Donald Norman
Don Norman
Biography
Donald Arthur Norman, born December 25, 1935, is an American researcher, professor, and author.[1] He studied at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his doctorate in 1962 with a thesis on sensory thresholds and response biases in detection experiments, advised by R. Duncan Luce.[1]
He first retired from the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Cognitive Science Department, in 1993.[2] He then joined Apple as an Apple Fellow and became UX Architect of a three-person group called the User Experience Office, the first use of the term "user experience" in a job title.[2] He later held an executive position at Hewlett-Packard.[3] He also served as co-director of the MMM dual degree program at Northwestern University, which combined an MBA and an engineering degree with a design focus.[2] He returned to UC San Diego to establish the Design Lab, and retired from it in 2020.[2]
He remains Honorary Professor and Founding Director Emeritus of the Design Lab.[4] He is also an honorary professor at Tongji University in Shanghai and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.[3] He is a co-founder of CHI and received its lifetime achievement award, and is a fellow of the ACM, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the Design Research Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[2]
With Jakob Nielsen he co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group.[1] He is a board member there and a member of the nonprofit charity The Don Norman Design Award and Summit.[2] His website is jnd.org.[3]
Contribution
Norman is best known for his work in design, usability engineering, and cognitive science, and shaped the development of cognitive systems engineering.[1] He introduced and popularized affordances, signifiers, and the three levels of emotional design.[5]
His central argument is that when a person fails to operate an object, the fault usually belongs to the design rather than the person. Feedback, mapping, and constraints are treated as variables the designer controls, and a failure in any of them produces behavior that gets misread as user error.
In The Design of Future Things he examined machines that act on their own initiative, arguing for a theory of human-machine interaction that engineers and industrial designers could put into practice.[6] His more recent work has concerned complex sociotechnical systems and humanity-centered system design.[4]
Selected Books
- The Design of Everyday Things (1988, as The Psychology of Everyday Things; revised and expanded 2013)[5]
- Emotional Design[3]
- The Design of Future Things (2007)[6]
- Living with Complexity[3]
- Design For a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered (2023)[3]
Related Reading
- The Design of Everyday Things
- Designing Interactions
- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
- Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
- The Psychology Of Everyday Living
- The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Don Norman, Wikipedia.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Don Norman, co-founder and board member of Nielsen Norman Group, Nielsen Norman Group.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Don Norman, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Don Norman, Donald A. Norman, Google Scholar.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Who is Don Norman?, Interaction Design Foundation.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Don Norman, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
