Today he is co-founder and principal of the Nielson Norman Group, a executive consultancy for user-centered thinking; a Professor of Computer Science, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University; and co-director of Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute (among too many other titles and activities to list). Importantly for design though, beyond his writing, he is trying to spread the word of design to our engineering and business brethren, so that they get how important design is, and so that we can work better together.

Bruce M. Tharp of Core77 caught up with Don at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s design center for a no-holds-barred chat. Don starts things off by criticizing the design of Bruce’s voice recorder, talks about his just released book [The Design of Future Things], what he’s writing and thinking about now, the relationship between engineering and design, and much more.

Listen now (mp3, 38 minutes) | iTunes

Filling much needed holes
“We need more unmet needs, not less. How many times do the never-ending ethnographic studies coupled with ever-eager design groups lead to unwanted, unnecessary, overburdening, and environmentally insensitive products? How many times are these unmet needs best left unmet? Why must we rush to fill the essential voids in our lives?”

There is an automobile in HCI’s future – part 2
“The automobile industry is badly in need of guidance on human factors. Excellent people already work in the companies, but they suffer the problems faced within the consumer electronics and computer industries over the past few decades. This is an important arena, one where human-centered design skills are essential. But success will come only when our discipline can provide seasoned managers who know how to work across disciplines, with engineers, designers (stylists), manufacturing, marketing and, of course, upper management. There should be an automobile in HCI’s future: but to make this happen presents a challenging problem in management, politics, and diplomacy.”

It’s happening already, according to this Design News article:

Greg Morris doesn’t spend much time wondering about the factory of the future. He already runs it.

His company, Morris Technologies, specializes in tough-to-manufacture metal components for aerospace, medical and industrial applications. At first glance, Morris seems to operate a conventional machine shop full of high-end CNC machines. Next to the machine tools, though, Morris quietly runs a bank of EOS direct metal laser-sintering (DMLS) machines, which build up parts from successive layers of fused metal powder.

With six machines, Morris has the world’s highest concentration of DMLS capacity. And he has been using those machines not just to make prototypes but also to turn out production parts. It’s a practice that goes by many names — including rapid manufacturing, direct digital manufacturing, solid freeform fabrication and low-volume-layered manufacturing. All of the names refer to the use of additive fabrication technologies, which were initially intended for prototyping, to make finished goods, instead. Morris believes additive fabrication systems will soon occupy an increasingly prominent space on our shop floors. “We’re on the verge of a revolution in how things are made,” he says.

This is also the right time to add another category to Putting People First: mechatronics (under “Business”). It is a term that was recently re-introduced by Donald Norman, and I add it as a category because I think it is particularly relevant to the city where I live (Turin, Italy) with its great and very high-end mechanical engineering tradition – and therefore also for any other engineering-focused economy.

Command line languages
We navigate the Internet by typing phrases into our browsers and invoking our favorite search engine. But more and more, we type in commands, not search items. All the major search engines now allow typed commands, bypassing any intermediate Web pages to directly yield answers. [...]
These modern command languages have some major virtues over the ones in the past. They are tolerant of variations, robust, and exhibit slight touches of natural language flexibility.

Perhaps a clue for policy makers in regional areas with lots of mechanical engineering companies: why not position yourself as the leader in the new field of “mechatronics”?

Physicality
The return to physical devices, where we control things by physical movement; turning, moving, and manipulating appropriate mechanical devices.
Physical devices have immediate design virtues, but they require new rules of engagement that differ from what we are used to with the typical mouse movements and clicks of the traditional keyboard and mouse interface. Designers have to learn how to translate the mechanical actions and directness into control of the task.

(via Pasta and Vinegar)

The excerpt, entitled “How to Talk to People”, is part of an ancient manuscript Norman uncovered, written some time in the 21st century, trying to teach machines patience in their interactions with people.

In short, a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek, deadpan must-read.

Download “How to Talk to People” (pdf, 583 kb, 4 pages)

The book’s expected publication date is October 2007. The publisher is Basic Books (New York).

Tentative table of contents:

1. Cautious cars and cantankerous kitchens: how machines take control
2. Servants of our machines
3. The psychology of people & machines
4. The role of automation
5. Natural interaction
6. Six rules for the design of smart things
7. The future of everyday things
8. Afterward: the machine’s point of view

A Word document of the first chapter (24 pages) can be downloaded here.

The Afterward (3 pages and here entitled “How to take to people”) is available as a pdf download.

The book will be published by Basic Books, probably in early 2008. According to Norman it is about the ever-increasing role of automation in our homes and automobiles, why it is being done so badly, with suggestions for doing it right through what he calls “natural interaction”.

Entitled “Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens: How Machines Take Control“, the first chapter aims to set out the driving questions of the book: “As we start giving the objects around us more initiative, more intelligence, and more emotions and personality, what does this do to the way we relate with one another? What has happened to our society when we listen to our machines more than people?”

Some quotes from the first chapter:

“We fool ourselves if we believe we communicate with machines. Those who design advanced technology are proud of the communication capabilities they have built into their systems. The machines talk with their users, and in turn their users talk with their machines. But closer analysis shows this to be a myth. There is no communication, not the real, two-way, back-and-forth discussion that characterizes true dialog, true communication. No, what we have are two monologues, two one-way communications. People instruct the machines. The machines signal their states and actions to people. Two monologues do not make a dialogue.”

“As our technology becomes more powerful, more in control, its failure at collaboration and communication becomes ever more critical. Collaboration requires interaction and communication. It means explaining and giving reasons. Trust is a tenuous relationship, formed through experience and understanding. With automatic, so-called intelligent devices, trust is sometimes conferred undeservedly. Or withheld, equally undeservedly. The real problem, I believe, is a lack of communication. Designers do not understand that their job is to enhance the coordination and cooperation of both parties, people and machines. Instead, they believe that their goal is to take over, to do the task completely, except when the machine gets into trouble, when suddenly becomes the person’s responsibility to take command.”

“More and more, our cars, kitchens, and appliances are taking control, doing what they think best without debate or discussion. [...] The problem is the lack of dialogue, the illusion of authority by our machines, and our inability to converse, understand, or negotiate.”

“Successful dialogue requires a large amount of shared, common knowledge and experiences. It requires appreciation of the environment and context, of the history leading up to the moment, and of the many differing goals and motives of the people involved. But it can be very difficult to establish this shared, common understanding with people, so how do we expect to be able to develop it with machines? No, I now believe that this “common ground,” as psycholinguists call it, is impossible between human and machine. We simply cannot share the same history, the same sort of family upbringing, the same interactions with other people. But without a common ground, the dream of machines that are team players goes away. This does not mean we cannot have cooperative, useful interaction with our machines, but we must approach it in a far different way than we have been doing up to now. We need to approach interaction with machines somewhat as we do interaction with animals: we are intelligent, they are intelligent, but with different understandings of the situation, different capabilities. Sometimes we need to obey the animals or machines; sometimes they need to obey us. We need a very different approach, one I call natural interaction.”

Norman goes on to ask what it would mean to have a graceful symbiosis of people and technology, and argues for a more natural form of interaction, “an interaction that can take place subconsciously, without effort, whereby the communication in both directions is done so naturally, so effortlessly, that the result is a smooth merger of person and machine, jointly doing the task.”

Read first chapter

“To imagine the phone of the future is also to imagine the future of consumer technology, and its personal and social impact. What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and probably will let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?”

“The chances are that phones will not only look very different—they may not even be seen. They may be hidden in jewellery or accessories, or even embedded in the body. They will undoubtedly have a host of additional features and novel uses, and users will probably interact with them in new ways, too. And even if they are still called ‘phones’—a word derived from the Greek word for voice—making voice calls may no longer be their primary function.”

The wide-ranging article, which quotes Donald Norman, Bruce Sterling, and Bruno Giussani among others, acknowledges a crucial foresight problem: “Although extrapolating from today’s phones by following technology trends can provide some clues about their future direction, the danger with this approach is that it risks overlooking discontinuities in their evolution.”

A more behaviour-centred approach to foresight might help: “No doubt other new functions will be incorporated into phones. But which ones? Given their uniquely personal nature—some people feel naked without their handsets—it seems likely that they might subsume the other two items that are generally carried everywhere, namely wallets and keys.”

Another human-centred angle is to focus on the social consequences of future phones. “Social factors play a crucial role in determining which technologies end up being adopted, and how they are used.” Insights by Max Hunter, Pierre de Vries and Donald Norman are cited on this topic.

Read full story

But where can you study it?

The short answer is that you can’t really study experience design. To my knowledge there is only one small programme of experience design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

An alternative is to go to a design school with a strong user-centred and experience design focus such as the one at Stanford or at IIT, both in the US.

One can also study interaction design, a field that does not always have the same user focus as experience design, and there are programmes now in many countries, including Australia (University of Melbourne, University of Queensland), Canada (Simon Fraser University), Denmark (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design), Ireland (University of Limerick), Japan (Keio University, University of Tokyo), Sweden (Chalmers, Malmo, Umea), UK (City University London, Middlesex University, RCA, University of Dundee), and the USA (Art Center College of Design, Carnegie Mellon, Indiana University, ITP, Parsons, Savannah College of Art and Design, University of Baltimore, University of Maryland).
[This is just a provisional list - see here, here and here for more discussion on interaction design education]

Other related fields are communication design, HCI and information design, or you can join a programme in what in Europe is sometimes called “new media” or “multimedia”.

Amsterdam also host the European Centre for the Experience Economy.

Bob Jacobson, the entrepreneur and visionary thinker behind the Total Experience weblog, just raised the issue in an email he sent to a selected group of people including Bill Moggridge, John Thackara, Donald Norman and some 26 others, where he underlines the need for an Experience Design Institute, as a place of study and research, as a site of serious reflection and discourse. I think his call is most appropriate and timely (if not overdue), and as per usual with Bob, well thought through. Why have I received 625 email newsgroup messages in the last four months mentioning “experience design” and there is only one study programme explicitly dealing with this?

The challenge is out there. Who is taking it on?

UPDATE: 12 September 2006

Apparently, some institutions are taking on the challenge and preparing experience design programmes or labs. Interestingly, they are not in the U.S. The Utrecht School of Arts (The Netherlands) is in the planning phases of a new bachelor course called Ambient Experience Design. Also the Belgian Media & Design Academy is setting up an Experience Design Lab (disclosure: I am working with them helping them in this process). I hear some interesting things coming out of Portugal, but I am still inquiring to find out more. The most developed for now seems to be the “design para a experiência” initiative of the Nomads center at the University of San Paolo, under the leadership of Marcelo Tramontano.

“Many of the design tools used by the Human-Centered Design community lead to well-structured, carefully organized designs, often using powerful card-sorting and hierarchical clustering algorithms to make similar things be located near one another. Call this the “Hardware store” organization. Hammers are in the hammer section where they are all logically arranged. Nails are in the nail section.”

“The hardware store organization is based upon a taxonomy: appropriate for libraries and for stores where the major problem is locating the desired item out of context. But note that some stores have learned to provide activity-centered organization in addition to their normal classification. Thus, smart food stores put potato chips and pretzels next to the beer. And some even put beer next to the diapers, so that when a shopper makes a late night, emergency trip to get more diapers, why there is the beer, temptingly convenient. Sensible, well-organized logical design would not support this real behavior.”

“The best solution is to provide both solutions: taxonomies and taskonomies. Some websites organize all their items logically and sensibly in a taxonomic structure, but once a particular item has been selected, taskonomic information appears. For example, if examining a pair of pants, the website might suggest shoes and shirts that match. Look at a printer and the website might suggest ink, paper, and other related accessories. Buy a book, and the website suggests other books on related topics, or sometimes, books purchased by other people who also bought the book under consideration. Such recommendations based upon past behavior are often superior to recommendations based upon logic.”

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We know how to make products that are easy to use and understand. But what about emotions? What about designs that delight? What do we know about how to produce an emotional impact?

Why are Google earth, Google maps (maps.google.com), the Beta version of Yahoo! maps (maps.yahoo.com/beta) and Microsoft’s Windows Live (local.live.com) so compelling, addictive, delightful? They provide the same information as the older, static maps from Yahoo!, MapQuest, MSN, and others, and the very same driving directions. They aren’t any more usable or easy to understand than the older, more static sites – some people have even found them more difficult, especially in their beta deployments. But they are more fun and engaging. What lessons can be learned from this?

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(via Usability in the News)

This was announced this Wednesday by the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, USA. The ceremony will take place on 27 April 2006.

For 182 years, The Franklin Institute has honored the greatest men and women of science, engineering, and technology. The Franklin Institute Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious comprehensive science awards in the world.

Among science’s highest honors, The Franklin Institute Awards identify individuals whose great innovation has benefited humanity, advanced science, launched new fields of inquiry, and deepened our understanding of the universe.

2006 laureates
Background story (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Four speakers operating in the field between the human sciences and design – Donald Norman, Josephine Green, Henk Janssen (Indes) and Paul Hekkert (IO) – will provide position statements in engaging presentations. The four positions will form the basis for a lively debate between the speakers and an audience of designers and design researchers.

Entrance to the symposium is free of charge.

Visit symposium website

(via John Thackara)

‘Consumers now get angry when the interaction design of a product or service is not perfect. People used to think it was they who were stupid; now they say the offering and the company are stupid.

‘But design knowledge is more than just methods of understanding users. Executives are using design in the early stages of their processes and in solving types of problems that traditionally have not involved designers. This is in stark contrast to the conventional model of the past in which design was involved late in the process, making decisions about visual form after engineering and marketing had defined the basic direction,’ says Patrick Whitney, Director, Institute of Design, IIT, in his introduction.

Points of View from the 2005 Institute of Design Strategy Conference.
Institute of Design at IIT

Chicago
Josephine Green / Philips Design
Larry Keeley / Doblin Inc
Donald Norman / Neilsen Norman Group
GK VanPatter / Humantific / NextDesign Leadership Institute
Patrick Whitney / Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology

Download book preview (pdf, 120 kb, 17 pages)

(Content from NextDesign Leadership Institute: New York, www.nextd.org

(via UsabilityNews)

(via Usernomics)

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(via Usability Views)