Donald A. Norman's Blog, page 6

The Design Lab at UC San Diego Seeks Design Fellows

The newly established Design program at the University of California, San Diego -- The Design Lab -- seeks creative fellows to join us in an exciting adventure to help move the field of design. The positing includes the official call for applicants.

Design Emocional: Interview with iDeia design magazine (Brazil)

I am pleased to say that I'm the cover story of iDeia design, a Brazilian magazine on design. (The interview -- and the magazine -- is in Portuguese.)

Hill climbing in radical Innovation

John Langrish challenged the analysis of Norman & Verganti on Incremental and Radical Innovation, arguing that we had ignored the evidence from Darwinian evolution. He called us "creationists." We find John Langrish's argument to be puzzling. We wrote a paper on product evolution and he chides us for failure to cite the literature in evolutionary biology. Similar issues have been faced in many disciplines. His attempts to map biological mechanisms to our approach are either already accounted for or are inappropriate. We are accused of being creationists. We plead guilty. That's what the field of design is all about: all-seeing, overarching designers who look over their creations and go in and change them. Designers have that luxury. Release a product and call it back for revision. Or completely change the next release, keeping the stuff that worked and deleting the stuff that didn't. Or completely repurpose it for some other usage that had not been considered at first. Radical innovation within the field of design does not come from hill-climbing. It comes from putting together things that never before were thought to belong together. It comes from the heart and mind of the designer. Yes, as designers we are creationists. We teach it, practice it, and take delight in it.

Verganti & Norman: Having a vision is not enough--it must be implemented

Vision building is the most relevant and rare asset in our society. We do not live in a world where data and knowledge are missing. Indeed, it is just the opposite. The amount of information is overwhelming. What is rare is the capability to make sense of this enormous and complex picture, to go beyond the past and existing patterns and imagine what is not there. The new frontier is to explore the path to innovation by understanding the nature of vision building. For this purpose, we need new frameworks. We need to investigate the slippery intangible dimensions of thinking, the capability to unveil what is hidden into the mirror that reflects our role in the society.

CBC Radio Canada Spark Interview on Emotional Tech

Innovations like facial recognition or biometric sensors promise a world of 'emotion-sensing tech' that knows how you feel. It can be used to respond to you more appropriately, but can it be used to improve your emotional intelligence? With interaction designer Jennifer Dunnam, user experience designer Don Norman, and human computer interaction expert Elizabeth Churchill.

FIRE: How Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant Methods Ignite Innovation. (Dan Ward)

Large projects tend to fail: Software, construction, new aircraft, it doesn't matter -- they fail. Dan Ward offers a simple solution: don't do them. With the time and money allocated for one large project, do numerous small ones. Do them Fast and Inexpensive, with Restraint and Elegance: FIRE. It's a well-known principle, but it goes against the nature of organizations who wish to solve all their problems with one project. In consumer markets, it the disease I call featuritis. In industry, it's bloat. What's the alternative? FIRE. For anyone even remotely associated with large projects, this eminently sensible, highly readable book is required reading.

Error Messages Are Evil

I hate error messages. They are insulting, condescending, and worst of all, completely unnecessary. Evil, nasty little things. They cause us to do unneeded work, and often destroy the work we have already done. Error messages punish people for not behaving like machines. It is time we let people behave like people. When a problem arises, we should call it machine error, not human error: the machine was designed wrong, demanding that we conform to its peculiar requirements. It is time to design and build machines that conform to our requirements. Stop confronting us: Collaborate with us.

Design at UCSD: Think Observe Make

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) has asked me to return to help develop a Design program. How could I resist? Starting June 1, I return to be Director of Design at UCSD, housed in the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (Calit2). We start off with strong support across the campus. Our governing committee consists of faculty from theater, visual arts, and the schools of management, engineering, and social sciences. We hope to launch seminars, symposia, a lecture series, courses, and an annual conference, preaching and developing a truly interdisciplinary field of design, integrating across the disciplines, combining art, science, technology and people. It is too early to announce specific plans and programs. Moreover, we are intentionally vague because the creativity and efforts of the group we bring together will move us forward in ways we cannot predict. We plan to invite both practitioners and researchers, the better to advance design in important, creative, and exciting new ways.

We welcome partnerships with Industry and Universities.

Human Error? No, Bad Design

new essay on LinkedIn: http://goo.gl/l4oWi0 . When there are accidents, injuries, and deaths the first reaction is often to claim "human error," blaming the last person to have touched the controls. That is why the problems persist: we punish the innocent and do not remedy the underlying causes. We won't solve these problems until we stop blaming people, until we admit that bad design of equipment and procedures is most often the culprit. We need to instill a people-centered attitude in the training of engineers and technologists. It is time to stop blaming people and instead to design for people. Fix the real, underlying problems: the lack of people-centered design of equipment and procedures.

Predicting too early is as bad as not predicting at all

It's nice to see predictions upheld, but in terms of practical value, getting the timing right is as important as getting the idea right.