Transcripts of Episode 263 and Episode 264 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Don Norman to discuss how design education needs to change so the designers of the future are better equipped to work at the crossroads of business, technology, people, society and culture.

Transcript  – Episode 263 (part 1)

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tristan Schaaf.

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you to everyone who is helping us with our transcripts. You’re doing a great job helping us make sure they’re published together with the podcast. If you’d also like to help out with publishing, just email us at hej@uxpodcast.com. That’s h-e-y, or h-e-j

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 263.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axiom.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.

And this is UX podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening in 199 countries and territories in the world, from Portugal to Sweden.

James Royal-Lawson
On May the 19th 2011, pretty much exactly 10 years ago, we published the pilot episode of ux podcast. And since then, we’ve published 262 episodes, well, including this one, it’s 263. Which, if you wanted to. And I’m pretty sure you do. This will take you almost an entire week, without sleeping to listen to.

Per Axbom
We’ve interviewed over 130 guests, one of which back in 2016 was Don Norman. And now Don Norman is perhaps still most famous in the UX space for his book ‘The design of everyday things’. But he has, of course, written many more both before and since he has lived multiple lives university professor, industry executive, consultant, keynote speaker, and ofcourse author. And he’s also been an electrical engineer, psychologist, cognitive scientists, computer scientist, and yes, designer. He is the co founder of the Nielsen Norman group and founding director of the design lab at the University of California, San Diego.

James Royal-Lawson
We thought it was pretty good way to celebrate 10 years by getting Don, back on the show, again for another conversation.

Per Axbom
And I think what piqued our interest this time was an essay on LinkedIn to create a better society that he published in November last year. And you try to get in touch with him.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Interesting that the essay, in that he talks about people, business, technology,

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
and society. And after that, we did actually twist or tweak our intro that we use sometimes when we mentioned business technology, we used to say users and we change the people. And now we’ve added society to it as well. But yeah, I tried getting in touch again with Don, back in November after been inspired by the article. So I asked him if he’d like to join us. And I got a yes. But you have to wait three months was the reply.

Per Axbom
And but some people when they say that it’s like, okay, so they’re just they’re pushing it ahead, and you never know what’s gonna happen. But you got you added it to your calendar, and you got in touch. I think it exactly three months after that.

James Royal-Lawson
I did. But to be fair, what Don was, the reason why Don said, wait three months is he was retiring for the third time at the end of November. And I contacted him pretty much at the end of November. And so he was having he was having a break before coming out of retirement for the fourth time. So thankfully, he did reply, and said, Yep, sure, let’s do it. So we recorded another two part interview with him.

Per Axbom
And this time around, as it turns out, design education, because he’s on a mission to reinvent it. And the fun thing I realised when I was doing research now, just as we were about to record, I thought these were new ideas, or somewhat new ideas. And then I found articles dating back to 2010, where he was actually describing his intent with with changing design education.

James Royal-Lawson
And I think this is kind of interesting from a scale point of view is like when you’re when you’re 85. And if you’re working design as long as Don Norman has, then 10, 11, 12 years. That’s actually just a kind of a reasonably short time to reflect when you consider the length of your career.

Per Axbom
Yes, definitely. And heads up. This is part one of a two parter. Just as last time when we interviewed Don, we spoke for almost an hour. And we decided to split this into two parts episode because we want it all.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So Dom You’ve been teaching designers for many, many decades. And you’ve been an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of designers all over the world. And now you’re on a mission to rethink the education of designers. So what made you embark on this mission.

Don Norman
Well there are two different issues. One of them is that traditional design training comes from art schools, art and architecture schools. And that’s not appropriate for design, design is not art. Design is doing something for other people to make their lives easier to make society better. That’s not what art is about. Art is very important. I love art. I buy art I patronise art, but it’s different than design. But somebody people equate design and art. They’re not, they’re different. So Moreover, the world is changing. And I really think of design as a way of thinking of approaching almost any issue you’d like to address, your company’s organisation, the company’s mission, the reason for a company, how it performs, or other organisations or looking at the United Nations list of 17, major societal issues like hunger, and education, and health care.

Designers actually could play a major role. But designers can’t. They’re not trained. A few do. But on the whole, they’re not trained well, and in fact, the ones who often do the best for people who are designers actually like me, but I was never trained as a designer. I was trained in a more broadly based educational system, and as an engineer, and then eventually as a psychologist. But having these wide areas of knowledge is what’s essential for the modern world. Because design is not a specialty. I mean, there’s no content in design. It’s a method. And that method is very powerful. But when we wish to apply it someplace, we have to work with other disciplines. And so designers don’t know much about any discipline, that’s virtue, that’s not a bad thing. Because by not knowing much, you find the experts and you bring them together, but then you try to make use of them in a way that they’re not used to.

Specialists are always specialists and engineers talk to engineers. And worse than that, computer science engineers only talk to other computer scientists. And worse than that, the people program operating systems only talk to people who program operating systems are not the people who program the interface, etc, etc. But designers can cut across all that. In addition, as I say, we, since we don’t know anything, we have to learn quickly. And when you learn quickly, we ask question, and many of which people say, Well, that’s a stupid question. stupid question is the most powerful question, because quite often is asking something that everybody knows that and you say, but why is that? Well, we’ve always done it that way. And as soon as they say, we’ve always done it that way, you know, you get paid or, well, why do you have to do it that way? Isn’t there some other way. So design is a very powerful method. And most designers, they don’t understand business, and they often hate business, even though they work.

And there’s another one. In 1971, Victor Papinek, a very well known industrial designer at the time, wrote a book called ‘Designed for the real world’. But the very first sentence in that book was actually in the preface. So even before we got to the text, the very first sentence was ‘there is no field more dangerous than design’. Why is that? Well, because designers build all that crap that people go out and buy, whether they need it or not and it’s destroying the environment. And he was wrong. He was right, but he was wrong. He’s right about the fact that designers today create a lot of crap. But he was wrong, assuming that it was a designer’s fault, because designers are in the middle level. If you were a practising designer, you either have a small consultancy that you run or work in. Or if you work for a company or in the middle levels of the company, it is very rare to find a designer who’s at the decision making level who decides what the company should do in the first place, and how it should do it. So designers have almost no voice. And if you’re in a university, the design department is seldom the most prestigious department within the university. Same thing. Why not change all that. We have great abilities, great power. So that’s the first step.

And that’s why we’ve launched this big major programme with over 700 people volunteering to help to try to rethink how we educate designers in a more broadly based way. But there’s more and actually a secondary thing as well. Technology and requirements are changing very rapidly. But there’s the other thing is that there’s a big concern in the world about the way that the colonising nations of the world, which are mostly European. And I include actually, United States is one of those European nations. Have gone around the world and sort of take it over and tell people that you must behave the way we behave. And we will, in fact, we’ll help you, we’ll help you, we’ll do it for you, etc. And if you actually even look at the early exploration of the world by mostly European nations, you would, you know, Columbus kind of discovered America, and said, Oh, it’s empty territory, we can take over. And no it isn’t there were lots of people living here.

But the same is true with every place in the world where new people came, as there already were established people and civilizations, but they got destroyed. In fact, in the United States, it happened because we called the indigenous people, we call them savages. So they weren’t really people so we could push them away, or kill them or enslave them. And this is a bit of a major problem. And it’s also the same with design. The way that we design is a European way. And the way that I’ve been teaching people to design is wonderful for four incremental improvements of mass produced items where we expect the same thing to be used all around the world. But yes, as we move to other kinds of manufacturing, especially the new methods of manufacturing, you can do smaller, in fact, even individual lots, why should that be necessary? If you under solve societal issues, why is it then you need to send out the anthropologist and do design research to find out the people’s issues and how they live. There are lots of clever, intelligent people in those places that already know their problem. And they don’t think send out anthropologists to tell them what their issues are.

Why not, instead of us going in and saying, Oh, we better study what you’re doing. And here’s what your problem is. And here’s a solution. That’s colonisation. What we want to do is find the people have the issues and then say that, oh, maybe we could help you a little bit. And because one of the issues is that even if you live in a society, let’s say you have infection, you have diseases, well, you try to attack them. By first of all, to act, disease requires a fair amount of medical assistance, it should come from the country, but it requires more than what individuals can do. But second of all, you have the disease, the disease will come back. And I’ll give an example. But I’ll give an example not from some foreign country. I’ll give an example in the United States in San Diego in the city, which I live one of the largest cities in the United States, eighth largest to be exact. We have epidemics. And so we send in the medical people, that San Diego is a medical town, we have lots of really good hospitals and medical people. But that’s not the problem. Yeah, we have to cure the diseases. But it’s why do we have the hepatitis epidemics? Well, it’s caused by bad sanitation.

Oh, so we send in the educators who explain to people what good sanitation is? Well, maybe, but why don’t we have good sanitation? Well, there are no sanitary facilities, once you’re out of your home, etc, etc. We should build them we should make them available. But come to think of it. The major issue is: we have a lot of homeless, they don’t have a home. And so if you want to attack the medical problem, you have to solve the homelessness problem. Now, that’s a really difficult problem to solve. And the average person even though they may recognise that they’re incapable of solving, because there you must harness together not only many different disciplines, because it’s an economic issue. It’s a political issue. It’s a construction issue. It’s a well, yes, we should build homes for the homeless, but not where I live. Thank you very much. It’s called the NIMBY, not in my backyard. So it actually in the end becomes a political issue. And designers say, Well, I’m not a politician. I’m a designer and I say, you want to solve the issue, you have to become a politician.

Per Axbom
And I think that’s where designers maybe struggle a bit in that you argue that the designers now need to learn about people in society. They need to understand Tech Impact for good and bad, economics and commerce, political forces, power and privilege, the colonisation issues that you talked about. It seems almost herculean. I mean, can we do all this?

Don Norman
Well, let me point out that this doesn’t mean that every designer must master all of these topics. It’s the design profession. And usually, you know, it’s we train people in universities to work all by themselves. And that’s how we grade people, and they do their final project all by themselves. But that’s not how the world works. Almost every all design is being done by humans. And there could be small teams. But, you know, if you work for a large company, and you’re working, I was at Philips, looking at their healthcare, they’ve now switched the company. So it’s mostly healthcare. And Philips, by the way, is quite unique. They do have a chief design officer C suite officer, who reports to the CEO, and I believe, meet with the CEO, like every week, and they have actually decided, hey, we discovered a new opportunity, here’s a new way of doing this, and they are changing things. But their team might be 20, 50, or even 100 people. And so what’s important is that team is representative and has people with the different skills. And maybe even people with different training, not at the design team doesn’t have to have all people trained in design, that you have to understand design, because they have to all communicate with each other and support each other. They don’t have to be sophisticated designers, because they can bring their knowledge about political economics or healthcare or manufacturing or materials to bear to put together the products. So that’s why it’s a possible issue. It’s not because everybody must know all these things.

Per Axbom
So it’s a co creation effort.

Don Norman
It’s called design, co creation. But what’s the difference? Because a lot of the co-design work, and actually a lot of the co-design philosophies came from Scandinavia. is still the designers are in charge. Yeah. co-design means we bring in the people we’re designing for, we listen to them and they have feedback. But the designers are in charge. And I say no, let’s make it the other way that the people are in charge. And we are their assistants or mentors or facilitators.

James Royal-Lawson
Can we do this? can we achieve this? By being open and openly labelled as designers? Or is it something that we have to be more covert in our operations, that we become educated as designers and understand all the different disciplines, but maybe don’t broadcast ourselves as designer’s. Reason for asking that is because I think we get a lot of pushback at times when we’re seen as designers and that we, we come from our view, and we own all these processes, and all these kind of ways of thinking and where everyone else is in. It’s somewhere else that we’re in, they need to adopt our ways of working.

Don Norman
Well, yeah, the word design is a peculiar word, it has many, many different meanings. And it’s not even clear that many people agree on common meanings because design is changing. But I think, and so a lot of us have tried actually to find better terms rather than other names. But actually, in the end, we come back to design. So it’s a new concept design, and I don’t think in order, what we’re trying to do, has to be public. Because if we try to disguise it, or hide it or not talk about it. We’re not being truthful. So I think… it is a new way of thinking. But look, there’s a trend today, a hot topic has been for some time ‘design thinking’ we have all these little courses on design thinking and you can take it for a few hours or a weekend or, maybe even a few weeks. And people end up saying ‘See, I’m a design thinker, I’m a designer, why do I need the other designers’, you know, you people?

Well, the design thinking courses have some benefits, and that they actually do introduce the concept of design. But I always tell people, it’s like, some of my friends get angry with me when I say everybody’s a designer. No, they’re not professional designers. And they tend to mistake to make them think they are and I say, well, lots of people where I live are tennis players. And they may have taken tennis lessons for a couple of weeks or maybe even a year or two, but they don’t pretend that they are professionals. They don’t pretend that they’re nearly as good and I don’t see why design couldn’t be the same way. That sure we should teach design. I think design is a way of thinking that ought be taught in a university to everybody. Let it be required just like literature require writing skills are required or computing skills that are required a basic mathematics is required. Because I believe that if you understand these basic skills. First of all, you’ll be better. The second of all, you will appreciate better the power of trained professional designers. That’s my hope. We’ll see whether that’s possible.

Per Axbom
You’re also arguing that designers need to be fast learners, I think that’s probably the key when you’re introduced to so many different topic areas.

Don Norman
But that’s already true today. So that’s not a new, that’s actually one of the virtues of designers. Because if you work in a design studio, or wherever, you know, you get completely different projects all the time, oh, I’m doing an aeroplane interior or something. And now I’m doing a medical device. And now I’m doing a home product. And so that’s always been true.

Per Axbom
Then I would argue that humility is one of the most powerful ones. Because as you’re saying, you have to immerse yourself within a new culture or with new people, and help them actually do the work, as you’re saying, they should be the designers and we should be the assistants in the methodology.

Don Norman
I think, though, that that’s often a good trait for everybody.

Per Axbom
That’s a very good response.

Don Norman
I can see you have an interesting conversation, because here’s this is a conversation where it’s harder for you than for me, because I, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time until our five minute, you know. And then you’re second guessing ohh what’s the next question.

James Royal-Lawson
But we’ve got some reading through the essay. Before we talked to you today, I mean, there is just so many different points to go to, when you almost get I can understand and appreciate what you’re saying, Don because. From the essay, I can see how much you have been thinking about so many aspects of it over such a long period of time. As I said to Per beforehand, I mean, we could actually talk all day about the points in this essay, because it opens up so many different topics that we could explore and get into. One particular part I was trying to think about, well, if you do succeed in changing, to rethinking education, and the education of designers. And we’ve, now they graduated, they’ve come out of this brave new world of design education. How are they going to feel or how we’re going to cope with their onboarding into the real world? After that point,

Don Norman
I think there’s going to be a gradual process. First of all, we’ve been at this initiative for a little over a year now. We started in February of 2020. Second it will be another year or two years before we’re finished. And third, will you take a look at other fields that have launched similar initiatives, like the business schools, like medicine, like journalism, law, it then takes a decade before the business existing schools understand and start adopting and changing what they’re doing. And I think that yeah, it might be another decade for us too. And so what that does, though, is it means that the new, the new kinds of educated designers are going to come out slowly. And there’s a fair amount of time for society to adapt and for, for organisations, both companies and also government organisations. And actually, thirdly, non government organisations to say, Oh, this is really somebody we should be using or skills we should be using. So that it’s not going to happen overnight is a point. And I think the kinds of concerns that you have are real, but they also assume that suddenly a new group of people come out that nobody understands and how does that work? I think it’ll happen slowly, which allows for adjustment to occur.

James Royal-Lawson
I think that comes into one further and further concerns about it is that the, the incentive mechanisms and the way in which society works. That that’s the thing that does need that’s going to take time to change because, you know, these non government organisations and governments themselves and in businesses, they’re still gonna be stuck in the way of working and thinking from 10 years before.

Don Norman
That’s very true, because government often has this issue because the people who run the government tend to be older 60s 70s 80s, some places 90s and they remain on power for a long time. And the younger generation, younger In fact, today could mean 50 or 60. Who would like to make changes they it takes them a while before they’re in a position to do that. And then there is a bunch of issues about the nature of our economic systems and our manufacturing systems and businesses and in governments, that also make it very, very difficult to make changes. In fact, if a government is a democracy, or, you know, there are many different forms of democracy, but those are the hardest of all to change, because there are very many people who are objecting and very conservative. And I can see that in the United States right now. It’s very hard to make the changes that many people would like to see made. And the country that have it easiest are the ones running by dictators are one leader, or monolith. China is an example of that they can make changes much more rapidly than we can but even so, they have problems too. Yes, they would like to get rid of pollution. But and they are they are one of the fastest growing places of replaceable energy sources and non polluting energy sources. At the same time, they’re one of the greatest polluters with coal burning plants. Because it’s, it’s a major nation with 3 billion people. And it is you can’t change it overnight.

James Royal-Lawson
And the complexity Don, it doesn’t vanish, just because they’re a dictatorship, the world is still a complex place,

Don Norman
It’s indeed a very complex place. And, yeah, so a lot of these issues are simply going to take a very long time, and they may get modified as they get applied. And I have a feeling modification is necessary, because it’s easy to step back and say, Well, here’s what we must change. But that, but you’re thinking it through. And one thing we learned as designers is that you can have lots of great ideas on paper, but when you build it and try it out, it’s not right. So a lot of what we say should be done is probably not the right right way. And so we’re gonna have to do a lot of experimentation. And our problem is the world’s public doesn’t understand experimentation. Because we experiment, and when something isn’t correct, we change it. And we modify it. That’s one of the tools we use, but to the public, we do something and it isn’t correct, you failed, why are we listening to you? So that’s a very difficult issue.

Actually, I have a solution before you go on. I think I have a solution. It’s actually an old one that comes from political science. That is incrementalism, do not try to change the entire world at once. But find some very small, simple place where you can make a difference and change because if it’s relatively small, you’re not going to get much opposition and try and get it was relatively small. If it fails. It’s not a big deal. And if it succeeds, both also not a big deal. But you’ve succeeded, which it makes it easier to do the next step, and the next step on top of that, by not trying to change everything at once. Where do you do that? So massive foreign aid programmes, or even in a country itself is, you know, it launches $10 billion programme, or 20 or 30 billion, it’s going to take a decade. People it’s a lot of money. And so people say, Well, there are other things we should be spending the money on. And on top of that, you need strong political support. But it’s going to take 20 years maybe, and politics changes, the Prime Minister changes, the president changes and Congress changes, the representatives change. And so the next one says more, why are we doing that? And then why are we doing that? And so it’s very difficult. But if you do small steps, I believe it’s easier is the classic paper called ‘muddling through’ by a political scientist called Lindblom that talks about that. And that’s the paper that I’ve been following.

James Royal-Lawson
Does that then Don, does that increase the well, not increase necessarily. But if we’re making small incremental changes, as part of a journey to bigger change, ultimately, then that puts a burden on the requirement on us to communicate the results of those incremental changes, so that we’re passing on the knowledge from our small experiments to others, so they can improve them in other aspects.

Don Norman
This is an example, in a different field, but in traffic control. In the Netherlands, there was a traffic engineer. I’ve forgotten his name right at the moment, and unfortunately, he’s now dead. But um, the what he said was I’m going to make the streets safer and make it easier to get through a town. Well, I’m going to do that by taking away all the traffic lights and all the pedestrian crossings, and I’m going to make the streets more narrow, I’m going to make it look more dangerous. And I’m not going to have traffic lights, I’m going to have roundabouts circles. And you may have known, you may know about this work. And it has been quite successful. And it has been copied in other places. It doesn’t work in every environment. But it has been very successful, where it’s been tried and that, and the traffic engineers of the world all know about these studies. And so a lot of them are being applied slowly around the world. People hate traffic circles, because you get, they think it’s dangerous. And that’s a good thing. Because if you think it’s dangerous, you’re very careful. And what happens is people drive more slowly through the town. But they get through it faster, because they’re no traffic lights, they don’t have to stop, which is also more energy efficient, and it’s energy efficient, for two reasons, they’re going more slowly. And second, because you waste a tremendous amount of energy when you have to stop. And then we have to accelerate again to get going. But that’s an example of incrementalism that is slowly catching on in places where it’s appropriate.

Per Axbom
You said something really interesting there, it doesn’t work everywhere. And to me, that is an example of a fallacy of designers that we often believe that ‘Yeah, I worked on this project. And we designed it this way. And it worked great. So we’re going to apply that over here as well. And we’re not we don’t even have to test it because I know it works’.

Don Norman
There’s a wonderful book, which I learned from called ‘The tyranny of experts’ by William Easterly, in which he said the problem with experts is they go into a community and they actually never colonised because they go into the community, and they study it. And then they come back and they say, here’s what your problem is. And here’s a solution. And it’s, again, there’s these massive, very expensive things. But one of the problems is that they are experts, they do understand the problem, they do understand the solution, but they don’t understand the people, and what’s unique about this location, and so they’re trying to apply the same solution all across the world. And that’s exactly the point you were making that no, you have to take into account a local conditions, the culture, the people, what their capabilities are, what their resources are.

James Royal-Lawson
And history, too, I guess, because they might have been, they might have had experiences previously that will colour or affect their acceptance or understanding of, of a desire.

Don Norman
Absolutly I would include that as part of the culture. But yes.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So that concludes part one of our two part episode with Don Norman, and coming up and things to look forward to in Episode Two or Part Two are things like we start talking about responsibilities, accountability, as designers about leadership and how we convince leaders or make things into their best interest. We talk a bit about Facebook, we get into externalities, which you love, James,

James Royal-Lawson
I did.

Per Axbom
And we talked about ethics. We talked about systems. So it’s tying everything together in a fantastic way.

James Royal-Lawson
We’re even talking about political systems.

Per Axbom
Yes, exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
And if you’re listening to this, there’ll before episode 264 part two of our interview is out. Then we recommend that you go back and listen to our previous interview with Don. which was Episode 125. Design doing, otherwise, move right on to Episode 264: part two of our latest conversation with Don Norman.

Per Axbom
Show Notes including the links mentioned in this episode, and a full transcript can be found on uxpodcast.com. And perhaps even where you are listening right now.

James Royal-Lawson
So click follow, subscribe, or add whatever the button says, If you aren’t doing so already. And join us again, for part two of our Don Norman interview.

Per Axbom
And if you’d like to contribute to funding UX podcast, visit uxpodcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Why did the dolphins elect a dictator?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, why did the dolphins elect a dictator?

James Royal-Lawson
Because they wanted to serve a greater porpoise.

Per Axbom
I love how you said ‘por-poise’.

James Royal-Lawson
you’ve got to kind of say like halfway between that kind of joke I

Per Axbom
wouldn’t have gotten it otherwise. So you’re right but it was fun.

[End of Episode 263]

Transcript  – Episode 264 (part 2)

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.

James Royal-Lawson
UX podcast is funded by James and Per together with contributions and help we get from you, our listeners. You can contribute too, any amount you like, however often you’d like. Or by donating your time. Just go to uxpodcast.com/support

Computer Voice
UX podcast, Episode 264.

[music]

James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody. Welcome to UX podcast, coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
And Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
Balancing business, technology, people and society. We’ve listeners in 199 countries and territories in the world, from Algeria to Ghana.

Per Axbom
It is 10 years since we first launched UX podcast. And as part of celebrating that we have a two part interview with Don Norman. This is part two of our interview.

James Royal-Lawson
And for those of you who haven’t listened to part one, Don Norman is probably the most famous in the UX world for his book, The Design of Everyday Things. He has lived well, you could say multiple lives, as a university professor, industry executive, consultant, keynote speaker, and of course author.

Per Axbom
And he’s a little bit… also been an electrical engineer, psychologist, cognitive scientist, computer scientist, and yes, of course, a designer. He’s the co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group and founding director of the design lab at the University of California, San Diego.

James Royal-Lawson
So here is the concluding part of our two part interview.

[music]

Per Axbom
So if we historically, I mean, designers have been mid-level, as you say, which is why Papinek sort of got it wrong. But in taking more responsibilities and taking more leadership, we also have to accept that we are responsible, to a greater extent. Do you think we’re ready for that responsibility?

Don Norman
Well, the word we, there are… I mean the people I interact with already. But that’s a small percentage of the world’s population of, first of all people, but even of designers. Industrial designers, for example, make beautiful, wonderful objects. They’re trained well. But they don’t understand people. And to have an industrial designer design, something that is actually easy to use by people, that’s the mistake. Second of all, there’s a tendency to try to find the right mix of materials. And so you take this wonderful metal, and you cover it with light leather or something. Well, that means you can’t redo it, you can’t recycle, it can’t reuse it, because they often make it so it’s either impossible or extremely difficult to separate the leather which could be reused and the metal which could be reused. But if you can’t separate it, then the whole thing has to be junked. And so a large amount of the problems we have are because we use sophisticated materials. We can make things smaller, lighter, stronger, more attractive, but they become junk, and they go into these big piles of burning trash all around the world. So we have to change that.

Now, there is a political way of doing it. And it’s interesting that one group, lots of people think that we simply must educate the legislatures, educate the people in power. And yeah, that’s useful. But, that’s not going to do it. And I have some friends in the business that I’ve really learned from would say, look, one of them has worked a lot with large companies and trying to get them to, you know, more environmentally-friendly, he says, you can convince the top level and the companies and they might even have a new policy and change. But as soon as there’s an economic downturn, they revert to their old system. Or as soon as they change, that they’re no longer the CEO it’s a new group of people coming in. The better way is make it in their best interest. So what he does is he tries to go and say, hey, let’s go back, take a look at your factory, look at that smoke coming out of the smokestack. That’s money. You’re putting money into the air and he shows them how they can save money by being, you know, environmentally positive, but by reclaiming and making use of all the stuff that’s being spit out.

And the other thing is what what the economists call externalities. That if I’m manufacturing things and part of the waste product is you know, dirty water and I just put it out in to the streams or whatever? Well, that’s not my… what happens to that is not my business, it has nothing to do with the manufacturing I’m doing. But that’s a cost that’s going to now cause harm to people downstream, or to the government that has to clean up the water. And so why can’t, why shouldn’t the companies be responsible for the side effects of what they’re doing? Because if they were responsible for it, and had to pay for it, well they would change their ways. If they would have to pay for the ability to take their own products and reuse them, they wouldn’t make things that were so difficult to disassemble. And so a better way is to simply make people pay the real costs of what they’re building. And oh, will that raise the prices? Well, yes, it might. But you know what, the people are already paying for it. Except they don’t realise it. But they’re paying for it in taxes. If the government is forced to do this.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, they’re paying for it with their health, for example.

Don Norman
…their health, yes. And so they have to raise their prices, but everybody would have to raise their prices. But actually, no, because eventually, they would learn methods of doing this that were more efficient, and they wouldn’t have to raise the prices, they can lower them again.

Per Axbom
I would love to hear Facebook have a conversation about externalities.

Don Norman
Well, that’s interesting, because the externalities that are easier to talk about are physical ones.

Per Axbom
That’s right.

Don Norman
And Facebook has ones that are, so to be sympathetic to Facebook, or in general, the social media. These are difficult decisions. There are parts of things, there are parts of policies of these companies that we think are just fundamentally wrong. But I know people who work in Facebook who are actually trying to see how to control the things that they’re allowed to publish, that are produced by other people. Facebook, YouTube, even Tik Tok, I mean all the basic social media. It is difficult to draw the line between things that are really harmful, and things that are simply somebody’s opinion that I disagree with. So there are things that I think everybody agrees are wrong. But those are, that’s the easy part.

James Royal-Lawson
I think, as well, with the very large organisations like Facebook, then they have a momentum, which I think also makes some of their issues and decisions challenging, because like, just like the world is spinning, you can’t stop the world spinning. So some of these organisations, there may be people wanting to make change, trying to make change, but the organisation has a momentum, and it will take time to slow it down or change course.

Don Norman
That is clearly the case, take a look at Google. Because it started off with noble aims, and they had a really great search system. But they also had no income. Yeah, they tried, they tried to sell their search engine to companies, you could buy a Google search engine on a dedicated machine, and so on. But that wasn’t enough income, and they true they accidentally discovered advertising medium. And they did their best to use advertising in a fair way. But then they got caught up in the fact that advertising was their major source of income. And it’s actually taught in business schools, the more you know about your customer, the better you can serve them. And so they started collecting more and more information about the customers, to better help the advertisers, and better make sure the correct advertiser is seen by you when you do your work, etc. And pretty soon though, they were in as you say, they got into this huge morass of ethical issues, that even if they want to change, it is very, very difficult. Which reminds me there are two other topics that I, that we feel are very important to add to the design curriculum that are never talked about. One of them is systems. I’ll come back to that in a minute. And the other one is ethics.

Almost every profession has ethical statements, and some of them are extremely, extremely informative. So I’ve been looking at the one done by the IEEE. It’s the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and they have an ethics statement. It’s actually a book. Because they start off by saying, explaining how difficult ethics is. Because on the one hand, people say, well, there’s right and there’s wrong and we simply teach people to do what’s right or not What’s wrong? Well, but different cultures have different opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong. And not everybody agrees. And you may have to respect that as you work around the world. And second of all, even the ones that we agree on are not so easy to put into practice. And especially where there’s a murky line between whether something is ethical or not, and it may actually have to do a lot with the circumstances and how its deployed, not with the action that you’re doing.

And so but we feel that ethics is absolutely essential, and it has not been taught to designers. And we also think it’s so important, we should not teach it as a course. It should be a part of everything you learn, it should be part of all the courses you’re taking. Because if you teach it as a course people think, Oh, well, I can do all my work in ethics. Yeah, this is the other thing. And then I’ll look to see if I’m being ethical. But no, if you embed it within the courses that are being taught, then it gets right into the very fabric of what you are designing and what you are making. So ethics is going to be very important. For the reason that actually you’ve just mentioned. The other one is systems, and systems as it relates to this. That we cannot think of our product as isolated. Anything we do is part of a complex system. And the impacts are felt throughout that entire system. And so we must begin to understand the nature of systems.

James Royal-Lawson
And well, how can we, how can we start to understand it? I mean, because of course we all, a lot of us maybe think we we know systems, or we work with a system. But what was required to make that leap to understanding systems on a larger scale,

Don Norman
By the way, the notion of systems is artificial. That is, what we call a system is something that somebody decided to put a boundary around. But actually, in some sense it’s the world that exists and everything is interconnected. But you can’t address a problem that way, you do have to figure out what is important, and put the boundary around it. And the rest you just can’t handle. But actually, that also means that different people and different components of what you are doing might actually draw the lines of the system differently. But the answer to your question is very simple. I don’t know the answer. But well, I don’t know the answer to everything. But I do know the questions. And so one of the things we were doing and the reason it’s taking us a year or two years or three years to do this, is we have divided up into a bunch of what we call working groups on different topics. And right now we have seven, but we were going, we think we’re going up to about 20. But it may be we don’t know as we go through. Because, well a good example is we decide that we had to have a systems group. And so what we did is we appointed two very, really good people in systems. And their job is now to appoint other members of their group. And their job is to spend a year helping to answer the question that I said I can’t answer. But I’ve asked some experts to work on that for a year. But they also said, you know, there is sustainability, that’s a systems problem. But it isn’t the same as the one we’re looking at. So you actually need to have a different Working Group on sustainability.

Anyway, environmental impact climate, you know, climate change, that should be another working group. And so, we will discover as we go along that, our choice of working groups may be wrong, and some may be demolished, some of them maybe should be combined with each other. And some of them will split off into the several working groups. See, when I’ve talked to the other groups, the youth group that we’ve gotten most learnings from is computer science, which has every 10 years, they have this major group that needs to revise the curriculum recommendations. And that takes two or three years. And they had lots of issues about getting started and how to know who to bring together and so on. But their job is a lot easier than ours because even the very first time they’ve done it, they’re now doing their third 10 year cycle. The very first time pretty much agreement across the world what computer science was, and wasn’t. Now that has changed over time. For example, the field of design which is in computer sciences, human computer interaction, that wasn’t part of the early initiative, it only came out in the second one, because nobody thought that was part of computer science. But today they do. Today. So human computer interaction is a fundamental part. And in fact, in developing the recommendations, they have a set of requirements. Everyone who’s in computer science, aught to know these topics. And these other topics are optional, because they’re more specialised. And interestingly, the human computer interaction one is now considered one of the required topics. But the field was better structured than our field. Design is not well-structured.

There’s so many different versions of design and somebody ever new things coming in that there are design schools in the world that are actually working on this and developing this. And we’re trying to bring in, make sure we have people from those schools with us. But the more traditional design schools that are still part of say of art and architecture. They’re not they’re not interested in changes at all, they’re doing a fine job. Thank you very much. And personally, a lot of them are doing a fine job of trading traditional designers, and there still is a need for those things. But when we’re trying to expand, we don’t really know the answers. In fact, I’m not even sure we know all the correct questions. So my belief is, this is going to be a long process. And that will be to produce something that I hope will be of great value. And if we follow the computer science tradition, which I think is an excellent one, ten years after we started this one, so maybe in 2030, there should be another initiative, which, which will be easier, because I’ll have this one to build on, but they’ll have to change what that new initiative does, because the world will have changed by 2030.

Per Axbom
I have one final question. I don’t know if James has one as well. But so, if I’m a designer listening to this episode, and you’ve totally sold me, Don, I want to do it differently. I don’t just want to work with efficiency and making things faster and cheaper. I want to work on these broader issues. Where do I start? Is there someplace I can start reading? Is there a book you’d recommend? Anything like that?

Don Norman
That’s what I ought to do. I haven’t done that. So that’s a really good question. But the problem is, and I’ve been reading a tremendous number of books, and what I really ought to do is I want to sit down and say, let me go through the books and see which ones I’ve really recommended. So you don’t have to read as many as I’ve been doing. And I haven’t done that. So I really can’t give you a recommendation. You know, you can start by reading our website. And we’ve tried to do in our website, futureofdesigneducation.com? No its .org. futureofdesigneducation.org. I think. We also decided that why not? we have 700 people, we’re not using them all. A lot of them have good ideas. So we’ve started an essay series, where we ask people to write short essays, 2, 3, 4 pages, not longer than 10, because it should be so somebody can read it quickly. And second of all, you might want to publish this essay in a formal journal. And so we want this to be so short that this publication doesn’t prevent you from expanding the ideas in a journal. And so that will become a very valuable source.

And we’re also listing papers that you want to be reading, that already exist. It’s just started. But if you look at the essays today, they’re only three of them. And they’re not very general yet. We’ve just put together an editorial meeting, an editorial group. We haven’t managed to schedule the first meeting, because we have people in New Zealand and people well, not in Sweden, but certainly in… we actually have somebody in Sweden. So we have people all around the world. And as you know, the timezone problem makes it really, really difficult to schedule. But it’s, so it’s new. But this is one of the things we’re hoping to do is to bring people some simple reading, but I actually like your idea that I should sit down and say, Okay, what are the books that I have found useful and readable? That can help say where I can begin?

James Royal-Lawson
I think it’d be an excellent list to provide Don, and I think it would create a lot of value very quickly for a lot of people.

Don Norman
Yeah, it’s a long list.

James Royal-Lawson
[Laughs]

Don Norman
I don’t want it to be a long list. But if I actually think about the books I’ve been reading and the ones that I haven’t gotten to yet, but other people strongly recommend its a lot of books.

Per Axbom
Thank you so much for being with us Don. As always, you’re providing tremendous value.

Don Norman
Well, I hope so. I mean, I lived a long time, and I’ve accomplished, I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished, which is mainly by the way, my students and my books. But I’m 85 years old right now. And I’d say, Okay, I have one last attempt to do something. And I want that thing to be something that actually makes for a better world. And that’s why I’m devoting so much time to this effort. So thank you for having me. I actually enjoy this kind of conversation very much, and you’re very good at it, both of you.

Per Axbom
Thank you.

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you, Don. And I really, really hope that you succeed in making a difference with this, well, you’ve said it, your last chance to make a big difference, but I mean, maybe you’ll have more chances, I know you’re in your third retirement already. So you can retire again after this one.

Don Norman
Yeah, I mean, actually, because I have lots of friends who are in their 90s, or even late 90s. And they’re still active and still giving talks and still publishing. We’ll see. Okay, thank you very much.

Per Axbom
Thank you.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So trying to unpack everything that we’ve talked to Don about across these two episodes, it’s a lot. And I feel like I’m going to have myself listen back to these two episodes regularly, because I think they’re so central to what design is and where we want to be, and where we want to go from here. Because I think it’s important to acknowledge that Don, perhaps he’s not the first one to have these ideas. We’ve heard them from others. And these notions about colonisation. I mean, more marginalised and ignored communities have been talking about this, of course, for decades, because that’s been their experience, their life. But the difference now is that we’re reaching a tipping point where enough people in power are beginning to listen to those who have been un-listened to for too long. And I think what Don is showing that he’s regularly both through the values he’s communicating and now and how he’s acting, how important it is to always be prepared to change perspective, and abandon your previous preconceptions and not be stuck in a loop. As is the case with many people.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and I think something which struck me around this is, I wrote a little bit about this in our backstage newsletter, that, Don, like he said, He’s 85 years old, and he has a lot of knowledge and experience. And his sense of scale of time is very different to us. I mean, he’s lived almost twice as long as me and you Per. And that length of time gives you an opportunity to think about things, reflect on things, you can talk about 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, in a different way to when you’re in your 20s, and so on. And we know that me and you prepared, possibly more than usual for this interview with Don. And he still managed to answer pretty much every single question we thought would be interesting to ask him in his first opening, like 12 minute section of speaking, which he picked up on himself, that we’d pretty much done that.

Per Axbom
We ran out, we ran out of questions, but then we didn’t, because there was so much more to actually go into.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. But no… he’s not the first but and he won’t be the last. But he does have, I think a good and healthy way of repackaging it, reflecting on it and communicating it again, and getting us to look at ourselves, I guess.

Per Axbom
And making it easier to understand. And I think that’s what Don does, he is able to communicate in words that a lot of people can take to heart.

James Royal-Lawson
And myself, I don’t think I’ve reflected maybe enough about the times when we’ve probably been having colonising like behaviour in design work we do. I mean, you could say dominating is another word you might be able to use.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
For a similar thing. It’s easy to dominate. And in many situations in our work.

Per Axbom
It really is. And acting like this Saviour type person.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
Something that really listening back to the first part was, something that struck me was the point he’s making about designers aren’t yet in that position to make real change. But we are nevertheless impacting change. And so for me, that makes us really, really powerful, but without enough power to avoid harming. And that’s scary.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, it’s almost like you’re powerful, you don’t know it, or you’re powerful, but not powerful enough. And it’s almost it’s a kind of a combination of both. Yeah.

Per Axbom
Man, but also, I mean, acknowledging that these things they take time, change takes time. It’s what you’ve been alluding to now, as well as we’re talking about Don’s age, how long it takes. He’s been aware of many of these things. He started writing about this, it sounds like something new, he started writing about it more than 10 years ago. But for everyone to change, and that is something he talks about as well is that it’s not that we will change design education over a year, it’s that new kinds of designers will come out slowly, allowing for adjustments to occur incrementally, if you will.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And I brought up the point there about the incrementalism. And whether how open we need to be as designers, about our long term plan. And we’ve discussed the fact that politicians need to be educated and more aware of digital design and so on, but Don himself said, it’s useful, but it’s not going to be enough. Which is interesting. But we’re talking about periods of time, that stretch beyond governments. And that opens up a whole load of interesting questions, not only to do with ethics statements, but, you know, being open about our long term goals as a design community. You know, magically, if we do actually get ourselves organised enough to be a community working together, then, you know, the things that are required from us to make sure that isn’t misused.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And something that I think about when you say that is that this thing about him saying that, I think we’ve talked about in the past as well, it’s good that we don’t know anything. Designers not knowing anything is a virtue, not knowing anything of course is pushing it to an extreme. But we obviously can’t know anything, but we are interested in the whole system, which means that we need to be able to be more open about the fact that we don’t know enough to make the right decisions. And we always need to bring in the people who know the stuff, who will live it, who breathe it, the people who actually we are affecting.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I mean, I’d love the, I really did like the professional tennis player analogy that Don used. I mean, we do have the argument, about how everyone’s a designer, or isn’t everyone a designer, but the tennis one was good. And even followed up later in the interview himself, almost following the same doctrine that, I don’t know the answer to everything. But I do know the questions. Don himself is not, you know, I’m not the ultimate professional these other professionals that know that — experts sorry, that know more about these things. We’ve mentioned, of cone-shaped and T-shaped individuals over the years. I did a quick check, we actually Well, at least one time we talked about it in relation to accessibility. It was with Laura Kalbag, but actually in episode one, 10 years ago, we talked about…

Per Axbom
That is amazing.

James Royal-Lawson
…t-shaped designers that, you know, it’s important to, exactly what we said with Don, that you need to be aware of a lot of stuff and know when to call anyone else. And that awareness is a crucial aspect of what we do.

Per Axbom
Yeah. But also how realising that it benefits us, if everyone is a designer, because if you know a little design, you will appreciate the skills of a professional designer more, so it will be easier to talk about, it’ll be easier to communicate. And perhaps that is even how we will get the power to actually, I don’t know, create less negative impact.

James Royal-Lawson
Get the power? You’re after the power now Per.

Per Axbom
Yeah, no. But what I was saying before was that we didn’t have enough power to not impact negatively, but we need that power to actually say that we need to bring in these people to avoid harming.

James Royal-Lawson
I think I start to really understand the whole point about systems and ethics. Because it was toward the end of interview that Don says that systems understanding, well, systems thinking and then generally ethics are two things that we have to include in design education, or what designers understand. And it kind of makes sense. Especially with the systems that you were saying, that we need to, we do interact with multiple… our impact goes beyond just an interface or a digital product and understanding how all these things potentially are interconnected or are interconnected. Is a skill that needs to be developed.

Per Axbom
And what Don says is that ethics shouldn’t be taught as a course. But you should embed it in everything that is being taught. Which, of course, when I hear that, because I give a course in ethics at a design school. But the point I make in that course, as well is that now you know this, now you need to embed it in your work in your everyday work. And that is the point.

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, because he’s not saying that, we’re not saying that an ethics module is wrong, in itself, it’s more that all the other modules also need to include ethics.

Per Axbom
Yeah. Which means that you need to learn it really early on, to be able to then integrate it into everything.

James Royal-Lawson
And then your role as someone who’s teaching ethics courses, you have to then take the responsibility to influence and communicate with the people teaching the other modules or even organising the whole course, to make sure that it’s included.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Now we’re doing kind of like micro solutions for just that course whereas it ties in though with Don’s work with creating a design, well the future of design education where there’s a 10 year cycle of deciding what is included in it or not, this is related, but we’re doing it we’re talking now about maybe a grassroots level.

Per Axbom
It makes me think that all teachers should attend each other’s courses. There’s so much work to be done.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the responsibility of what we teach. Or what we share. When are you exploring thinking and when you’re actually teaching.

Per Axbom
Right.

James Royal-Lawson
Because I mean, there’s, maybe this is a completely different show. But that thing about when we both me and you do a lot of explorative thinking, especially during the podcast, we reflect like now on interviews we’ve had, and we work through our thoughts to reflect on what we just listened to and heard. And that in itself is, it’s not teaching, but we’re sharing our early ideas.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s what’s really powerful about us having done this 10 years, is our ability, like when we did a live show for many hours, the other week, just reflect back on what we were talking about 10 years ago. But Don can do so much more of that. And what he’s saying as well, what he’s ending on. And well we’re doing this now, but this is one initiative, and in 2030, there should be another initiative. So he’s already preparing for being wrong. He’s preparing for being wrong now. He’s changing it now.

James Royal-Lawson
No, not just being wrong Per, but also preparing for the fact that the world will change.

Per Axbom
Oh exactly. That’s what I’m after.

James Royal-Lawson
But also, being right now doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be right in the future. Because things don’t stay still.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And I think that’s always so important to acknowledge as a designer that, the thing I do now, its not fixed in time. It’s always related to everything that’s going on around it, and it will probably not work as well over time.

James Royal-Lawson
Final thought maybe for me was just tying it back to what you said at the start of this reflective part of the show about colonisation. I think again, the whole usefulness of working with hypotheses, well you know, I’m a big fan of doing it. But I love the healthy aspect of it that allows you to keep on reflecting on what it is you think, and why you think in, and what you expect your impact to be when you make the changes you’re planning. So I am still a big believer in we all should work much tighter with hypothesis, personally.

Per Axbom
Exactly, yes.

James Royal-Lawson
But it doesn’t have to be a formal, you don’t have to kind of like, implement SAFE or whatever, you know, method in your organisation. I think you as an individual designer can work with hypotheses much better.

Per Axbom
And for me that ties in definitely with ethics, the whole part of ethics is that taking that time for reflection, and what the hypothesis could mean, going forward. That time, even though we say that we work with hypotheses isn’t always made available, and that’s a problem.

James Royal-Lawson
So if you’ve listened to this episode, before Episode 263, which is part one of this latest interview with Don Norman, then obviously you need to go back and listen to that. I guess it still works to listen to them in reverse order. You’re not going to kind of like miss out too much, I think. But if you have listened to these in the order that we thought you might 263 – 264, then our recommended listening is the recent episodes 261 and 262. I’m getting very critical of all these numbers Per. But 261 was our chat to Scott Birkin and 262 was our conversation with three wonderful women in our design industry. Kim Goodwin, Kate Rutter, and Pamela Pavliscak, and they tie in, I think nicely with our conversation with Don.

Per Axbom
Yeah, you’re right. But I’m actually going to go back myself and listen to episode one. Now that you mentioned it and see what we said about T-shaped designers.

James Royal-Lawson
Actually, I might do that too.

Per Axbom
And if you can spare a little bit of your time, then join our little community of volunteers. We’re always looking for help with transcripts and publishing. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
James, I was just reminiscing about the beautiful herb garden I had when I was growing up.

James Royal-Lawson
The beautiful herb garden you had?

Per Axbom
Yeah, good thymes.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Don Norman recorded in April 2021 and published as episode 263 and episode 264 of UX Podcast.