Designing for the Future: A Conversation with Don Norman (Design As Finale)

For me, in many respects, this Design As season has given me hope. It’s allowed me to think about where we’re going as a discipline, what’s emerging, and how we care for one another.

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In this finale episode of Design As, host Lee Moreau reflects on the season, and also includes an exclusive interview with famed designer Don Norman, where they discuss the origins of human centered design, speculate on the future of design research, and question the responsibility that design and designers have.

This audio was recorded at the Design Research Society 2024 Conference hosted in Boston in June 2024. If you’re hosting a design conference and want to be the next site for our next season, reach out!

Transcript

Lee Moreau Welcome to Design As, a show that’s intended to speculate on the future of design from a range of different perspectives. I’m Lee Moreau. We’ve brought you six new episodes with six new keywords that we’ve interrogated and two bonus episodes directly from inside this year’s Design Research Society conference in Boston. For me, this has been a bit of a whirlwind. It was a lot of work, really exciting being in conversation with leaders and speakers from the conference and we were able to produce episodes on governance, care, visualization, discipline, humanity and the emerging world of pluriversal design. And for me, in many respects, this Design As season has given me hope. It’s allowed me to think about where we’re going as a discipline, what’s emerging, how we care for one another. In the article that I wrote on Design Observer in the lead up to the season, I described how I was frustrated and challenged by the last couple of years. And truly they have been challenging in the design world and it’s not been an easy place at times to practice. On the other hand, I still think, and I was reminded in these conversations that we are doing really important work as a field and as a discipline, and I’m hopeful that you all will listen to these episodes and hear some of that and gain some of that hope that I’ve managed to find as well. I think in many respects has reminded me that we need to both look to our past a little bit, but also to kind of look within ourselves and our discipline to really understand how we can change our future. And that’s fundamentally what design is all about. So to kind of wrap this whole thing up, I want to share with you today our special episode in my conversation with Don Norman. Don Norman is one of the most important and most celebrated figures in the world of design. And yet there he was in the front row of the conversation I was having with design leaders and as an 80 something year old practitioner of design who’s done everything they needed to do in the field, he’s still learning, he’s still listening. And I think some of that’s reflected in his new book, Design for a Better World. But if you’ve read that book or his book, The Design of Everyday Things, which is the first thing on the reading list for most design courses, I think you’ll understand and appreciate that he’s not done yet and we’re not done yet. So I’m very excited to share this conversation with you. And now here’s my conversation with Don Norman. 

Lee Moreau This week. It’s the 2024 Design Research Society conference here at Northeastern. We’re in the podcast studio at CaMD, and I’m joined by Don Norman. 

Don Norman Good afternoon. 

Lee Moreau For our listeners, would you mind introducing yourself, Don? 

Don Norman Who is Don Norman? 

Lee Moreau /laughs/

Don Norman I don’t know. I never know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing until I’m finished. And then I see it and I read and see: Yeah, that’s okay. I write a book, and then I go do something else that I don’t know about because I don’t- I love to be in that area not understanding what I’m doing and what I understand. I go off to something else. So I’ve been asked what kind of a designer am I? I’m a electrical engineer. I’m a member of the National Academy of Engineering. I’m a psychologist. I’m a fellow of all sorts of psychology groups. And now I call myself a designer. I’ve been a business executive, too. Well, I design people. That means I design designers because I’m an educator. So the most important thing I do is my books have been very important. And the Nielsen-Norman Company, which I co-founded, is an educational company. And my students are very important to me. And I — the last book I wrote, I d-dedicated to my students past, present and future, future being the ones who are reading the books. So that’s what I am. I’m an educator. 

Lee Moreau This is a very fitting way to end this series of conversations. And what are you seeing so far here at the conference? This is day three, right? 

Don Norman This is day three. Well, it’s interesting because I’m a member of the Design Research Society. In fact, I’m an honorary fellow, which in Britain means it’s the highest level a fellow. But I’ve never been to one of the conferences because it’s primarily a European conference. And most of the meetings are in Europe.

Lee Moreau This is the first time it’s been here. 

Don Norman The first time in the United States. And I’m trying to minimize my travel, but not very well. But I decided I wouldcome and experience a Design Research Society conference. But I didn’t realize that the emphasis was on research, design research. 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Don Norman And I worry about that, that I know that we must do design research, but we also have to do things. Now, there are two different kinds of research. Design research means well before I do a product or even while I’m doing it, I want to know who the audience is. And I got to go and watch them and understand what they need and how they really behave. And even as we build the product, I want to take simple prototypes out and see whether they can really use it. And I try to make them make believe they’re using it for their real job, even though it may just be a piece of wood with some markings on it, or maybe a piece of paper — with a piece of paper, we show a picture of the screen and then we say: What would you do? Oh I would push that. Okay, and then we whip the paper around-away and put down a new piece of paper that shows what they would see. There are all sorts of ways of testing. Well, that’s the design research at the product side. But the other side is the design research, which is done mainly by academics, which is — so what is design about? What are the methods? So if you look at many of my books, that’s the kind of design research where I talk about affordances and about constraints and mappings. And these are fundamental principles in designing things that people can understand and use. And that’s a different kind of design research. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Don Norman And there are many people who do that, But you have to really understand what the designers need. I’m going on for a long time, but this is relevant. I thought I was pretty expert at design. I had written The Design of Everyday Things, I was working at our design research group in my lab, which we called user centered system design. We got rid of the word user soon thereafter, but user centered system design is a letters UCSD. And I was at University of California, San Diego— UCSD 

Lee Moreau Kind of worked out. 

Don Norman But we also talked about system design, looking at the whole system anyway. So I retired in UCSD in 1993 saying: Well yeah, I understand. And I went up to Apple and I discovered that all this wonderful stuff I knew was kind of useless in making a product. For in making the product they had fundamental questions they would ask me and I would say, that’s really interesting. We never thought of studying that. 

Lee Moreau Mhm. 

Don Norman And this gap between what researchers do and people really need is huge. Now, interestingly enough, after I was at Apple Fellow at first, which meant I had- I was a very high level job with no responsibilities because I could do anything I wanted and I could talk to anybody because nobody basically I didn’t have any real power. I could go to the CEO’s office any time I wanted, go to the lowly programmer’s office any time I wanted, but it was hard to get things done. So when the vice president of Advanced Technology Group, the research group, moved on to a higher position, I said: Hey, how about me? 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Don Norman And so I became vice president of Advanced Technology Group, which are researchers. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Don Norman Now, it turns out the researchers in industry are more like the academics than they are like people in the company. So most of them didn’t even have any idea of how the products were being made in the same company that was interested. And that’s that’s wrong. 

Lee Moreau This is a disconnect that I thought, or I think we were solving a little bit over the last few decades in consulting, which was trying to get the actual people with expertise, the designers themselves, the engineers, so forth, out into into the field, doing the field research as well, sort of hybridize the work, ensuring that the people who were at the bench doing the design work were also out in the field seeing the evidence in real time. You’re suggesting that the dialog here may be separating out a little bit? 

Don Norman Yes, but I’m suggesting that what you said is absolutely essential. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. 

Don Norman And I’m proud to say that at Apple, they used to start off before they did a product, they had to- the marketing people had to agree, and the engineering people had to agree, and then that would get launched. And then they call in the UI, they call it, user interface people or user experience people. And I said: No, we have to be there in defining the product in the first place. That I managed, that I was able to do. I had started a group which I called the User Experience group and the first use of that name in an industry, and so now there were three of us that had to agree, but it worked out well because we we took it as not as a competition or not as a battle. But — how do we get together to make the best products? And so during- I used to love to watch the teams working because I would go in to watch the team at work and I, I wouldn’t know which person was the that design person or the programmer or the marketing person and the marketing people. They would just do whatever job was they thought they were good at when that was needed at the moment, and the marketing people made sure that they took me and they took me to France to visit some of my big customers, and I went to the Mayo Clinic to see why they didn’t buy our computers because we thought they should be they should use a computer on every desk—

Lee Moreau Obviously they should have them. 

Don Norman Which is what they wanted to do. But I also realized—  that we made laser printers, right? And the kind of everyday laser printer you see in schools and in your homes. Well, they had laser printers, but /laughs/ they had a stack of paper that was like five feet tall, folded. So it must have it took a forklift to bring it in. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Don Norman And when you print it, it went blll at an incredible rate. And I said. 

Lee Moreau That’s a different thing altogether. 

Don Norman Not that we do consumer goods. That’s not what they need. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. 

Don Norman Now, actually, the doctors could use our stuff in the practice in their consulting room, but in the back end, no, they needed a big machine. 

Lee Moreau So having the designers out in the field, seeing what the actual problems are. 

Don Norman Yeah. 

Lee Moreau Might actually suggest you shouldn’t be doing working there at all. You should be doing that project at all.

Don Norman Yes. You can focus on other things. And in addition I, they took me I went with some of the teams to homes, people’s homes. And so I think the way that Apple was doing it was what I’m preaching for, actually. 

Lee Moreau Well, let’s get these people in dialog more. I have to say, honestly, I’m thrilled to be talking to you. I kind of imagined this conversation for several years. In fact, the first podcast that we started, that I helped start at Design Observer was called The Futures Archive, which started out as a concept, as a basically an oral history project on human centered design, which is an oral mode of practice itself. And yet there is no real oral history of this practice. And so you were one of the central figures that I wanted to speak with so— 

Don Norman Bunch of books that talk about the history. But there are two origins of human centered design. There’s the kind of work I did, a user centered design is human centered design. We just changed the name. 

Don Norman Right. 

Lee Moreau And this came from a group of psychologists and computer scientists mainly, which started to band together and try to make computers easier to use and understand. They had a big conference, I forget the year, but it was called Human Factors in Computer Systems. And after the conference it was so successful — actually it was in Boston, come to think of it — it was so successful that we decided to start a society, you know, an organization. And I wanted to be part of the human factor society. But the computer scientist one so it was part of the ACM which is a weird society where it is a professional one for a computer scientist. I’m a member. I’m a fellow of it. But its association for computing machinery is not for people, it is for the machine. 

Lee Moreau Right. A society for machines. 

Don Norman But anyway, that’s. But that- so the human computer interaction group, it’s called HCI or sometime CHI, CHI is- you can pronounce better. 

Lee Moreau Right. Yeah. 

Don Norman And simultaneously there were a group of industrial designers that were called in, mainly by companies like Apple and a few others to help design like the mouse and the the early Apple II,  Frog Design did the early Apple II. 

Lee Moreau Frog, IDEO was probably involved in the early days. 

Don Norman Yeah that was right all the other ones in the valley there. So one of the people who was involved wrote a history of of design in Silicon Valley and it was all about industrial design and the design family. And I, I was asked to write a review of the book and I looked at the book and I said, No, I won’t. 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Don Norman Because-

Lee Moreau You’re not going to get a blurb from me. 

Don Norman Well it left out, there was all a psychology and computer science people. Now we didn’t know about them and they didn’t know about us. And- but over time, we came to know each other and I became friends, in fact, of the head of Frog Design and Helmut and the head of- David Kelly and so on. And we realized we’re doing similar things with different talents. And so we merged. But it took a while for that to come through. 

Lee Moreau So there was a sort of zeitgeist, right, different people in different places. 

Don Norman Yeah I think so. So that we were working on this same problem was that the —  yeah, it was the zeitgeist. 

Lee Moreau That’s kind of a cool moment that you were somewhat formative in. 

Don Norman I’ve been in a whole bunch of formative transition. In the early days, well I went to MIT and got a degree in electrical engineering and went to the Moore School in Pennsylvania to get a masters degree because that’s where computers were developed. And I decided I wanted to understand these modern computers. They’re big and huge. They have a thousand words of a memory, can you believe that? 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Don Norman That’s the Remington-Rand Univac. But nobody was there. All the people who developed the computer had left and started. In fact, they were Univac company. And so just in the psychology department change and there was a new head. He was a physicist and he gave a talk and I said: Oh, so I can’t build an intelligent machine, I can study the intelligent machine. And I went up to Bob Bush and I said I was interested. And he said: You don’t know anything about psychology. Wonderful. /laugh/ And so I will take psychology. 

Lee Moreau We’ll take you. 

Don Norman And I must admit I hated the psychologist because in engineering you just learn a few basic principles and then you derive everything else. In psychology, no, you had to memorize all the experiments. There were no real theories that put things together. So I used what I understood about information processing and brought it into psychology, which to do in psychology — wow, that was exciting. Wasn’t I brilliant? No, I wasn’t. Everybody knew this stuff if you were in engineering. And so anyway, I finished my thesis, my work, and my first job was at Harvard. And when I got to Harvard, I was introduced to the Faculty of Psychology and the most famous psychologist of the 20th century was B.F. Skinner, who stood up and denounced me and everything I was doing. 

Lee Moreau That was a great day. 

Don Norman Welcome to Harvard. I kind of thought it was a compliment because he actually wasn’t he didn’t know me. He was talking about my mentor. That was George Miller. He’s the person who wrote the paper “The magical number of seven plus or minus two”, which is quite famous. But he was really good at it almost— he helped develop what is today called cognitive psychology. So then- then I stumbled into design because after Harvard, I got a job at this new university in- in San Diego that was just opening up. And I was there before anyone had graduated. And maybe there was 100 faculty. And I started something called Human Information Processing Psychology and wrote a textbook. And that-that eventually became cognitive psychology, and then that became cognitive science. But what happened is that I was also studying memory and attention, but I also got studying why people make errors. And then I got called in for the nuclear power problem at Three Mile Island to see why the operators took so long just to diagnose it and why were they so stupid? 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Don Norman And it was a panel of human factor experts. And we looked over everything and we said they were really good. They did the best job they could. But if you wanted to design a plant to cause error, you couldn’t have done a better job. And I said: Oh, wait a minute, I’m a technologist. I understand technology. I’m a psychology. I understand people. What’s this design? Yeah, I like to build things and create things. And so that’s where I started working in design, working first in human safety with NASA, in aviation safety, and then deciding I wanted to try industry. And off I went to Apple where I learned what real design is. For the the first time I worked with people whose titles was designers, and they were industrial designers and graphic designers and even user interface designers, which they had learned at Delft, some of them. 

Lee Moreau And that was a really important moment. Like I think historically, not just for you as a designer. And in the same—

Don Norman Well, what was important was Xerox Park’s invention of the Bravo computer, which was if you looked at it, you would see all the basic things that’s in today’s Macintosh and Windows machines. And it made it so for the first time instead of memorizing commands and exotic commands, you could always see. You didn’t need a manual. You could just pull down the menus and find the one you want, and off you went. And so that was the big moment. And then the notion of user testing and the usability and design research was then slowly starting to build up. And there were many other centers I just mentioned Silicon Valley and UC San Diego, But for example, the Institute of Design in Illinois, in Chicago was doing a lot of that early work and some of the local companies around it. And I think there are groups all around the world that started to do this work. 

Lee Moreau And in that way the user is no longer required to be a technician. They can just be any human being and find a way to navigate an experience. We just have to design it such that it is— 

Don Norman And it’s interesting—

Lee Moreau More optimal. 

Don Norman There’s a famous video that the Xerox Parc did. They they were trying to say that the- your copiers are too difficult for people to use, and none of the executives believe that. So they filmed two people trying to make you know, they had to make 40 copies of this big manuscript and it should be printed double spaced and stapled. In which the machine could do all that. And it was doing just fine. And then the paper jammed. So they cleared the paper jam and they said, Well, how do we start over again? I mean, how do we know how, how did what page should we start on or what how do we continue? And they couldn’t figure it out. And so they basically started all over again. And they showed the movie to the executives who said, well: why don’t you test stupid people? Well, it was Allen Newell and-and  /laughs/ one of the one of the other guys who worked with Allen Newell. Allen Newell, he’s died-died now. But he and did a lot of work with Herb Simon. They sort of revolutionized the field of problem solving and they devised also one of the first thinking machines they call, I think, a machine that actually solve some unusual mathematical proofs. And that was in the early days. But he wasn’t stupid. 

Lee Moreau We would not be here probably talking right now at this conference if not for them. 

Don Norman Exactly.  

Lee Moreau Right. Fast forward a little bit to where we are now, where we take some of this early technology, you said, you know, a thousand words of code or something like that in the UNIVAC, to  what we’re what we’ve got in our pocket every day. Right. And you’ve seen that —

Don Norman Far more powerful than a UNIVAC

Lee Moreau Far more. I mean, that I don’t it’s incomprehensible. But you’ve seen that whole transition. 

Don Norman I’ve lived that whole transition, including the current one that’s going on, which because we’re in the today, we’re in the middle of a number of technological revolution simultaneously. New types of sensors that allow us to see things from satellites. And it great for agriculture and great for fishing and great for other things. And we can also see inside the body sometimes you just things on the outside look at what an Apple Watch and other kinds of watches can detect about the body and they’re starting— watches  will soon be telling your blood sugar level without any injection or. 

Lee Moreau Non-invasively. 

Don Norman Non-invasively. And then there’s all sorts of, well, look how powerful the watch is to do the computation and communication. You know how many different radios you have in your cell phone, you know, between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and several different kinds of cellular systems? It’s crazy. And in fact, when I was learning electrical engineering, we would have said it’s theoretically impossible to put all those different antennas in that interfere with each other. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Don Norman So materials to all sorts of new materials and new manufacturing methods. The additive manufacturing, most people know it as 3D printing, but there’s a much wider variety of ways of doing it. So when you want to build a table like I’m sitting in front of, or most of this is solid wood, but most of it is wasted because if you look at where the strength is, it’s if you could make the table with a lot of hollow spots and you in the right spots, it would be lighter, but it would be just as strong. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Don Norman Well, we can do that today. 

Lee Moreau So when you think about the future of design, even design research or those two things actually converging in a way that’s meaningful and useful? 

Don Norman When I don’t like about design research is that they’re still mostly focused upon trying to make the things more usable. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. 

Don Norman And that’s too late. What about the future? Why don’t you driving the future? And you know, they’re saying we should really be all about using A.I. and learn how to do it, because otherwise it will take away our jobs. And I’m saying: No, why aren’t you telling the people what they should be doing? Why aren’t you driving that the development of those things? And maybe if you had been involved, we wouldn’t have had all the biases that we introduced. And in general, I do think that the new power of the large language models is going to change our interaction, we’ll mainly be having conversations, but it’ll be like you just hired as an assistant who was really, well, naive. So you ask the assistant to do a job and it comes back wrong. So you have to say: No, no, here’s what I meant. And then you do it again and again and again. And eventually you train the assistant. Well, that’s what we have to do with the large language models. And maybe the assistant will make things up too, I don’t know. But the large language models have zero understanding. They’re powerful. They do- but they do pattern matching and they don’t understand what they’re putting together. And that’s why they so called hallucination. But the way it works is fundamentally limited. And it’s not going to get to be the more powerful machine until we change the architecture and add something akin to a sensor of you will. But gee, hey, Freud, Mr. Freud, we need you. Remember you- the ego is the sensor. The ego is watching over what you’re doing and say: No, no, that’s the wrong thing, oh too late. Did you realize what you just did? 

Lee Moreau Well, I’m glad you brought Freud into the conversation, but you’re suggesting we need to get out ahead of this, right? As designers, our responsibility is let’s not wait to receive the technology of yesterday and act on it. It’s influence the technology that’s information. 

Don Norman Yeah, I mean, it’s not our responsibility, but why don’t we make it our responsibility? Because right now design is in the middle levels of a company and you have to do what the company tells you to do. You almost never have a say in what the product will be. Why? We go out to the users homes, we see what the kinds of work they do and what their frustrations, or we go to businesses and see their frustrations. And well, why don’t we suggest that we do things? Now, sometimes designers do that, but they don’t know how to talk to business because they they’re so proud of their skills and they show the wonderful drawings they’ve done and they show the prototypes and they show the prizes they won. Marketing doesn’t do that. Marketing says you’ve got to build this thing differently. You’ve got to add these three new features. And how do they how do they convince management? They show a spreadsheet. So you increase sales decrease cost, increase profits. And I tell my design friends, why don’t you do that? Well, how would we know what the sales would be if was a new thing that nobody had ever seen before? Well, do it. A marketing person does make up the numbers. 

Lee Moreau /laughs/ Or figure it out. That’s what designers do really well. 

Don Norman Yeah, but if you make up the numbers. Come on. The executives also do that themselves. They know there’s no other choice, but they are sophisticated about it. They say: Yeah, but where did the numbers come from? What was your assumptions? What was how did you do the computation? You must have made some basic assumptions to get started. And or did you use some data and fact and then infer from it? And so you have to be able to have a logical story and then they’ll take you seriously. Then they might look at your diagrams. Or better yet, a movie is showing somebody using it. Now that could be a fake movie too, because you haven’t built it, but you can you can fake how it would look like. 

Lee Moreau So one of the magical things and what I love about design is that does blend the physical world and the social world. The fact that we can play with these two things together is really what is attractive to me. And I think to many designers— 

Don Norman It is the interface between basically technology, because technology is anything that is human made for a purpose, and world and society, and that means the social world went for people and for groups and for — yes. 

Lee Moreau So at the Design Research Society conference, where should we be taking this? You’re saying more focus on the physical. We have more designers in the room. Expand the audience. What else can we do? 

Don Norman There’s another I have several different enterprises I’m working on and one of them I’m about to write a paper with a friend who’s at the National Academy of Engineering, and I’m a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and we’re going to write a paper that said why we are against STEM. 

Lee Moreau Say more. 

Don Norman Well, first of all, in other words, is no people in STEM. It’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Second of all, they’re still segregated. You learn science, and you learn mathematics, and you learn this and that and that. And each one of them learns a separate topic. And so it’s hard for people. People often give up in mathematics. They have no idea whether like  why they’re forced to learn this stuff. But if you actually give them a problem where mathematics is relevant, they don’t even notice they’re learning mathematics. And so if you combine the things, that’s how the world works. I think we should stop teaching in disciplines. We should start teaching problems because when you teach a problem, you have to bring in all the different disciplines that are relevant. And that’s the problem with STEM. And so people say, we should add A for STEAM and we should add an H for SHTEAM. 

Lee Moreau /laughs/. 

Don Norman Or something, for humanities. No, because as long as you keep them still as separate things that you teach, it’s not going to make a difference, people won’t know why they’re learning it. And a good example is the humanities — history and philosophy. I was forced to take that when I was a student at M.I.T. and all of us M.I.T. students hated it, and we didn’t learn very much because we didn’t understand its relevance to the engineering we were learning. And now it’s highly relevant. But we didn’t know that because of the way it was being taught. And so years later, I started to realize that, and so I’m now self-taught in those fields, sometimes guided by my friends who are philosophers or humanists, etc., or historians. And I read a lot and learned a lot. And but when I was taught it M.I.T., first of all, it was separate. And so I didn’t understand the thing. And second, I wasn’t ready. And I think we have to be careful how we do education because when somebody isn’t ready for something, don’t try to force it on them. 

Lee Moreau You’ve been doing a lot of work in education in the last 3 or 4 years with your group that expanded. 

Don Norman And don’t forget, I did research on how people learn. So yes, And one of the things I did in my life was say:  I’m not happy with design education because it’s really comes out of art. But design isn’t art. Artists are doing wonderful things, but there’s different. They’re doing it mainly to express themselves and we are doing it for other people. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Don Norman And we have we sometimes have to design things that we ourselves would never want to use because we’ve have discovered — that’s what design research is about — we discovered this is what they need. So I wrote a paper with a professor of practice, or it should have been a professor of practice at UCSD, Michael Meyer. He used to be a CEO of a company in Silicon Valley and worked for was an executive of a Frog and also at IDEO, so he’s in the business school now at UCSD and part of the design lab. And so we wrote a paper about how design education must change. And what Michael did was he looked at how business education changed, because business used to be like design. There was no theory, there was no fundamental work. People was seat of the pants. And then they slowly developed methods and they learned, so basically some theory about why they were doing what they did and they brought in economics and finance and marketing and other areas. And he said that’s what we should do, the same thing. And so a friend of mine, Karel Vredenburg, he worked for IBM in the design field, IBM design. And he said, Well, that’s important. Why don’t we develop a little project to change design, just look at design education. And so that’s what we did. It lasted, I don’t know, four years, except it wasn’t as revolutionary as I wanted it to be and or as Karl wanted it to be. And the reason is that Covid came. We had planned how we would do this. We would have a two day conference, two and a half day conference, which everybody understands what we’re trying to do and we can debate it and they could come back and tell us to modify it, and that would be good. And then they would go off for a year and do things, and then we would come back every year and we would again, make sure we’re all on the same team and under the same side. And maybe new developments would mean we would shift the goal that we’re doing. But that would be okay. That would be part of the plan, as we learned. But Covid prevented us. We had this conference call plan. We were talking about the menus and and then like two weeks before the conference, we well, there was this mysterious disease coming around and we don’t know that is it — it should be, really? So we decided to out of safety to cancel the conference. Thank goodness. But that was Covid. And so Covid lasted for the whole part of our things that we never really got everybody together. We tried with Zoom. But it is just not— the reason I like to bring people together, my theory about a good way of meeting is you bring people together the first evening and one person gives a talk about why they are here and what they’re hoping to accomplish. And then everybody goes off and have drinks and talk and so on. And then the next morning, you don’t have to give them you don’t have to tell them why they’re there. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Don Norman We start and my experience often is the first day everybody feels was a waste of time and we don’t know where we’re going, etc., etc. And that’s why I make sure there’s a another day, because I’ve seen this happen over and over again. A group of people are really pissed that they had to come to this meeting and we usually do it in a remote location so they can’t quit and go home/. 

Lee Moreau Right /laughs/. 

Don Norman And they can’t. So also get, you know, interrupted by business. And so at night, they start working on me. Come on, let’s do it right. And the next morning they come through with wow. Yeah. So then the magic happens. But you need to actually go through that one day of frustration because actually the frustration is part of what designers do. When I teach design classes and there’s a project and there’s a due date, and I’ve seen this actually in industry too, nothing seems to be happening in the design team. Come on, we’re going to have to ship. You have to have that completed by this date. And it’s two weeks away and you haven’t done anything yet. It’s one week away and you still haven’t done it. And then on that last week, the magic happens. And often in classes it’s even the last couple of days. And I think that the reason it comes together so fast is that in all those weeks and nothing appears to be happening, people are trying all sorts of different paths and different ideas and different ways of thinking about it and bringing in new stuff. And they don’t know how to put it together, but it’s all there in their head. And when you force them now, there’s a deadline. You got to do it. It comes together. So you need that kind of frustration and therefore you need it an administration, a manager who understands that and allows that to happen. 

Lee Moreau Don, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I look forward to seeing you at the conference. 

Don Norman That was a good ending, wasn’t it? 

Lee Moreau It was. It was a mic drop ending. 

Don Norman /laughs/. 

Lee Moreau Thank you so much for listening to this season of Design As. This is, for me very much almost a therapeutic exercise, trying to understand my own place in the world. And I hope you’ve been able to share and enjoy this journey with me. It was great to have you back. It’s been a little while and we were on hiatus, but to have this opportunity to be at the Design Research Society conference, meet all these amazing people, host these conversations, it was thrilling. And I think in the future, if you’re hosting a conference out there and you would like Design Observer to come visit you and be a part of your event and host some similar conversations, we’d love to do it. This was a lot of fun and we hope to do it again. Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at Design Observer dot com slash Design As. You can always find Design As on any podcast of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Write us a review, share it with a friend and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer. We’d love to give you a seat at our roundtable however we can. Special thanks to Maxine Philavong at the Northeastern Recording Studio and Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt. This episode was mixed by Judybelle Camangyan. Design As is produced by Adina Karp.