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Don Norman's JND.org

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260 from 17 Nov 2003 to 4 Jun 2025
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2025 1

  1. How I taught DBW

2023 36

  1. Next generation air-conditioners
  2. United Nations
  3. WEIRD People: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
  4. Praise for Design for a Better World
  5. How to make a positive impact on the world
  6. Individual Authors
  7. Electric Power: Wind, Water, Sun. (and Nuclear)
  8. The DBW Toolkit (for Learners and Teachers, Both)
  9. Behavioral Economics: Policy impact and future directions
  10. Podcasts and articles
  11. Design for a Better World: Excerpts and videos from the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF)
  12. Where did the term User Experience (UX) come from?
  13. Journals
  14. Climate Change: Organizations whose focus is climate change
  15. GPT-4: We Are in a Major Technological Change
  16. A video and text summary of Design for a Better World: A talk for McKinsey & Company
  17. Disposable clay coffee cups: Are they truly waste free?
  18. Unesco
  19. Books at the United Nations
  20. Creating a New Moral Economy
  21. Human-Made Stuff and the Legal System
  22. Measuring Quality of Life
  23. Systems Theory
  24. Housing
  25. Foundations and Organizations
  26. Sustainable Design Videos by me for the Interaction Design Foundation
  27. Humanity-Centered Design Videos by me for the Interaction Design Foundation
  28. Four Essential Books (and a paper)
  29. Human-Centered versus Humanity-Centered Design
  30. Examples and Opportunities in Humanity-Centered Design
  31. Highly Relevant Books Published After DBW
  32. The Uniqueness of Japanese Time
  33. I No Longer Give Talks — I Hold Discussions
  34. DBW: Chapter 35. The Future of Technology
  35. DBW: Chapter 1. Almost Everything Artificial Has Been Designed
  36. DBW: Chapter 6. Overview of the DBW book: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered

2022 6

  1. Frontier Design Prize & Speech
  2. Power of Incrementalism
  3. Public Garden/Compost
  4. Irrigation Project
  5. Taking a Stand for Ukraine
  6. Humanity-Centered versus Human-Centered Design

2020 7

  1. To create a better society: The 2020 MP Ranjan memorial lecture
  2. The Future of Design Education
  3. 21st Century Design (In 6 minutes)
  4. “The universe is made of stories, not atoms”
  5. Recycling: A poor solution to the wrong problem: An essay in two parts
  6. Changing Design Education for the 21st Century
  7. Why Designers don’t have much power in companies

2019 12

  1. People-Centered (Not Tech-Driven) Design*
  2. The Four Fundamental Principles ofHuman-Centered Design and Application
  3. Why Criticism Is Good for Creativity
  4. Delightful Products for Healthy Aging
  5. Why I Don’t Believe in Empathic Design
  6. 21st Century Design for Societal Problems. Combining Community and Domain Experts
  7. Inviting Workshop Proposals
  8. Overcrowded, by Roberto Verganti: In favor of criticism
  9. The driverless car revolution must proceed with caution
  10. What Is the Future of Design (in 50 seconds)?
  11. HOW PIZZA COULD SAVE THE WORLD
  12. COMMUNITY-BASED, HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

2018 8

  1. January 2019: Books worth reading
  2. If you can think of a clever solution in a few hours, assume many others have already done so.
  3. Unusable Objects
  4. Failures? No — Learning Experiences
  5. I learn more by being wrong than by being right
  6. Design for real people
  7. Democratizing Design: A Lecture.
  8. Don’t be logical

2017 5

  1. Then and Now: The Bauhaus and 21st century design
  2. You can’t predict the future by inventing it
  3. Seeing the unforeseen follies of autonomous vehicles
  4. Technology Forces Us To Do Things We’re Bad At. Time To Change How Design Is Done
  5. Design, business models, and human-technology teamwork

2016 5

  1. The Challenges of Partially Automated Driving
  2. The Future of Design: When you come to a fork in the road, take it
  3. Interview: Is Tesla Racing Recklessly Towards Driverless Cars?
  4. Norman & Stappers (2016). DesignX: Design and complex sociotechnical systems
  5. Vox Media on Norman Doors. ‘Bad doors are everywhere’

2015 11

  1. In memory of Naomi Miyake
  2. How Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name
  3. The “science” in the science of design
  4. Affordances: Commentary on the Special Issue of AI EDAM
  5. Encounters with HCI pioneers
  6. Ready or not, the fully autonomous car is coming
  7. Apple’s products are getting harder to use because they ignore the ​principles of design.
  8. A Product Is More than a Product — Consider the Chair
  9. Automatic Cars Or Distracted Drivers: We Need Automation Sooner, Not Later
  10. UC San Diego Postdoc in Human-Centered Healthcare
  11. Positive computing: technology for wellbeing and human potential (Calvo & Peters)

2014 18

  1. Why Procrastination Is Good
  2. The Human Side of Automation
  3. Why DesignX?
  4. DesignX: A Future Path for Design
  5. A Great Product Ruined
  6. Hill climbing in radical Innovation​
  7. Verganti & Norman: Having a vision is not enough–it must be implemented
  8. Error Messages Are Evil
  9. Design at UCSD: Think Observe Make
  10. Human Error? No, Bad Design
  11. Predicting too early is as bad as not predicting at all
  12. State of Design: How Design Education Must Change
  13. Gestural Control: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
  14. Stupid Smart Stuff: Watches and Automation
  15. Nutrition, Nudges, and Sledge Hammers
  16. Why Rice Cookers Are Exciting
  17. Stop Cellphone Anorexia: Make Batteries Last the Day. A Rant.
  18. Floorplan Light Switches

2013 12

  1. Foreword: Computers as Theater (Brenda Laurel)
  2. The Paradox of Wearable Technologies
  3. Microinteractions (My Foreword)
  4. Evil by Design (My Foreword)
  5. Why We Fail (My Foreword)
  6. Opportunities and Challenges For Touch and Gesture-Based Systems
  7. Suggested Readings From Design of Everyday Things, Revised edition
  8. Preface. Design of Everyday Things, Revised Edition
  9. Rethinking Design Thinking
  10. Great Design Always Means Great Style (Misc Magazine)
  11. Gadgets? Who, me? (Misc Magazine)
  12. Complexity is Good, Simplicity Overrated (Misc Magazine)

2012 9

  1. Manufacturing, Design, and Innovation
  2. How To Find a Job or Graduate School in Design or HCI
  3. What Moves? Culture & Interaction Design
  4. Automobile Reviewers: Stuck in the Past
  5. The Future of Automobiles (An Interview)
  6. Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus Technology and Meaning Change
  7. My Dream: The Rise of the Small
  8. Yet Another Technology Cusp: Confusion, Vendor Wars, and Opportunities
  9. Does Culture Matter for Product Design?

2011 7

  1. Conversation: Jon Kolko & Don Norman mediated by Richard Anderson
  2. Design Education: Brilliance Without Substance
  3. Gesture Wars
  4. Act First, Do the Research Later
  5. The Design Dilemma: Dismay vs. Delight
  6. Videos from Design of Everyday Things
  7. I Have Seen the Future and I Am Opposed

2010 12

  1. Why Human Systems Integration Fails (And Why the University Is the Problem)
  2. Why Design Education Must Change
  3. Looking Back, Looking Forward
  4. Design Without Designers
  5. Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product
  6. Why Great Ideas Can Fail
  7. Why Design Contests Are Bad
  8. Design Thinking: A Useful Myth
  9. Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability
  10. Talk: Research Practice Gap & 2 Kinds of innovation
  11. The Research-Practice Gap
  12. Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural

2009 8

  1. Technology First, Needs Last
  2. THE TRANSMEDIA DESIGN CHALLENGE: Co-Creation
  3. When Security Gets in the Way
  4. Designing the Infrastructure
  5. Compliance and Tolerance
  6. Memory is more important than actuality
  7. Selective Memories (Metropolis Magazine article)
  8. My TED talk

2008 102

  1. Eveready Energizer EZChange and DURACELL EASYTAB Hearing Aid Battery packages
  2. Trapped in a Lufthansa Airline Seat
  3. Chapter 11: Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles
  4. Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design
  5. Affordance, Conventions and Design (Part 2)
  6. Advanced TV Standards
  7. Making Technology Invisible: A Conversation with Don Norman
  8. Looking Forward to the 21st Century
  9. The Life Cycle of a Technology: Why it is so difficult for large companies to innovate
  10. Affect and machine design: Lessons for the development of autonomous machines (with Andrew Ortony and Dan Russell). (August, 2002)
  11. Cyborgs of the New Millennium
  12. How Might People Interact with Agents
  13. Learning from the Success of Computer Games
  14. The Future of Education: Lessons Learned from Video Games and Museum Exhibits
  15. The Emotional Eye (pun Intended): Introductions
  16. The Personality of Automobiles
  17. Applying the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences to Products
  18. In Defense of Cheating
  19. DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again
  20. The Complexity of Everyday Life
  21. Interaction Design for Automobile Interiors
  22. Emotional Design: People and Things
  23. Cockpit Complexity
  24. Navigation Systems
  25. Robots in the Home: What Might They Do?
  26. Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone
  27. In Defense of PowerPoint
  28. Emotional Autos
  29. Trapped In a Lufthansa Airline Seat
  30. Do companies fail because their technology is unusable?
  31. Universal Design & Auto Design: We Are Getting Older
  32. How To Find a Job or Graduate School in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction, or Industrial Design
  33. The truth about Google’s so-called “simplicity”
  34. Complexity of the Modern Automobile-Isn’t Progress Wonderful?
  35. How To Write an Effective Manual
  36. Things That Make Us Smart: Forbes article
  37. Whose profession is design?
  38. To school or not to school
  39. Interaction Design is still an art form: Ergonomics is real engineering
  40. Why doing user observations first is wrong
  41. Interior Design Versus Product Design
  42. A Time For Standards
  43. Motorist trapped in traffic circle 14 hours
  44. Full-scale maps: Cartography dream realized
  45. Complexity again — Isn’t progress wonderful?
  46. Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users
  47. Dashboards for the Passengers
  48. A Car Is for Entertainment
  49. Three Challenges for Design
  50. People Are From Earth, Machines Are From Outer Space
  51. Signifiers, not affordances
  52. CNN Designers challenged to include disabled
  53. Filling Much Needed Holes
  54. Simplicity Is Not the Answer
  55. Workarounds – Leading Edge of Innovation
  56. Waiting: A Necessary Part of Life
  57. A Fetish for Numbers: Hospital Care
  58. With safety and security, more can be less
  59. Usability Is Not a Luxury
  60. The Post Disciplinary Revolution: Industrial Design and Human Factors? ​Heal Yourselves
  61. Commentary: Human Error and the Design of Computer Systems
  62. Technology and the Rise of the For-profit University
  63. How Might Humans Interact with Robots?
  64. Chapter 15: It’s a Million to One Chance
  65. Chapter 16: Coffee Cups in the Cockpit
  66. Turn Signals – Table of contents and Preface
  67. Chapter 17: Writing as Design, Design as Writing
  68. Activity-Centered Design: Why I like my Harmony Remote Control
  69. When Bugs Become Features
  70. Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus
  71. Chapter 6: The Teddy
  72. Appliances of the Future
  73. Facing to the rear
  74. Concept Cars
  75. Problem of Automation: Inappropriate feedback and interaction, not over-automation
  76. Emotionally-centered design
  77. Logic Versus Usage: The Case for Activity-Centered Design
  78. Why is 37signals so arrogant?
  79. Simplicity Is Highly Overrated
  80. UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces
  81. UI Breakthroughs-2-Physicality
  82. There’s an Automobile in HCI’s Future
  83. Automobile in HCI’s Future-2
  84. 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu.
  85. Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better
  86. The Perils of Home Theater
  87. Being Analog 2 of 3
  88. Being Analog
  89. Being Analog 3 of 3
  90. The Psychology of Waiting Lines
  91. Toilet Paper Algorithms: I didn’t know you had to be a computer scientist to use toilet paper.
  92. Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful
  93. HCD harmful? A Clarification
  94. Design as Communication
  95. Sociable Design – Introduction
  96. Where Emotional Design Fails
  97. Design as Practiced
  98. In Appreciation of Jef Raskin
  99. Exclusive interview with Donald Norman on learner-centered design and other relevant issues
  100. Everyday Design
  101. Affordances and Design
  102. Chapter 1: I Go to a 6th Grade Play

2003 1

  1. Cautious Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens