The problem with Don Norman

Don Norman has built a career by writing about things he didn’t understand.

In 1985, Norman was a well-known professor of cognitive psychology chairing his department at the University of California, San Diego. But he was burned out. So the then-fortysomething decided to spend six months visiting the University of Cambridge. Working at the university’s psychology department, he was stuck in an old, quirky building whose layout and idiosyncrasies drove him mad. 

He became frustrated by his confusion while completing the simplest of tasks: opening doors, flipping on lights—even turning on water taps. So frustrated, in fact, that he bought a new Mac and churned out a book in two months that blamed the field of design for these terrible quotidian experiences. 

The book, at first called The Psychology of Everyday Things, was effectively about design, though Norman himself wasn’t a designer and had never built products himself. One day, not long after finishing his final draft of The Psychology of Everyday Things, Norman bumped into his friend Bill Verplank in an elevator while at a conference. Verplank was a designer, and a creator of the term interaction design. So what did Verplank think of the book? 

He hated it. So much so, that he felt compelled to assemble an impromptu intervention around a conference room table, where Norman received a crash course from designers that would alter the course of his life.

“They told me I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what design was about. And they were right, because I never met professional designers before,” Norman says, laughing, during a Zoom call with me earlier this month. “They changed the book as a result of that conversation. And then over time, I started to learn . . . what design was about.” 

Eventually, a new publisher renamed the book The Design of Everyday Things, and it went on to become a best-seller translated into 25 languages. The book reframes products as not merely objects of aesthetic value but as devices shaped to respond to particular human use—use that should be addressed front and center in the design process. It’s still the closest thing we have to a household book on design, and it almost got the practice entirely wrong.

Today, the 87-year-old professor emeritus and director of the Design Lab at UCSD is considered by many a legendary mind in the design world. He helped coin the now-ubiquitous term user-centered design, and was the first person with “user experience” in his title at Apple. He cofounded his Nielsen Norman Group consultancy in 1998, and he’s served as an adviser for entities including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Panasonic. His success is due largely to his constant career evolution: He’s been an engineer, a cognitive psychologist, an academic, an executive, a consultant, and, yes, a designer, too.

After stumbling into design, Norman has ostensibly defined the way designers have both spoken and worked for decades. Now he’s trying to upend the design world again with his new book, Design for a Better World (released today by MIT Press). 

“I’m getting older,” he tells me. “And I said, ‘Well, maybe it’s time for me to step back and think back about all the things I’ve encountered.’”

Design for a Better World

In his new book, Norman is addressing a world that’s on fire: environmentally careless, politically useless, and systemically inequitable. But his increasingly fraught relationship with women and people of color in the design community demonstrates that he’s failed to internalize the very lessons he’s trying to teach.

Norman’s book starts with the premise that everything around us is artificial. He argues that since the industrial revolution, people have been trapped in an invented, modernist world where we work for the machines of progress more than they work for us. In this world, we prioritize the growth of wealth while assuming we have infinite resources. “We must completely rethink and redo how we decide to live, what we reward, and what activities we stop,” he writes. 

Norman argues that to do so, design practitioners need to make a shift from centering “users” in their process to centering all of humanity. Human-centered design—Norman’s formerly championed viewpoint—brought us irresistibly disappointing products of modernity like fast fashion and social media. Whereas humanity-centered design urges people to think beyond fashioning the world for mere function, instead bringing social equity and environmental concern to the forefront. 

Norman’s mind is a rubber ball ricocheting between these points for 300 pages, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. His insights can feel more like a summary of discrete problems than a unified blueprint for progress. I wasn’t surprised to hear that much of the book was rearranged over the course of editing.

One moment, he’s indicting economists for the concept of gross domestic product; the next, he’s offering systems-thinking diagrams on how public projects could be built with more oversight and input from the community. At one point he takes us inside the printer company (presumably HP) where he learns how companies manipulate us to spend more than we plan. I particularly enjoyed the ire directed at his fellow academics when he explained how the COVID-19 pandemic showed just hard it is for researchers to speak to the public in plain language.

Humanity-centered Design

Norman has always been at his best when he’s roasting idiotic decision-makers of all types. Yet his authoritative thinking doesn’t mesh so well with the current culture of design.

A mere 3% of designers today are Black, a fact that’s led to a generation of products with a baked-in racist viewpoint, including medical textbooks and AI systems. Meanwhile, Norman’s own field of UX may very well be the most diverse contingent within the design world. In recent years, UX thinking has become more attuned to its own power dynamics, and more inclusive as a result. This awakening is thanks to a new generation of designers who’ve actually grown up dealing with the intentional and careless prejudice built into so many real aspects of their lives. That prejudice would not be there if the white-dominated fields of design and technology had acknowledged the value of all people decades ago, or in the decades since.

Admittedly, my reading of Design for a Better World was tainted by Norman’s history of tone-deafness, and even outrage, directed toward women of color who’ve questioned his viewpoints. In 2017, Brazilian artist and designer Luiza Prado accused Norman’s fellow design researcher-practitioners Ken Friedman, Terence Love, Johann van der Merwe, Eduardo Côrte-Real, Gunnar Swanson, Keith Russell, and Filippo Salustri for writing off diverse scholars on a professional email exchange. On Twitter Norman weighed in with a demeaning retort: “Aren’t all white mails [sic] sexist. Colonialist too. You too: women are sexist.” 

Then in 2018, during an interview on anti-racism, Carrie Sawyer, CEO of the firm Diversity by Design, politely corrected Norman for using the term “oriental.” Norman responded with a lengthy explanation as to why he should still be able to use it. 

In 2022, Norman demonstrated yet another tier of intolerance. It began when Vivianne Castillo—who runs a UX consultancy called HmntyCntrd—criticized a passage that Norman was previewing to promote Design for a Better World. “Tell me you haven’t done your work of understanding white supremacy & colonization without telling me,” she quipped in a caption on Twitter. (Disclosure: HmntyCntrd won an Innovation by Design Award in 2021 and Castillo contributes to Fast Company—as has Norman.)

Norman responded by sliding into Castillo’s DMs. At first, he seemed to take her tweet on the chin, writing that he was “delighted” to deepen his understanding and that he’d like to talk. That was until Castillo—herself an expert who runs a business devoted to the topic of design equity—agreed to his request and asked for a fee to coach him.

Accustomed to a level of hero worship that has defined vocal white design “leaders” for so long, Norman lashed out at Castillo. He called the offer “very funny,” and sarcastically offered to trade consulting fees. His started at $10,000 per day, and he earned four times that for lectures, he said. 

“I thought her response to me was inappropriate. But I completely agree that it annoyed me, and I shouldn’t have written anything,” Norman recalls of the encounter. “My response was completely inappropriate. I said so, but it was too late.” When MIT Press called an emergency meeting after his spat with Castillo, Norman told the team that he was simply going to stop reading the criticism, noting that “the best defense of what I’m saying is the book itself.”

To this day, Norman argues that his interests align with people whom the field of design has historically marginalized. But he’s wholly unwilling to continue a discussion with those who vehemently disagree with his views.  “The problem I have with communities like this: Basically, they know ‘truth,’ . . . and if you don’t understand their truth, then you must be the enemy,” Norman tells me. “But the fact is that there’s no way to negotiate with them. The best way is for me to ignore them.” This coming from the same man who writes in his new book, “We need to judge people as individuals, not as members of rigid categories.” 

Unpacking the argument

Don Norman the author can write with a level of authority that verges on arrogance. But Don Norman the conversationalist is a warmer human being who delights in debate and offers far more flexibility around his thinking. He readily admits his ideas are not new, and that few ideas are. He doesn’t dodge my open criticism of his behavior, nor does he avoid answering my questions about his myriad social spats. I believe we both enjoyed much of the 90-minute conversation in which I poked at his ideas and stress-tested some of his claims. “You know, maybe what people will do is show me I’m wrong in the book, or maybe they’ll find new areas I didn’t cover,” he says. “And that would be wonderful.”

Even while writing the book, Norman seems to have had an eye to potential criticisms. In many cases, he tries to preempt those issues with missives that acknowledge the inevitable shortcomings of his book. “I don’t have the space to cover the major societal issues of prejudices of every sort or the inequities of how people are treated,” he writes in Chapter 6, only in a later chapter to offer the grand pronouncement “I will not be content until all injustices are dealt with.”

In the book, Norman writes several passages denouncing the inherent prejudice baked into capitalism itself, but he stops short of ever using the term white supremacy, even while describing it. My issue is not that he doesn’t say the words. The issue is that he doesn’t seem to understand some of the basic consequences of white supremacy. 

One of Norman’s key solutions to fixing the world’s inequity is the idea that people can “design for themselves.” He writes the phrase as a source of empowerment, citing how Ikea hacking demonstrates the power of community action to remake the world for itself. The solution does seem inspiring for a moment—across the disability community, hacking has been an important aspect of survival—but then I found myself wondering, Would you ask a family in Flint, Michigan, to hack their own water supply? (And would you ask a family in Burlington, Vermont, to hack theirs?) In any case, aren’t we asking a lot of people who don’t have the luxury of spare capital, time, and extracurricular pursuits? “Design your way out!” is a slippery slope to “It’s not my problem.” 

Despite Norman’s stated support for people living in the margins, he betrays himself in his own text. In Design for a Better World, Norman writes to an audience who is all too familiar with the dynamics he lays out. This creates an uncomfortable, almost patronizing dynamic between the writer and many of the potential readers of this book. This is best exemplified in his convoluted passage on the idea of how marginalized groups can be a source of truth and education for people who lack perspective.

He writes: “It is necessary to break down the feeling that many people have that there is a difference between ‘us,’ the poor, the uneducated, and the ‘them,’ the wealthy, the highly educated. No, we are all in this together, and quite often the everyday knowledge and experience held by ‘us’ are highly educational to ‘them.’”

Norman’s use of “us” and “them” is semantically confusing, but more importantly, the passage reveals a fundamental issue with his understanding of humanity-centered design. His pep talk corrects the thinking of a group that he’s not a part of—a group that already speaks up but is not often heard.

I bring these criticisms forth not to cancel him, but because the nuance of what Norman doesn’t understand—specifically, why he’s actively offending many people in his own field—is exactly the foundation of what’s guiding design today. 

A matter of perspective

Norman is undoubtedly an expert on UX. Allow me demonstrate just how established of an expert he is. When adopting the term humanity-centered design for his new book, he started researching its first use. He tracked the first mention back to a paper written by grad student Christy Reed in 2005. When I reached out to her former professor, Eli Blevis, he remembered using the term in class starting around 2004. He then pointed out something that Norman forgot: Blevis actually discussed this terminology with Norman at length over emails from 2007 during the review of another paper. He credits Norman with being a supportive influence of his thinking.

Norman is such a significant figure in this field that he was attached to this recent zeitgeist toward humanity-centered design nearly 20 years ago. But now Norman’s own understanding of being humanity-centered has been outpaced by the diverse UX specialists who are defining the term today.

With Design for a Better World, Norman seems to ignore selective viewpoints. And the cracks in his arguments show. 

Throughout the book, Norman grapples with concepts that require the nuance of perspective and language that he simply does not possess. “The way I work is I never know what I’m doing,” he says. “I deliberately study things and decide to move into an area where I don’t know anything about it. . . . And when I finally understand it, yeah, usually I write a book, basically.”

With more trivial matters, a beginner’s mindset can lead to delightful, if naive, insights. In Design for a Better World, Norman can feel like he failed to listen enough to complete the task.

When insisting on the use of “oriental” back in 2018, for instance, Norman defended himself by explaining that “‘white people’ is already a weird term,” constructed by “bigoted anthropologists.” His implication seemed to be that, like oriental, the term white people is nonsense. “What does it mean and why does it matter?” he floats in the interview.

I appreciate that Norman has lived through decades of shifting terminologies, and that he readily admits his confusion in trying to navigate them. But note how Dori Tunstall—the first Black dean of design at OCAD University (and in the world), and the author of another book printed by MIT Press this year, Decolonizing Design—handled this same topic with more nuance in her text. White people is a term that was ultimately codified by white legislators who lived in Maryland in 1681, she points out. It was something designed and designated legally to create a caste system, distinguishing white skin as superior to institute laws of control.

Norman’s book is admirably ambitious. Disentangling the relationship between design, identity, systemic prejudice, corporate greed, public projects, systems thinking, and environmental catastrophe is an impossibly hard task for one person to do alone. Norman acknowledges this, but acknowledgment isn’t absolution for lacking perspective. Not when white people have used our power to design a world that’s most actively successful at two things: ignoring certain people and destroying itself.

Norman has yet to internalize the consequence of his own point of view. That’s the nuance still missing from his book. That’s the nuance still missing from his thinking.