Don Norman: Putting the User Back in User Interface

29:03And most of it doesn't work. And why? Because, yes, the experts understand the issues, but they don't know the people and the resources of the people. And so it's the worst things of colonialism. That is, some other country comes in and says, oh, you can't govern yourself. We'll govern for you. Isn't that nice of us? No, it isn't. People, society groups, don't like outsiders coming in and telling them what's good for them. So I'm saying the people who live in those communities, they know what their problems are. They don't need to send in the anthropologists. And not only that, but there are 8 billion people in the world and there are a lot of really intelligent people in the world and they probably have people who already are trying to tackle their problems.

29:47So why don't we not design for somebody telling people what's good for them? Why don't we look and find the really creative people and design with them? In other words, you want to design by the people. And I'm talking about not a device, but I'm talking about like a sewerage system or sanitation or better education or better health care. How can we do it taking advantage of what you already know? But you still need advice. And the professionals, the designers and others can be mentors and facilitators. And one problem often happens is that they are solving the symptoms of the problem. But unless you solve the underlying causes, those symptoms come back.

30:27But they don't have the resources to do that. And so, again, the outside people can help them by talking to the politicians, by maybe supplying funds, by being able to provide a more general background. So that's what I meant, is design with people and by people. But this is for these larger societal issues, not for the kinds of products that you and I use every day. Up next on Remarkable People. I think that the systems that we will see in 10 years will be much more powerful and different than the ones we see today. And so it's really dangerous to extrapolate from what you see today to what we will see in the future.

31:08If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. One of the examples, I mean, well, my reaction would be, God forbid we could actually learn something from other people. What a concept. And your book didn't go into detail. And I was just so fascinated about the negative aspects of air conditioning And you cited something that was either Iran or Turkey, where they have a building that has very good temperature control, but not based on air conditioning.

31:56They did something with the design of the building. And can you just tell me more about that building? Like, what made that building so great without air conditioning? Well, actually, many cultures have done this. Yes, India is another example of buildings like this. So when you don't have modern facilities, you don't have unlimited electricity and air conditioners, what do you do? Well, first of all, you don't make a building with all sorts of windows facing the sun when you're living in a hot area. And second, you can actually have windows. But if you have an overlapping ledge and you design the building properly, it turns out that in the summer, the sun is higher up in the sky.

32:37And in the winter, the sun is lower in the sky. So if with a proper ledge, guess what? In the summer, the sun doesn't shine into the windows. You're in the shade. And in the winter, the sun is lower. And guess what? The sun shines through the windows. So first of all, you get the sun working in your favor. Second of all, you use very thick walls, heavy walls. And because heavy walls, the big adobe buildings that we built in the southwest, the Indians used to build, because they're so thick, they capture the heat. If in the summer, at night, they cool off. And so that coolness is sort of there for the rest of the day.

33:14And in the winter, they heat up in the daytime and they give you that heat in the summer at night. Now, there's another process called a wind tunnel. Basically, you want hot air to come into the bottom and go up through the middle of the building. And that automatically causes a breeze and causes the temperature to be uniform. And some of these buildings beneath the building, they have these big pits filled with water or whatever, because that maintains a constant temperature. And so, again, the constant temperature makes you comfortable in the winter or comfortable in the summer. The other thing you learn is that the best kind of cooling and heating is a heat pump.

33:54An electric heater is 100 percent efficient because all the electricity is changing to heat. But a heat pump can be three or four hundred percent efficient because it takes the heat out of the air. Let me try this with water. You have water. In order to make it evaporate, you require to pump a whole bunch of heat into the water. And in order to take the air and make it back into liquid, you have to get rid of the heat. And so when you compress air to make it back into a liquid, guess what? It releases a lot of heat. that's how a refrigerator works and that's how you could do a heat pump works and heat pumps dramatically reduce the need for energy so between better buildings because we got lazy in building buildings because we had oh we could always use electric power to heat and to cool no because electric power is polluting the earth because of the way we generate the electricity in the same sense we got lazy with cheap oil right it's easy and we also thought the earth was infinite it's so big so i do some mining here so what it's just a small piece of the earth well we've been at it for hundreds of years now and the earth is not unlimited i wouldn't call it lazy it was that we didn't look at the larger picture so don let's suppose that joe biden calls you up and says I read your book, I Think We Need to Embrace Humanity-Centric Design.

35:24I'm creating a new Secretary of Design position. So first question is, Don, do you take the Secretary of Design position? And second question is, assuming you would take it, what do you do? Well, I'm not going to take it because you said you were 60 some odd years of age. Well, I am 87 years of age, so it's not for me. And part of when I give talks on this book to people all around the world, especially students, and sometimes they ask me questions like that. And I'll say, I don't know the answer to that question. And that's good, by the way, because when I don't know the answer, it's because it's a really difficult problem.

36:07And I don't believe anybody knows the answer. But you, and I point at the students, you are the answer. because you're the ones who are actually going to have to live with these issues. And I want you to be the ones who are thinking deeply about these issues. And you are the people who will have to supply the answers. So I want a younger group of people to be part of this office of the Secretary of Design. But design is a field that is a way of thinking, methods, but no substance, if you will. And so designers are generalists. And what we have to do as designers is use all the specialized knowledge And so I need this office to be populated by people from the different technologies, from the arts, from the sciences, from the engineering, from the humanities.

36:55The other thing is that we tend to populate it with technologists, but technologists don't understand people. And then I say, you know who understands people best? And everybody says, yes, social scientists and psychologists. No, the people who understand best are novelists. Because if you write a novel, you have to give a story in which you have real people doing real things where it sounds like it's really true. And, oh, yeah, I recognize that person or that situation. So let's bring some novelists in as well. That's a first, Don. I've never heard that theory. Novelists? They understand people because they're good observers.

37:36And that's one of the things I try to teach my students is to be good observers. as you go through life, watch other people. Look at the things that are happening around you. And that's where you get your great ideas by just being curious. So here's my favorite novelist who actually attacks these problems. Kim Stanley Robinson, who writes these wonderful books, where he actually delves deeply into what is going on inside people's minds and the kind of politics. He has this wonderful series about Mars, red Mars, green Mars, blue Mars. And in the United to say it's green is good. Well, it turned out that in Mars, they decided red was good because red was the people who said, we don't want to destroy Mars.

38:17We want to leave it the way it is. And the green Mars people were the ones who say, no, we want to build an atmosphere. We want to grow plants so that we can live and survive. But he did a really good job of showing that even the people who started populating Mars got into these political fights, political divisions, and couldn't agree upon things. And I just love his book. His latest book is The Ministry of the Future is all about the climate change problem. I could make the case that Margaret Atwood definitely is being proven right. There we go. It's the clever novelists who look at these issues who really do understand people.

38:54Segway here, but I loved in your book how you discuss about the power of stories that these stories and stories of people and cases are very useful and illustrative. Okay, that's the good news. The bad news is, do you know who Daniel Simons is, University of Chicago? He did that famous video where he told people to watch the people in white t-shirts tossing balls to each other. And in the middle of that video, somebody dressed up a gorilla. Yes, of course. So he did that. His new book basically says that people are so focused on things that they ignore the other conditions. And I'll give you an example we can relate to very well, which is there's this line of thinking that Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't finish college.

39:51So if you want to be a great entrepreneur, you don't need college. Dan Simon's point is that yes those three people didn't go to college and succeeded but there's also another group of people who did go to college and succeeded and there's other groups that didn't go to college and didn't succeed and didn't go to college and did succeed but all we think about is Zuckerberg gates and jobs. And so telling stories done incorrectly or without considering all the other boxes in the matrix can be very, very misleading. So how do you balance the power of stories versus the power of stories to give you a very limited view of the world?

40:41Here's another story, which will answer your question. I'd say this is how decision making seems to get done in big companies. And I've been one of the executives in just these kinds of situations. All the executives pile into the boardroom and there's a fancy, expensive wooden table with very comfortable seats around it. And we all sit down in those seats. And then around the edges, there are these wooden, uncomfortable chairs. And that's where all the staff sits. And now the team comes in to make a proposal about a new product. And they have PowerPoint slides, and they have Excel spreadsheets, and they tell you all the wonderful things, and they show you the profit that's going to be gained and the increased sales and all that stuff.

41:19And then they leave the room. Now the executives have to make up a decision. So they have all those numbers in front of them and they have all the information and they're saying, oh, well, I don't know. And they talk about this, that, and the other. And then somebody says, my daughter came home from school the other day and what she told me was this. I love this. And she tells a story. And the point is, then they make their decision after maybe a few people tell stories. But here's why. Stories are not enough because stories get you into a particular situation and you begin to understand the context.

41:52But there are millions of situations, billions of them. A story is a very limited sample and is exactly the kinds of problems you mentioned. You tell a few stories and you assume this applies to everybody. No, that's not true at all. But you have these numbers and you have these statistics and people have done whatever measurements or analyses they can make. But the problem with that is once you put it into numbers and into graphs and diagrams, it's very abstract. It's reduced from reality. And so I feel that what is important is the combination. The stories put some reality to the numbers and the numbers, though, expand to tell you about the impact on a larger population of people.

42:33So it isn't that stories alone are sufficient. You need the combination. Okay. I knew you were going to say that. I love that story. Yes, he probably was in that situation, both in the early days sitting around those uncomfortable chairs and then the later days in the comfortable chair. Oh, yeah. I can just imagine Donald Trump saying, my daughter Ivanka said, and let's go from there. This is going to sound like a weird series of questions, but I understand the transition from human-centered to humanity-centered. But should we not question whether humanity is the center of the universe? Maybe the center of the universe is not humans.

43:16And, you know, I think a lot of people think that the universe exists for humans, right? We're the center and everything is for us. But have you ever thought that maybe we're not the center of the universe and it's God or science or truth or something else and we're just a pawn in this system? Sure. I think almost every thinking person has wondered about us and where we are, where do we stand in the world? And then where does the world stand in the universe? For that matter, where does the universe stand in the galaxy, etc.? But I think that, yes, we can think about that. But if you look at what it is that we are capable of doing, at this point in the development of human beings, the best we can do is take care of the world, the globe.

44:08And I believe that this requires us to really understand, though, that, again, this is a complex system where all living things like plants, animals, and the other classifications of life do impact human life and very much ourselves. We have to take care of the environment and ourselves and what I call humanity. But humanity is not just human and not just alive things, but everything. I only have one word. In a three-word phrase, humanity-centered design, some people say, no, it should be planet-centered or it should be life-centered. You only have one word. One word is going to be wrong no matter what you choose.

44:47So I try to define it to be broad. But you're right, we're part of a larger scope of things, but we can't modify that. We can modify the globe. Could it be that there is a higher form of intelligence and, well, at extreme, I think that machines are going to be smarter than people really soon. And so maybe we should let machines run the world. And so this is a semi facetious question, but if today you said to me, Guy, you have a choice. You can either have Donald Trump be president or you could have chat GPT-5 be president. I would pick chat GPT-5. I wouldn't. What would you pick? I wouldn't. Whether you like Trump or not, Trump had some of his ideas were good and in fact are still being followed.

45:41Chat-DPB, though, G-T-P, what a horrible name. I actually tried to figure out what G-T-B stands for, and I do understand what it stands for, but I can never remember because it's inventing words. The technology is inventing names. That's not the way to go. But it has no intelligence. It does not understand what it's doing. So you want to give it some ethical values. No, it can't because ethics requires you to be able to sit back and think and have some knowledge and understanding about what's going on. People seem to forget that AI, the letter A stands for artificial. It's not human intelligence.

46:19It's artificial intelligence. And what it is capable of doing is stringing together stuff. But it can be nonsense because it has no way of knowing. It has no understanding. In the old days, we used to have what we called good old-fashioned AI, which I actually was a part of. And we used to develop systems that had really deep understanding. The problem was that our computers were primitive, our tools were primitive, and we were doing this by hand coding, and you can't do that. And what is the breakthrough in artificial intelligence and neural networks is not the neural network. That was a small breakthrough, but the power of computers has gone up thousands of times, maybe even 10 ,000 or 100 ,000.

47:01And that has allowed all sorts of things that weren't possible in those early days. But again, it's simply pattern matching. It's a very complex, sophisticated pattern matching, but it has no understanding. And so I wouldn't want a world run by that because how does it learn what it's doing? Well, it learns by watching people and learning from people. and therefore it has all of the biases and ill-conceived notions of people. And so that's not good. Now, what I'm aiming for is collaboration, because actually even chat GTP, the way it exists today, is a powerful tool. A friend of mine sent me a paper about using technology to help the elderly, etc.

47:44And I said, well, it's a 12-page paper, and I didn't feel like spending my time and reading 12 pages, So I put it in the chat and I said, summarize it for me and give him 200 words. And it did. And I sent him the summary and I said, this is actually a better abstract than the one that you have. He said, well, no, it's not a bad abstract, but it leaves out the most important points of our paper. And I said, good, because that's what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping for collaboration. And when people write a paper, they hate to write the abstract. It's something the editor requires and they just do a quick job.

48:17But here I can have chat through the abstract and give it to you. And you say, oh, that isn't quite right. But when someone gives you something that's not quite right, you can fix it. It's much easier to fix it and make it better than it is to start from scratch and try to write it. And so there's a good way of collaborating. And I'm hoping that more and more people will learn that we can use these AI tools to make our lives better. When calculators were first developed cheap enough that school kids could have it, the schools used to forbid you to use a calculator. Not anymore, because I make mistakes in doing arithmetic and the calculator doesn't make mistakes.

48:57And even solving calculus problems, a calculator can solve the problem, but it can't conceive of the problem. My job is to conceive of the problem and what equations I need. And then when I look at the solution that the computer gives me, I say, oh, that isn't what I wanted at all. So I must have framed it. And some of the design tools and even the chat tools. When someone has won an art contest by a painting that chat did, it wasn't chat, I'm sorry. It was one of the drawing programs. And they complained. And he said, no, no, no, no. It took me a month to do this. It was a collaboration. I could not have done that without the computer.

49:34But the computer could not have done it without me. and that's what I'm looking for that two of us work together since you mentioned this exercise of abstraction because of your book I read that article about the art of muddling through or that's the name of it right yep and Don I gotta tell you oh my god that is like 10 ,000 words of gibberish that if I could copy and paste that into chat GPT and get the gist of it it would have been very helpful. I'm not a dumb person, but man, you really had to struggle to read that damn article. That's a good idea. I should try that. By the way, I want to do the same with my manual from my car of forager pages.

50:16I don't know how to put it into chat, but I think that would be so wonderful where I could just ask, I'd say, how do I change the scale on the map that you're showing me? I could ask questions and I pretty much you it could actually start to answer them. I think the paper that you read, I feel was a very important paper, but it was written by an academic or an academic audience. And it uses a language of academics. And a lot of this stuff is really hard going. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's just the way that academics talk to one another and they're used to it. So I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think there was a lot of good stuff in the paper.

50:51but yeah oh yeah i'm gonna push back a little bit you on chat gpt right so i use it as a research assistant i don't let it right for me i don't want that i don't need that but it seems to me that i have a hard time believing that if chat gpt or artificial intelligence would create a line of thinking or a body of laws that says it's rational and optimal to reduce LGBTQ rights. Let's reduce women's rights. Let's stop the study of history and black history and let's subsidize coal. Like I refuse to believe that ChatGPT would do that, whereas Ron DeSantis will. So that's why I think ChatGPT should run the country.

51:40Now, tell me why I'm nuts. Look, five years ago, you would not have conceived of a ChatGPT. You wouldn't have believed that something could actually produce coherent material that you would say, wow, that's pretty impressive. And in fact, I couldn't distinguish it from something that somebody wrote. But what we have today is in its infancy. And I think it's really much too early to try to judge it and try to see what it really will be good at and what it won't be good at. We know some things it'll be good at that's already proven itself, but there's a lot we don't know. And I think that I complained earlier that it has no understanding, no deep understanding, and it's also not collaborative.

52:21And it's often been trained by human data, which is not what we need. But if you take a look at the way that these systems have learned to play games like chess and Go. They used to be trained by human data, but not anymore. Now what they do is they train by playing against themselves. And as a result, they have created all sorts of moves in chess and in Go that the experts never would have thought of. In fact, when they first make the move, the experts say, wow, the system is really stupid. Whoever would have made that stupid move? And then except the system then ends up winning the game. And that's, I think, what's going to be happening more in the future as well, that we're not trapped by our past, but this thing can explore new ways.

53:05But also there are people trying very hard to add some knowledge systems. And one of the ways of doing this is maybe go back to the good old fashioned AI and try to add some of the lessons we learned there and add them to today's systems. And I think that the systems that we will see in 10 years will be much more powerful and different than the ones we see today. And so it's really dangerous to extrapolate from what you see today to what we will see in the future. I have a specific question here. I think the only example when you use the donut hole graphic was that every arrow was pointing out, which is bad, right?

53:46But there was one arrow that pointed back in, which is the ozone hole. So what do we learn from the example that the ozone hole issue has been reversed? Like, why can't we do that to climate change if we can do that to the ozone hole? Yes, actually, there are many people who are saying just that. And the ozone hole, though, was because it was mainly caused by hydrocarbons. It was the material that we use in refrigerators, freon and other gases, that when it would leak, either because of leaky pipes or because when you threw away the refrigerator, the air is the Freon escaped and so on. That was dangerous to the atmosphere.

54:28But it turned out there was a solution. There were other kinds of fluids that could be used in refrigeration that were not so dangerous. And so here's where the laws are useful. So law often can help because to force a company to change what they're doing, the companies don't want to do it. It costs money and that will make them non-competitive. But there's a regulation and a law requiring them to do that, that all the companies have faced the same issues. So again, there's no problem about competitiveness. And that's what happened. So what happened is there was a simple technical solution. It took a while, a number of years, but the technical solution therefore got rid of the dangerous gases and replaced them with new gases that were much new liquids.

55:15It's a liquid gas combination that were much less dangerous. Now, can we find solutions in some of the other areas? Plastics is one of the great harm. And there are many, many people working a new type of biologically derived plastics that we believe will be less harmful. And again, there's a hope that we can actually turn around other things just like we did the ozone penetration. So suppose a young person is listening to this and now is just fascinated with how design can change the world and make it a better place. Let's say this person is a senior in high school or a freshman in college and he or she wants to ask you, Don, so I believe, what do I do?

56:02How do I go about implementing your ideas? I welcome those people. I think that these are the people who are now in high school or even younger and in undergraduate schools who are going to be in the future. So I'm trying to help. So first of all, I have a website. I have my own private website. It's called jnd.org. JND is a psychology term that means just noticeably different.org. And That's where I have my own notes and messages and things, writings, and where I talk about my books. But second, I have a new website. The book is designed for a better world. So the new website is dbw.jnd.org, which is filled with resources.

56:49If you know about the book and you want to learn more, I'm trying to add into dbw.jnd.org resources that says here's you can read more. Here's here are societies you might join. Here are organizations that are hiring. Here are people working on this. I'm still trying to increase the amount of information, but I want this to be a place people can go and find where they can learn more or do more. Or there are lots of student groups that are also working on these issues. You can join them. And so that's one step. Second step, some friends of mine kept saying they wanted to make a design prize, the Don Norman Prize.

57:27and they were going to give it to some famous designer for doing good stuff. And I said, no. First of all, I resisted her for a while, calling it the Don Norman Prize. But second of all, I didn't want to give a prize to a famous, well-known designer. It's too late. It won't change anything they're doing. And so I said, okay, let's do it. But let's give it to a young, early career professional who has a notion. But I'm not going to give the prize for the notion. Too many designers win prizes for doing beautiful concepts and they win awards and they get contests, but actually it never works in the world.

58:04So I want somebody to have this great idea and they build enough of it and try it out enough that we can see this has great potential. We can therefore bring attention to the young entrepreneurs that are actually doing something in the real world. That might make a difference because over time, I'm trying to raise enough money that we might be able to give, say, five prizes of$50 ,000 a piece for five. And in two years, that would be 10. And in 10 years, that would be 50. And then I also want to have a conference that goes along with it where all the people working on these issues could come together and share their ideas.

58:40And I think this could make a difference. And I have an advisory committee that's helping me. We're in the process of trying to raise sufficient funds to make this work. But again, it's a way of incentivizing the young people to go up and do great things because an award like this early in the career can be life-changing. Do you think that guy who created the system to gather plastic floating on oceans, he's actually doing it? Is that the kind of thing that might win? Yes, I think it is. There are a number of examples. I know of people who are doing things like in India. There are people who have taken garbage and stuff that couldn't be recycled, but they've got, they built these monstrous machines.

59:21You throw it in it and it compresses it and makes it into blocks, building blocks that you actually can then use to make buildings. But so, yes, these are the sorts of things. But I want it to be not from people with lots of money behind them already. I want it to be when people are just struggling to get their ideas out because that's the people who need the encouragement the most. Okay, so this is my last comments, last question. Okay. So, you know how the NRA has a scorecard for politicians and basically all the Republicans get A's and all the Democrats flunk? So I think you should do a Don Norman scorecard slash grading system where you give companies a grade for the degree of humanity centered design.

1:00:13Why don't we make it the Don and Guy system? Or the Guy and Don system? Actually, it could be the, it's either Guy or Don. That's God. G-O-D.

1:00:28But wouldn't that be a good thing to recognize companies who are doing it? And like Apple might get a C plus, right? Because nothing is upgradable or repairable. So I think that there are existing systems that rate them. They're not well. But for example, Patagonia gets scores very high on this. They really made this part of their plan. First of all, their B Corp, which is therefore the B Corp as opposed to a C corporation, is one that is not out to make profit. is out there to do good for the world. And they really live up to that. But that's a very specialized sporting goods company. So we need other companies that do this.

1:01:06But other large companies, a few of them have said that's what they're doing. You have to be careful that what they say they're doing has to be tested because a lot of them say they're doing things and they're not. But yes, I think this would be a good thing to do. I don't think I have the resources to do it but maybe guy and don could partner together after all you have a very big very big network of people that listen to your podcasts and pay attention to what you say you are an evangelist actually been in your career since you were at apple you were one of apple's first evangelists so why don't you become an evangelist for good for the good of humanity i believe that yeah you You know how you said you're 87 and you don't want to be Secretary of Design.

1:01:51I'm 68 and I feel the same way about a lot of these things. The other way of doing it is, just like I do, you call upon the network of people that you know, which is a rich and impressive network. Yep, absolutely. Don, it's been a real pleasure. I hope it's not another few years before we interact again. This has been just delightful. Thank you very much for doing this. It's been a long time since the audience may not know me. You live in San Diego. Guy used to report to me when we were at Apple, except I gave up on him. That's right. Because I was vice president of advanced technology, and Guy was a really great marketing person.

1:02:31He was an evangelist, as I said. That wasn't what we were doing. And so I said, you're doing great stuff, but you really should be working for someone else, like in marketing or some other area, who really focused on your kinds of talents. And so that's actually what I think is good about the companies where you wouldn't. I wanted to say, I like I think you're doing great work, but it doesn't fit my requirements. So my job is not I'm not going to fire you. I'm going to say, let's find a place where you are better at match. Those were the days, Don. Those were the days. Yeah, they were. That's it for today's podcast on the life and work of Don Norman.

1:03:13We hope you enjoyed hearing about his diverse range of roles, contributions to various fields, and influential books on design and usability. Don's impact on technology is undeniable, and his ideas about usability and design continue to influence products today. In fact, I wish his ideas would influence products even more today. but let's not go down that rat hole at the end of a podcast. There's no doubt that he has left an indelible mark on the world of design and technology. Maybe he will inspire you to do the same. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People and now I want to thank the Remarkable People team.

1:04:02Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C., Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana and Madison Nismar. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. Can you tell this is the fourth recording I made this afternoon? This is Remarkable People.