Design a Better World, with Don Norman

Ep. #24: Welcome to season 2! We are kicking the season off with a fascinating conversation about changing the world with design, with Don Norman. Don Norman has been a well-known name in the design field for over 30 years, and is currently Director of Design Lab at UC San Diego, where he spoke to us from, in between trips around the world spreading the practice of design to change the world. You might know Don from his book The Design of Everyday Things, or maybe you know him as a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, or any one of the other many influential writingsand talks and work he’s created. Don is generally recognized as one of the early framers of the discipline we now call user experience, which is a term he coined while he was a VP at Apple, though he really doesn’t like how the term UX is being used -- it’s often misused, it’s overused and it’s lost its original intent. He talked about that a little in our conversation, but mostly we talked about why, and how, designers and researchers in our discipline should be changing the world. 

Don Norman is the founder and Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. The UC San Diego Design Lab does fundamental work in a number of different areas, with healthcare and public health being the largest. He is also cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group [https://www.nngroup.com], a member of the National Academy of Engineering, IDEO fellow, and former Vice President of Apple. He serves on numerous company and educational advisory boards and boards of directors. He has published 20 books translated into 20 languages including Emotional Design and Design of Everyday Things. He can be found at www.jnd.org.

Don is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s IxDA conference, Interaction19.

Books by Don Norman: The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

From the show:

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor  by William Easterly

ERIC VON HIPPEL [email protected] - Professor of Technological Innovation at MIT FREE INNOVATION – (A book on how citizens create and share innovations) (free PDF download) 

Community-based design organizations for change: San Diego Design Forward Alliance

Seattle Design for Good | AIGA Seattle  Design in Public 

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