Getting down to the nitty-gritty of design snags

A champion of design thinking and an innovator on user-focused design, Don Norman, Director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, wants designers to ask what the real problem is.

“You don’t need a pencil – you need something that allows people to write,” he says. “As designers, we are not problem solvers but rather problem definers. My rule is: don’t solve the problem you were hired to solve. That’s almost never the real problem. Find the real problem, and the initial one often goes away,” he says. According to Norman, design education needs to stop telling students that problems are problems – instead, students should be taught that a problem is a tool to help you learn.

“The worst way to teach is in lectures”, Norman explains. “We need to excite students by giving them problems and saying: go out and solve them. Solve the problem before you even understand it!” By examining problems, students experience design theory and education first hand. According to Norman, design thinking should be human-centred. “We need to watch and observe to understand the perspective of the user, and that’s why design students need to solve problems and get stuck. That’s when you learn the most and when the theory starts to make sense.”

Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, is famous for its examples of where design thinking fails. Doors with no hardware or visible pillars so you don’t know how to open them; a newly minted coin the same size and weight as a differently-valued one that’s already in circulation; kitchen hobs arranged in a rectangle while the control buttons are arranged in a line – all of these, Norman says, are instances where the designer didn’t put ease-of-use first.

And there’s another piece of poor design Norman’s just seen in Hong Kong. “The elevators at the Polytechnic University’s (PolyU) brand new building have two buttons – an up button and a down one. Doesn’t it make sense to have the up button on top and the down button on the bottom? At PolyU these buttons are next to each other. Which is up? Which is down? I don’t know who made those buttons but they failed design thinking,” he says.

The Design of Everyday Things was first published in 1986 and revised in 2002, and again in 2013. Technology and design have come a long way since 1986 – in the original Norman says he is waiting for the day when portable computers become small enough for him to keep one with him at all times – but errors in design thinking still exist.

“How do we better educate the next generation of designers? Learning a craft is not enough. I want to see design education moved from trade schools. Trade can become obsolete but general knowledge doesn’t. The Luddites weren’t against technology – they were against losing their jobs. If all you have is the craft of weaving, there’s nothing left to do when a machine comes along,” Norman says.

Norman’s passion for design education becomes apparent in conversation when he declares: “My two most important projects are the books I’ve written and the students I’ve taught.” To this end, he has worked with various universities including Northwestern, the University of California San Diego and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology. Norman instructs students in user-centred design and other principles essential for young designers, such as teamwork.

“It’s important to teach collaboration. The best work instance of this I’ve seen was at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which is an art-based design school. On one course every project had to include input from an MIT business student, an MIT engineer and an RISD design student. At first they had trouble working together but once they did it was brilliant. Together they created products that were wonderful to look at, functioned well and would be affordable to manufacture,” he explains.

Norman says educational institutions can and should teach teamwork – and that any designers unwilling to study the skill of collaboration should consider another profession. “I think everyone can learn collaboration, but some people are thick-headed,” he says. “If you can’t get along, get out. Single-minded people who can’t work together with others have no place in design. Just following your own instincts makes you an artist. Art is important, but not when I’m trying to design a product that’s useful.”