there just may be a way out of our predicament.
These are just a few of Don Norman’s many ideas in his new book Design for a Better World: How to Create a Meaningful, Sustainable, and Humanity-Centered Future. Considered one of the pioneers of user experience design, Don Norman is the author of 21 books, including the global bestselling The Design of Everyday Things. It would take several minutes to introduce Don properly, but I’m hoping our interview today can serve as an introduction to some of his achievements and ideas. Don Norman, welcome to Design Matters.
Don Norman:
Thank you. That was quite a powerful introduction.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, well, thank you. It’s a powerful book. Don, I believe you were born in New York. But since your father worked for the US government in the public health service, you moved every couple of years and have lived all over the country. Were there any favorite locations growing up?
Don Norman:
It’s hard to know because I moved every two years, including a period in El Salvador, except that one for me was only a few months because my family was there for two years. But that’s when I left to go to college. When I went to college, MIT, for four years, that was the longest I’d ever been in one location.
Debbie Millman:
Was it hard for you to move from place to place while you were growing up?
Don Norman:
Well, this is the story I tell in my book, is that the way we grow up and what we encounter, we just assume is normal. It never occurs to us there’s some other way of living. So, yeah, that’s the way I was. I didn’t question it, it just was …
But one thing that that happened was, really, I don’t have any friends from that period. But my wife still has friends who went to kindergarten with her. Me, I don’t even remember any of them. It was I first met people who I still know and talk to when I went to college.
Debbie Millman:
Your father’s job required that he transfer to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and you moved to Falmouth, Massachusetts where you went to high school. I read that you said that you learned nothing in high school. Is that true?
Don Norman:
I learned nothing from the Falmouth High School. I suspect I learned before that. I didn’t even graduate. I left before graduation. But they said, “Well, no one from our school has ever gone to college. So if you get into a college, we’ll give you your degree.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, your father was transferred again, and, as you mentioned, this time to work with the State Department in El Salvador. From what I understand, this resulted in your never actually finishing high school, but you still ended up being able to go to college. How were you able to manage going to college without a high school diploma?
Don Norman:
I don’t remember the details of how that worked, but you do have to apply to college in your senior year before you’ve [inaudible 00:03:32].
Debbie Millman:
Ah, interesting.
Don Norman:
But it’s interesting because I met another friend, a computer scientist, very well-known computer scientist. I was at his home in Rhode Island, and we discussed, he said he came from a place nobody had ever heard of. So I asked where he was from and he asked where I was from, and he said, “Well, it was from Massachusetts.” “Well, where in Massachusetts?” “Well, Cape Cod.” “But where in Cape Cod?” “Well, Woods Hole.” He said, “What?” It turns out he graduated from the same high school I did. He was told that he was the first person ever to graduate and go to college.
Debbie Millman:
Maybe he got the diploma.
Don Norman:
Anyway, those are all asides. But I was a real nerd in those days and I learned a lot by myself. I was a radio amateur from junior high school to high school and I was building my own equipment while going to high school in Falmouth. At MIT, I was a nerd and I fit in just fine. So it’s actually been a rather remarkable transformation from nerdhood to today.
But part of that, though, is I can talk to engineers. I have no problem with bridging that gap because I can speak their language, because I am an engineer. I have two degrees in engineering. I’m a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
To me, design is actually taking what we know about technology, what we know about the way the world is configured, and human behavior. It’s the combination of that, because we create things that are for people, but that obviously always use some kind of technology. It may just be paper and pencil, writing, printed, but it’s technology.
Debbie Millman:
When you were at MIT, when you first went to MIT, you discovered both analog computers and digital computers. You’ve said that it’s difficult to imagine this today. But as freshmen, you and your friends had great trouble understanding the difference. When did you begin to feel like you had an instinct for computers and engineering?
Don Norman:
The reason we didn’t understand the difference between digital and analog computers is because analog we could understand because it was, well, differential equations, which was a fundamental in engineering and that it mapped directly. But digital, well, nobody taught digital in those days. So we didn’t know what was going on. But they both used the same word, computer. So, oh, what’s the difference?
Analog computers are far more powerful in any event. Analog was neat, because when you had an equation, you could turn the knob and see, oh, on the oscilloscope, on the displays. Oh, I see the difference. That’s what happens. Oh, this is what happens. You could immediately see and transform and modify the parameters just by turning knobs.
Whereas with digital, when you finally got to it, no, you had to sit down and program laboriously, and then you had to submit it on to the computer. Then maybe the next day, you’d get a big printout and you tried to figure out what the printout meant. It just wasn’t very useful in those days.
Remember, the first computers, well, when I programmed the first computer at Penn, University of Pennsylvania, it was a million-dollar computer in those days, and that was very expensive. It was a giant brain. It had 1,000 words of memory.
Debbie Millman:
Come a long way. Given it was such a new field at the time, what were you envisioning you wanted to do professionally?
Don Norman:
I wanted to make an intelligent machine. What happened was I didn’t have computer science at University of Pennsylvania. It turns out my friend from Woods Hole went to University of Pennsylvania, wanted to study computer science, and they said, “Wonderful. You will be the first student.” So we followed this funny trajectory.
And so, psychology suddenly … I was not interested in psychology, but they got a new department chair. He gave a talk in the engineering school, and it turns out he was a physicist. His talk was very interesting to me. I went up to him and I explained why I was interested, that maybe if I can’t study, I can’t build intelligent machines, I could study this machine, this intelligent machine, humans. He said, “You don’t know anything at all about psychology.” I said, “Right,” and he said, “Wonderful.” That’s how I got accepted.
Debbie Millman:
I read that initially you hated psychology. How come?
Don Norman:
I still hate the psychology that I hated then, because as an engineer and as a scientist, you don’t really have to memorize very much. There are fundamental principles. If you learn the principles, you can always derive everything else. In psychology, someone did an experiment. So you have to remember what they did and how they did it, what they said they found, and who they were. Then someone else did a different experiment.
So you had to memorize all this stuff and there was no cohesion to it. I wanted cohesion. So I applied what I understood about engineering to psychology. There were times when everybody thought I was brilliant. No, I wasn’t brilliant.
There was some puzzle and they couldn’t figure out what the answer was and how you understood this weird behavior. I would take some elementary principle from my engineering studies and apply it and say, “Well, how about doing this?” and they … “Oh, that’s so brilliant.” No, it wasn’t brilliant, except …
This is a common phenomenon, by the way. When someone is in one field and they apply their knowledge, even the everyday knowledge of that field to the new field, to the new field, it seems like, oh, brilliant. And so, I’ve capitalized that through my life, because I keep changing fields and able to bring what I knew about this into that.
So when I graduated, in those days we got jobs differently than today, my advisor said, “So where do you want to go, Don?” and I said, “Oh, I don’t know.” We talked about it and decided I should go either to MIT or to Harvard. So he sent me to investigate both schools and come back and say what I thought.
At MIT, it was really neat and fun, but I said that’s what I’ve been doing a lot. Harvard was completely different. And so, I said I think I should try Harvard. So I went to Harvard.
When I got my faculty position at Harvard, my mentor, George Miller, who was a very well-known psychologist, who did understand what I was doing, introduced me to the faculty, and B. F. Skinner, the most famous psychologist in the 20th century, stood up and denounced me and my field and what I was trying to do.
I didn’t take it personally because obviously he didn’t know me, but I thought it was very amusing. But basically he said if you can’t see something, you can’t study it. I kept wondering, how do you think physicists or chemists get along? I mean, gee.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was so intrigued by was the fact that when he denounced you and your work, you didn’t really care. Did his denouncement impact the way others saw you at Harvard at the time?
Don Norman:
Look, it turns out he really wasn’t denouncing me. He was denouncing George Miller. So Miller and Jerry Bruner worked together. They started something called the Center for Cognitive Studies. You can see where I was. When I was admitted to the Center for Cognitive Studies, I didn’t know what the word cognitive meant. I hated American psychology and I was just doing my thing.
But when I was at Harvard is when I first learned real psychology, I discovered William James. William James was wonderful. I thought, yeah, why did it stop? Well, it stopped because the behaviorists took over.
I’d also discovered British psychologists, said the British were doing really neat stuff. And so, I started to work following the British psychologists, and starting in William James Hall actually, the name of the building, following William James, that my first book was called Memory & Attention. It starts off saying, “Everybody knows what attention is,” and that was a quote from William James.
Debbie Millman:
You once said that you never like to work on anything that you understand. Therefore, most of the time you have no idea what you’re doing or why or where it’s going. It’s only over time that you’re able to step back, put it into a coherent story, make sense of it, and fully understand it. Was that the case with the writing of your latest book?
Don Norman:
Then when I’m all finished I write a book and I teach a class with it. Then I’m like, okay, done with that. Now on to the next thing I don’t understand. Yes, that’s how I work, because I think that the mind is really a neural network, much more complex than the neural networks we’re building today. But neural networks is the closest we can come to building things, kind of work that way. Very different than normal digital computers, by the way. It’s a pattern recognition system.
I think of my head as I read a tremendous amount, I talk to many different people in many different areas, and it all piles up inside my head. It’s a jumble. I often can’t even recreate it. So what was the great book I just read and finished, yes, last night? Oh, I don’t remember. I don’t remember the title, but actually my mind, my subconscious remembers. It has all of that stuff. It all gets mixed up and what it does is it tries to find coherent patterns.
There was a European philosopher, mathematician. I can’t remember his name, French. I can’t remember his name, but who said the same thing. He said that what happens is the mind, the subconscious puts all these things together until it finds what feels like a low-energy solution, speaking in physics terms. It interrupts the conscious mind to say, “Hey, I found something.” It often is brilliant, but it often is stupid, because it can’t do arithmetic, for example.
So when you interrupt the mind, then you have to figure out, oh, is that a good idea or not? Most of them are not. But the ones that are good ideas are truly good ideas.
That’s how my mind works. So I don’t know what I’m doing and I have a feeling that most of my students never thought I knew what I was doing, because I didn’t, until it all started to merge and makes sense.
Putting it together in a book is also very important because then you’re sitting analytically trying to say I have all this stuff that I’ve been writing. I write every morning for hours. And so, I have all the stuff I’ve written and how do I put it together? What’s the coherent story I can put to it? That’s the hard part. Writing is easy, but I can’t write until I have a coherent story.
Debbie Millman:
What provoked you to write Design for a Better World right now?
Don Norman:
My books to this point, especially in design, have all been about how to make things easier to understand, easier to use, et cetera. That’s important, but it’s not going to change the world. I’m at this point 87 years old and I said, well, it’s time I’ve stepped back and tried to do something that really will make a difference in the world.
These ideas were building in me as the world itself suddenly went into a weird state. So we had a Black Lives Matter issue, we had all sorts of problems with discrimination against gender, and the women’s movement. We had the anti-colonialism movement building up. It’s basically all sorts of prejudices and biases being exposed and being talked about.
Then, of course, the climate change issues were finally becoming more and more public. A critical sentence that I remembered was … Victor Papanek who wrote a book in 1971, Design for the Real World, he called it. The first sentence of the book said, “There is no field more dangerous than design.” Why? Because these designers make all the crap that we buy and throw away, and it destroys the world when you mine, destroys the world when you manufacture, destroys the world when you throw it away. He didn’t say the last part, but he meant it because I’ve read all about his history. So he knew about that too. I said, yeah, why are we doing that and what can we do about it?
Again, I went and talked to many different people. I especially looked at the Black Lives Matter and people concerned about equal rights for women. I agreed and understood what they were about, but I didn’t think that I would be especially important in that area. I wanted to do something where I could use the particular knowledge I had that would be effective.
Then suddenly I get this note that I was awarded the Sir Misha Black Medal for Design Education. They asked if I would fly to London to receive the award. This was during COVID. So COVID was also the pandemic and our complete inability to respond as if we knew that it was coming. We knew it was coming. The infectious disease doctors all knew it was coming, but nobody pays attention to that.
That’s been another statement that’s an important one in the book, that people are really good at dealing with a calamity when it occurs, but they don’t do any work to avoid the calamity in the first place, because, beforehand, it’s not visible. You work on things that are visible. And so, the limitations of the human mind is to a part exactly what is going on today.
Anyway, when I was in London, the Design Museum in London, which I always visit whenever I’m in London, was having a new exhibit called the Waste Age. Moreover, I had discovered The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is located on an island in the southern part of England. They were partially responsible for the exhibit.
And so, I met with them for three days. They’re the ones who championed the circular economy and they’re all about sustainability. So I learned a lot from them in my preparation for meeting with them.
Then during the exhibit, I went to that exhibit for three days. They invited me to the opening VIP installation, and I met the woman who was responsible for much of it. It turned out we had met before. I didn’t remember. She reminded me very forcefully, “We had met before, Don.”
That gave me an anchor for what I should talk about, that I began to realize how I can piece together my knowledge of human behavior and of some of the issues. And so, I talked about meaningfulness, that scientists use stuff that doesn’t make sense to the average person. Why don’t we talk in the language that people understand? Also, the economists have dominated. The economists don’t have any notion, any understanding of people up till recently, when the behavioral economists finally took off.
And so, they measure everything and they measure it in money. They want a common way of measuring things, so they used monetary units, and they try to simplify. So we use a gross domestic product, which is the single number that tries to state the power of a nation. And yet that number includes negative as well as positive things.
Yet there’s a group at Oxford that has said, no, no, no, let’s try to separate out the different parts that a country does that are good or bad for the ecology and the parts that a country does that are good or bad for society.
And so, we don’t want to talk about whether a country is good or bad. We talk about your educational system is excellent, your healthcare system is not. You’re polluting the oceans. You’re doing good this, you’re doing bad that. That’s more useful.
Just last night, I said, wait a minute, the IQ is exactly that. We measure people’s intelligence by something that we can measure, in the way how well you perform on these silly tests. We use one number to try to summarize a very complex set of things.
I’ve always believed that the IQ test is really good at telling you how well you can take IQ tests. It correlates very well with how well you can take tests in the university. But neither of those correlate that well with how well you do in life. Life is more complex than that. It’s not passing exams. That’s not what you do in life.
Though all that became a part of my story. When I was an engineer, I was told that if you can’t measure it, it means you don’t understand it. But I went back and read the origin of that statement and it came from Kelvin, Lord Kelvin, who said if you can’t measure something, then it means you really don’t understand it. That’s what he said, except he started by saying with four words, in the physical sciences, if you can’t measure it.
That’s because there’s no history in the physical sciences. If I throw that in the air, I can predict its course and how long it takes to come back. If I do it again, the same answer. Do it again, the same answer. The fact that I’ve thrown it a few times doesn’t change this behavior.
Well, if I throw a person up in the air, believe me, the second time it would be very different, or an animal or anything. And so, live things are different. You don’t measure them the same way. You can’t. It’s not so consistent. You can’t make simple behavioral rules like we wish they could do.
That all is the theme of my three parts of the book. Well, one is that the world is artificial and the last part is so what can we do about it? But the three substantive parts are making it more meaningful, please. Don’t tell us about a 1.8-degree rise in temperature, starting with the rise of the industrial revolution of the 1700s, to now when the temperature changes more than that every day. What are you talking about? Well, they scientists, they understand it. It’s about heat, not about temperature. But the average person? It makes no sense.
Debbie Millman:
What do you suggest that scientists and anthropologists say instead?
Don Norman:
What it means. First of all, you can talk about what it means for the weather and climate, but scientists are too conservative to say that, because the whole point about science, by the way, is that you disagree with all other scientists. When someone publishes a finding, some scientists say, “Whoa, that’s really exciting.” But the majority of scientists are taught to say, “Well, I don’t know,” and to question it and to find holes in it and to try to repeat. If they can’t repeat, well, it either means they didn’t do it right or the other person is wrong.
But it’s that kind of debate going back and forth that makes science so powerful. What the world didn’t understand during the pandemic is that scientists would often tell you, “Here’s what we should do,” and then a month later they would say the opposite. And so, oh, what are we talking about?
People think science is a body of facts. No. Science is a method for getting better and better information and better knowledge. So when scientists told us at the beginning of the pandemic what we should do, well, it’s a new pandemic. They didn’t really understand this particular virus, so they just gave us the very best information that existed at that time. As they learned more, well, they changed their minds, and scientists change their minds all the time, good scientists. I change my mind all the time. In fact, my standard statement is if someone’s going to prove me wrong, I would prefer it to be me.
That’s all about meaning. People don’t understand how people work, how science works. And so, they don’t trust it anymore.
Debbie Millman:
You state that the planet is not in danger. It’s survived many mass extinctions and transformations, and it will survive this one, although it will be a changed planet. Going back to … You mentioned something about Victor Papanek earlier. In addition to that first line of his book being there are professions more harmful than design, but only a very few of them, he also states that designers have become a dangerous breed. You suggest that design must now change from being unintentionally destructive to being intentionally constructive. What are the first things that you would ask a designer to consider today to begin to make a tangible difference?
Don Norman:
Design is a funny field, because it started off early in the beginning of the industrial revolution as a tool to sell better. So basically like the Wedgwood factory for making china hired artists to print pretty patterns on the plates. Ever since, it’s been a tool of industry to try to improve industry.
Designers were always thought as part of the infrastructure. They didn’t decide what we should make, but they made it prettier, look better, more attractive, and, in today era, easier to use. As a result, designers, mostly, they’re trained in art schools. It’s art and design taught together, or architecture and design. That’s not true. We aren’t artists. Artists are quite different. Artists are trying to do something to make a statement, express their own knowledge, their own desires, their own opinions. That isn’t what design is. Design is building for other people.
So we really have to understand people and what they need and how they work. If designers build something and choose this wonderful set of materials that makes it light and thin and good to look at and touch and feel, and yet it can’t be taken apart afterwards, you can’t repair it, so it has a short lifetime, well, that’s good for the company. Short lifetime, you’ve got to buy a new one. In fact, deliberate obsolescence, planned obsolescence is a bad thing. But designers contribute.
Debbie Millman:
Well, if designers are in the service of their clients, how do designers work to change the client’s point of view about things like planned or forced obsolescence? I mean you see that planned or forced obsolescence in everything. You see it in technology, you see it in automobiles, you see it in fashion. How do we as designers begin to enforce certain changes that need to be made from the top?
Don Norman:
Very good. So how do we enforce things that have to be made at the very top? Well, one way is to be at the very top. How come we don’t have very chief design officers in the largest companies?
Debbie Millman:
We do. We are beginning to now. I mean I can name five or 10 off the top of my head that are designers in the C-suite, so to speak.
Don Norman:
In large companies, yes, you can name five or 10.
Debbie Millman:
Well, off the top of my head. I’m sure that there are more. I know that there are more.
Don Norman:
Surprisingly few. I think the number is more like in the hundreds as opposed to the fact that how many thousands of firms do we have and how many have chief marketing officers or chief finance officers or chief et cetera? But why aren’t designers there is the question. The question is because they often champion design.
I talk to designers and they say, “What can we do to make our administration understand us better, our executives?” and I say, “What do you do?” “Well, we go and we show them the work we’re doing and we show them the prizes we win. We show them the wonderful letters we get, or we describe some of the problems that people are having.”
I say, “Look, when I was an executive, if somebody came to me with a bunch of problems, I didn’t want to hear them. It isn’t that I didn’t want to know about the problems. I wanted to know what the solutions were. Knowing the problems don’t help me. But if you have a sensible way of solving them, yes, please come.”
The second thing is but you have to understand how a company works. So you can’t come and just show me pretty pictures. You have to tell me, “So, look, how much is that going to cost? Will that hurt our sales? Will it help our sales?”
I ask designers, “Don’t you know that one of the principles of design is to understand your customer, where your customer is the boss of your boss, the higher ups?” And so, you’ve got to learn to speak their language. You show them the spreadsheets with increased profits, with increased margins, et cetera, et cetera. They say, “Oh, how could we do that? We have this new idea. We wouldn’t know how many people would adopt it.” Oh, isn’t this what marketing does all the time? They push their ideas and they have those spreadsheets.
So make friends with marketing, or do what they do, make the numbers up. That’s what marketing does. But the executives are smart. They used to make up numbers, too. They know there’s no other choice. But what they do is they say, so what are the assumptions you made? Where did you get those numbers from? How did you start, et cetera, et cetera? So if you make a good argument, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, let’s take this seriously.”
But you can’t propose to switch to the circular economy or have a longer lifecycle of our products without saying, well, that’s going to hurt the monetary flow, the profits of the company, and we may go out of business. So you have to have a solution for that. If you don’t have a solution, well, maybe you have a beginning of a solution and maybe you could convince them to begin that way while we experiment. But you can’t do it all at once. You’ll have to do it in small steps.
But, again, you have to act like a business person, not like a designer. That means you have to learn the language of business.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely. Language of finance is critical for anybody that’s in design now.
Don Norman:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Otherwise … People are talking about and complain about the fact that they might not have a seat at the table. I’m more concerned about what happens when they get a seat at the table and have nothing meaningful to contribute.
Don Norman:
I can tell you what happens. I’ve seen this happen. Some designers get promoted up to a seat at the table, and not only do they not work well but they hate it themselves. And so, boom. I mean I used to learn that because I got on a couple board of directors. At first, I said, wow, wonderful. I can help them devise new products and move in new directions. I discovered that all the board of directors’ meetings were … 90% of it was financial. My response to that was to learn finances and to be able to address that.
Debbie Millman:
So is your recommendation, for designers to truly begin to address the issues that you’re outlining in your book, that they learn the language of finance?
Don Norman:
Well, it’s more than the language of finance. They have to learn about people, they have learn about society, and they have to learn about market forces. But market forces is more than just finances. It’s the qualitative market forces that drive and result in the finances.
But not everyone, because, look, we still need the great skilled designers. We still need the people with the skills and understanding and the creativity to put it together. But every design group needs at least one person who is rising to the top and can talk this language and represent what design needs to do, because design …
Look, design is, as I said earlier, this interface between the world, between technology, and the way we work, do things, and human behavior. That’s critical. That’s unique of all the fields. We optimize human behavior and human experience. Other fields optimize time or money and productivity. No, we optimize the experience. But we can’t forget those other factors. They are important.
So I feel designers are the best group to help lead these very large projects that are going to be necessary, because that’s what designers have to do. We don’t have the skills. We have to bring together the skills. I go on and on about methods of doing this because most of the big projects that go on in the world fail, so we have to do them in a different way.
Debbie Millman:
You talk about how modern capitalism, or what some people are calling late-stage capitalism, is one of the biggest causes of inequity of our time. You write that Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism should not be confused with the current practice of capitalism. How are they different?
Don Norman:
Well, when Adam Smith wrote, we didn’t really have the same kind of stock markets and shareholder power that we have today. So the people who usually own shares in a company, yeah, they often didn’t care what the company did, they just cared about profits. But at least they did care enough about the company to actually take part and listen to what was going on. Today, that doesn’t happen.
We have, of course, the disastrous statement by the University of Chicago Nobel Laureate, who said that a company does not own allegiance to its customers or employees or to the community in which it … This …
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s just to its shareholders.
Don Norman:
But to its shareholders. There’s been some revolt against that. So we have what’s called a B company, a B-corp.
Debbie Millman:
B-corp, yeah.
Don Norman:
But it’s not quite the same status as a normal C-corp. I always talk about Patagonia as a good example of a company that really cares about the environment and about the products, but about their customers and about … And they are a B-corp.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, but they’re probably the only one. I mean they’re, with the more recent announcement of the CEO, essentially giving up all of the profits to greater causes is I think an example that a lot of other CEOs could follow but won’t. Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder as written by the laws of capitalism. Until that changes, the only risks that corporations are going to take are calculated ones that ultimately will cause them as a little harm as possible.
Don Norman:
Yes. And so, that’s one of the things that must change. But notice these laws are fairly recent laws, mostly in the 20th century.
Debbie Millman:
Well, actually I want to ask you about that, though, because you write that three of the most important historical influences on today’s world are modernity, the industrial revolution, and economic theory. All of those began in the mid-1700s and, in combination, created the governments and economic systems that we have today. Should we be concerned that these influences are over 300 years old and we’re living with them in a day and age that no one could have foreseen at that time?
Don Norman:
I don’t think we should be concerned. I mean you asked me we should be concerned of the fact that it’s been around for so long. No. I don’t like to look backwards. I did lots of bad things in my history. Well, not bad legally, but things that I regret. But I learned from them and I learned to say I did the wrong thing, and I’ve changed my behavior completely.
I feel the same is true of all the problems we have today, except we have to admit that there are better ways of doing things that … It’s really hard because, well, the Republican Senate and House has now just voted that we should not allow financial advisors to worry about the ecological impact of a company. It’s only about money. Their job is simply to tell you where to invest your money so you might get to the largest return as opposed to where it might be good for people.
That just is crazy. They say this is the woke phenomenon. We want to kill the people who are woke and destroying the world. Well, I’m woke and I’m proud of it. By woke it means that I’ve changed my mind dramatically in the last … Actually over time, but especially in the last four years. You asked me why I decided to write this book is because I was awakening. I was starting to learn about a lot of the things that I never paid attention to, and realized how wrong they were and that they could be changed. Those laws can be changed. Because the laws were made by people, they could be unmade.
Debbie Millman:
One of the examples that you give in the book that was a little bit terrifying was implementing this seatbelt law. While Design for a Better World presents a really eye-opening diagnosis of where we’ve gone wrong and a clear prescription for making things better, I think one of the biggest issues about change now is that those who benefited from the historical path we’ve been on see little reason to change.
That was why I mentioned the laws developed or the ways in which we live being developed 300 years ago. It’s not necessarily because of self-interest, but it’s because they can’t imagine any other way of being. One of the examples that you give in the book is how something as simple as implementing a seatbelt law took more than half a century to implement. And so, I’m wondering how do we change the way we act today in a way that is a bit more urgent?
Don Norman:
Well, here’s how. As I said before, people are really good at responding to crises and disasters. They’re not good at preventing it in the first place. So the good news and the bad news about climate change. The bad news is that climate change is here. It’s causing destruction and fires and floods and famine, et cetera, great harm all over the world.
That’s the good news, that climate change is here, is causing floods and famine and disaster all over the world. And so, people are starting to take it intelligently, seriously. That’s what it takes. It seems to take something that … We are really good at reacting to things, but we are not good at foresight, at reacting before something, because there’s nothing there. We’re good at reacting to things that we see and understand. You can’t understand something that doesn’t exist yet. So I think that’s what was going to have to happen.
But we have a lot of people who are going to be hurt. We see that. Look, the United Nations were having annual meetings for 20 some odd years now about climate change. They get all the nations. That’s a problem. They have 119 nations that must all agree upon any resolution that they pass, and that’s almost impossible. So it gets watered down a lot. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is so all the nations, they all agree to it, then they go back to their countries and half of them just ignore it from then on. But even when Biden has one signed and he comes back to a US Congress, the US Congress says no way.
So it’s politically difficult. It really is. It’s going to take a long time, but we have to keep trying, because the problems are only going to get worse. But the worse they become, the harder it will be to overcome them, but actually the more the people will realize that we must do something.
Hey, I wish there were a better solution to that, and there may be. One of the reasons I’m hoping for the book … I give now lots of talks about the book to schools all around the world. Students often ask that question, what are the solutions, and I say I don’t know. They’re asking me questions I can’t answer, and I applaud them for it, because it’s the most important questions of all that I can’t answer. The very fact you’re asking the question is a really good sign. You, the students of the world today, you are where the answers will come from.
Debbie Millman:
I know that a lot of young people, and I think people in general now, feel that technology has too much control over our lives. You’ve talked about how we have to change the entire fundamentals of technology to ensure that machines and technology are the servants of people, not the other way around. Do you have any thoughts about how that can be undertaken?
Don Norman:
Yes. The way that we misuse technology was actually taught and studied and created by, well, the psychological scientists, the social scientists. We thought that these people teach in business schools. The applied psychologists and applied behavioral scientists, where do they get jobs? One of them is business schools. We used to teach about lock-in, that, hey, Apple, you should make your own equipment and your own operating system and use your own plugs and everything so that once people buy into your system, they can’t change. It’s too difficult. They’re locked in forever.
Now Facebook is saying, “If you use any one of our systems, you automatically are connected to Facebook, and vice-versa.” Well, I like to use Angry Birds, if you can remember that game-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Don Norman:
… as a good example, because it was brilliant engineering, because it was a really simple game and very trivial and so on, but what they did was brilliant. They had this pile of blocks or so, and you had to shoot an animal into it, which would knock them down. Your goal, though, was to aim just right to knock the entire thing down. In the end, you very seldom managed it, but it always looked like you came so close.
So if you had simply failed, you’d quit and maybe come back another day. But you don’t just fail. You … “Wow, I made it,” and then, “Oh no, this block is teetering, teetering,” and then it stays. It doesn’t drop. That’s brilliant psychology.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Don Norman:
Because it keeps you committed. You want to come back and say, “Oh, let me try one more time and one more time.” Two hours later, you discover you’re still doing it. Now is it evil psychology? Yes. But that’s what we were teaching. I taught some of that stuff.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think we’re doomed, Don?
Don Norman:
No, because I’m an optimist and the only way to live, continue living, successfully is to be optimistic about it. I think I see many people changing. I see more and more people joining in what we are talking about. I see, well, people like you who are well-versed in what I wrote. You obviously took it seriously. You are asking the absolute wonderful questions.
I see companies starting to change slowly. Yes, they will have to change their business model, but there are alternative business models. It probably will be a subscription service is going to be what we do, which we could live with. That’s how the phones used to come. We used to rent our phones. We paid every month for phone service and they guaranteed the phones would always work, and they did. They fixed it if it didn’t work and so on. But that also destroyed innovation in the phone business. But it shows that there are good aspects to those.
The subscription model doesn’t have to cost any more than what we pay already in buying new stuff. It’s just that it’ll be spread out over time. But that’s a way that you can try to reassure a company that says, “Well, if I sell a refrigerator that lasts forever, then they’ll just buy one. They’ll never buy a second one.” So you have to learn to get a different way of giving value to your customers.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that you write about in Design for a Better World is the fact that you didn’t want to discuss the way “technology is being used to control our behavior, to spy on us in part to increase the dominance by companies upon us, to seduce us into spending more and more time in their spheres of influence, as well as the dominance by governments, police agencies, and political parties to get us to behave in certain ways”. That was a quote. I’m wondering why you didn’t want to discuss that.
Don Norman:
Oh, very simple, because I’m writing a book, it’s already longer than I wanted it to be, 300 pages. I decided that there are lots of major issues going on in the world, but I wanted to cover the ones where I thought I had a unique perspective, that could offer something that might be new and valuable. On the issues you just discussed, there are whole bunch of people who are doing a really excellent job, and I didn’t feel I could add anything they were talking about.
Debbie Millman:
You talk about the fact that there are two types of knowledge that people use on a day-to-day basis, knowledge of, referred to by psychologists as declarative knowledge, so remember to stop at a red light, and knowledge how, which is also known as procedural knowledge, skills to be a musician. I’m wondering if you can talk about how both those types of knowledge might contribute to making some of the necessary changes we need to make moving forward in our world.
Don Norman:
There’s a different division of knowledge as well, which is related, which is conscious versus subconscious. Sometimes psychologists call it automated. But automated invariably means subconscious. Declarative knowledge tends to be conscious and procedural knowledge tends to be subconscious. In fact, you learn by having it all conscious. You either watch and you try to infer the steps you’re supposed to do and so on, and you’re pretty bad at it. The way you get good is by practicing.
It’s surprising, by the way, a lot of that practice can come in your sleep or can come just by thinking about it. You can get better by thinking about the skills and imagining yourself doing it, but it has to become completely automated.
I asked a musician once about this and he said that you have to learn to play the music so well with automatics. So the mind can be worrying not about the fingers and the notes, but about the melody and the emphasis and the emotional component. He said, “I once was playing at a concert and I lost my place. That’s a disaster. So I had to listen to myself playing until I recognized where I was, and then I felt comfortable again.” But the whole point was he could keep going automatically. That’s procedural knowledge.
Well, the problem is that it’s easy to convince people that what we’re doing is wrong and it has to change. It’s like telling somebody they need to go on a diet and they need to stop eating something. They will agree with you and they will understand it and they will even repeat it back to you, or they’ll even come and volunteer it to you, but they can’t stop.
I once showed a paper on will. It turned out to be an important paper, to my surprise, with Tim Shallice, who’s a neuroscientist in England, in which we said that will is the conscious attempt to control your behaviors. So in the morning, when you wake up and you don’t want to get out of bed, you have to force yourself by will to get out of bed, or if you’re on a diet and you don’t want to eat that tasty cake, you have to force yourself not to.
So will is what forces you to do things you don’t want to do, or prevent you from doing things you do want to do. And so, that led me to create this joke that if I’m at a dinner, a fancy dinner, and they serve all this food and I’ve eaten a lot of food, and now they bring this luscious dessert, which I do not want to eat, and it’s right in front of me and I am not going to eat it and I am not eating it, if somebody then walks up behind me and says, “Boo,” it startles me, I’ll start eating the dessert.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that?
Don Norman:
Because he destroyed my conscious mind forcing my body not to eat the dessert, has now distracted the mind from that inhibition. And so, my body just goes wrong.
Debbie Millman:
So then how do you make intrinsic changes that you know you should make and taking it on a bigger level from not eating a piece of cake to not buying into planned obsolescence or not doing things that are harmful to the climate?
Don Norman:
You have to do it in small steps, each of which demonstrates some positive factor. And so, the more you do it, the more you’ll get into the game. If you do enough small steps, you’re actually going to be committed to the whole.
There’s a related problem, which is a reward structure in both universities and in business. The reward structure in universities is horrible, because you’re rewarded for being the best in the field and publishing in more and more specialized journals of high quality. That means if you work with other people, you don’t get rewarded so much.
I mean I went to a meeting of the electrical engineering department at UC San Diego, where they were trying to debate if you do a paper with other people, how much credit do you get? Five people, you get one-fifth the credit. That was stupid. Most good work is done by groups.
Second, yes, we need specialists who are really good experts in their little narrow discipline, but we also need generalists who can put it all together. Generalists don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t publish enough in many of the good journals. So we have to change that.
We have to change the promotion policy in industry too, because it’s based upon not what have you done that’s good for the world, but what have you done that’s good for our profits, our immediate profits? That’s where from the high up has to be able to say, “No, we know we’re undergoing a major change we believe in the end is going to be better for us than what we’re doing today, but we know we’re going to go through a difficult period in the middle. And so, we will not punish you for not meeting your profits and not meeting your targets in the beginning.”
That could be done just with a few senior committed people at the top. They have to waive the wrath of the shareholders as well. But there are ways of doing this, and there are companies starting to do this. As you pointed out, more and more companies are starting to get CDOs. What their impact is is still unknown. But I know the few CDOs of large companies that I know of have actually made changes in the company.
Debbie Millman:
Don, this might seem random, and you actually haven’t addressed this at all in Design for a Better World, but I’d love your take on the newish buttonless elevators I’m seeing in hotels and office buildings, wherein you indicate what floor you want to go to before entering the elevator. There are no buttons to press inside the elevator.
Don Norman:
They are called destination control elevators.
Debbie Millman:
And what do you think?
Don Norman:
Well, I’m a member of the National Academy of Engineering. This is going to be a longer story because I’m going to start earlier.
Debbie Millman:
Good.
Don Norman:
I was at one of the meetings in Washington, and there was this person sitting alone at a table. I was with my wife. I said, “Oh, that’s David Kelley, the guy who founded IDEO, who founded the d.school at Stanford, and so on, who’s a friend of mine. So I went up to him and asked could we join him at his table, and we did.
While we’re at the table, he says, “The elevators they have in this hotel are horrible. I go in the elevator, there’s no button. What are you supposed to do?” I say, “Well, you’re supposed to tell it what floor you want beforehand and it tells you which elevator to take.” “Well, what if I change my mind or if I push the wrong floor?” “Well, what do you do in a normal elevator? If you’ve gone past the floor you really want to go to, you have to wait till it gets to the next stop and get off and then take one down.”
But I said, “Look, these are wonderful because what they do is they’re more efficient. They wait until they get people going in the same direction and as much as possible to the same floor so that it has to make much less stop. So it’s much faster for anybody. Yes, it feels bad because you have to, first of all, remember to hit your button beforehand, and then you have to wait at this elevator while other people came after you are already getting into their elevator. But they’re going to a different place. And so, it would slow you up to go into their elevator.”
It’s really wonderful. You show that not only do you use it faster, but you can build less elevators and handle the same number of people. So I was just in one. I was in San Francisco a couple of days ago and it had one of those elevators, and it was wonderful. But I did notice a few people get in and not know what to do.
The problem is you’re trying to change the behavior that we’ve become so used to, that it seemed bizarre and wrong. Even someone as clever and intelligent as David Kelley couldn’t get it at first. He got it after I explained it. He said, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” But that’s what’s going to happen with a lot of the things we’re talking about. But actually the new behavior is going to be much better for everybody once we get there. But there’s going to be a learning cycle, and things are harder during the learning cycle because you’ll keep forgetting.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so interesting to hear your perspective on this, because I think that most laypeople don’t understand the motivation for making those changes to begin with. So they don’t understand that you get somewhere faster, or you don’t understand that the people that are in the elevator with you are mostly going to around the same place you are, so it’s more efficient.
I think most people go into these elevators thinking it’s limiting where I can go. I don’t have as much choice. I don’t have as much control, seemingly. It feels like things have been taken away as opposed to augmented to be better. If only there were a way to be able to communicate why these things were done, it would make it a lot easier.
I often tell my clients that are concerned about what the response is going to be to a logo change, which we know is always overexaggerated now, that the way in which to do it is to explain why you’re doing it. If you just put it out there and expect that people will understand, they won’t, because no one is ever looking at a logo thinking, “Oh, look, they made changes. Woo-hoo. Let’s find out why.” You have to be able to prepare people for the change.
Don Norman:
That’s all true. I’m just thinking about what kind of communication would be … It’s so simple that people could read it quickly, yet they’d understand it. I think you could probably do that. You’re right, it really confounds people. It has not taken off as rapidly than ought to because of that reason, I think.
Debbie Millman:
The last thing I want to ask you about is actually something that you started the book with. You quote George Santayana in his book The Life of Reason, who famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You think he’s wrong and that we do not repeat history. Talk about why and what we do instead.
Don Norman:
History doesn’t repeat itself because history is very complex. There are so many different variables and so on. It would be impossible to repeat history. But, and the but, remember I talked about Lord Kelvin, who says if you can’t measure it in the physical sciences and you don’t understand it, but the problem is he can’t do that in the physical sciences and the behavioral sciences because the behavior, whatever you do impacts you for maybe the rest of your life. The technical term for that is path-dependent.
The way we got to someplace makes a big difference. In the physical sciences, it doesn’t matter how particles get to where they are. From there on, you can predict what’s going to happen. Actually, this is easier in classical physical sciences than in quantum mechanics and so on.
So our history really determines how we behave. It actually makes us think that the way we grew up and the way we interpret things, it never occurs if there’s any other alternative. We just take it for granted because that’s how it’s always been all of our lives.
That is where history matters, because if you don’t understand that, then you may actually limit the number of possibilities that you feel you can take. I mean I was with a company all my life. I’ve worked with these companies. It’s absolutely essential we keep increasing our profits year after year after year, and the shareholders insist upon it. But we can’t change that.
Well, you could change that, but you grew up believing that. That’s what you were taught in school, that’s how you watch other companies do it. That’s how you are rewarded during your career. It’s very hard to change. That’s where the Santayana quote … The spirit is right, but it’s the details that are wrong.
Debbie Millman:
Don Norman, thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Don Norman:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Don Norman’s brand new book is titled Design for a Better World: How to Create Meaningful, Sustainable, and Humanity-Centered Future. You can read lots more about all of Don’s extraordinary work on his website, jnd.org. If you go there, you’ll find out why it is named jnd.org.
This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.