Don Norman

Donald Norman

Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935), founder of The Cognitive Science Society is an expert of cognitive science and is widely considered to be the first to apply advanced human factors to design. Professor Norman splits his time between co-directing the dual-degree MBA and Engineering program at Northwestern University Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and consulting with the Nielsen Norman Group. Dr. Norman announced that the 2009-2010 academic year would be his last teaching full time

Professor Norman is an active Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology where he spends two months a year teaching. He also holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego.

He is on numerous educational, private, and public sector advisory boards including the editorial board of Encyclopædia Britannica.

Much of Norman's work involves the advocacy of Human Centered Design. His books all have the underlying purpose of furthering the field of design - from doors to computers. Norman had recently taken a controversial stance that the design research process has nor corollary to discovering breakthroughs.

He co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting group on matters of usability which also includes Jakob Nielsen and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (founder of the concept of the Human Interface Group at Apple) . The Norman Group's list of clients spans from Hertz all the way to Microsoft.

Career

Norman received an S.B. in EECS from MIT in 1957, and a Doctor of Philosophy in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. After a few years at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University, Norman came to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1966, first as a professor in the psychology department. Although he started as an experimental and mathematical psychologist, Norman's focus shifted to cognitive science. At UCSD, Norman was a founder of the Institute for Cognitive Science and one of the organizers of the Cognitive Science Society (along with Roger Schank, Allan Collins, and others), which held its first meeting at the UCSD campus in 1979.

Norman made the transition from cognitive science to cognitive engineering. It was about this time that he wrote the article "The Trouble with Unix" in Datamation which catapulted his prominence in the computer world.

Norman published several important books during his time at UCSD, one of which, "User Centered System Design," obliquely referred to the university in the initials of its title. In 1986, he became the founding chair of a new cognitive science department.

In 1995, Norman left UCSD to join Apple Computer, initially as an Apple Fellow, and then as the Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group. He later worked for Hewlett-Packard before joining with Jakob Nielsen to form the Nielsen Norman Group in 1998. He returned to academia as a professor of computer science at Northwestern University where he is co-Director of the Segal Design Institute.

Norman has received many awards for his work. He received an honorary degree from the University of Padua in Padua, Italy. In 2001 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2006 received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.

User centered design

In his book The Design of Everyday Things, originally called "The Psychology of Everyday Things," Norman describes the psychology behind what he deems 'good' and 'bad' design, through case studies, and proposes design principles. He exalts the importance of design in our everyday lives, and the consequences of errors caused by bad design.

In the book, Norman uses the term "user-centered design" to describe design based on the needs of the user, leaving aside what he deems secondary issues like aesthetics. User-centered design involves simplifying the structure of tasks, making things visible, getting the mapping right, exploiting the powers of constraint, designing for error, explaining affordances and seven stages of action.

Other topics of the book include:

• The Psychology of Everyday Things
• The Psychology of Everyday Actions
• Knowledge in the Head and in the World
• Knowing What to Do
• To Err Is Human
• The Design Challenge

Partial bibliography

Psychology

• Human information processing: An introduction to psychology (1972) in collaboration with Peter H. Lindsay (first author)
• Memory and attention (1977)
• Learning and memory (1982)

Usability

• Direct manipulation interfaces (1985) in collaboration with E. L. Hutchins (first author) and J.D. Hollan
• User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (1986) (editor in collaboration with Stephen Draper)
• The Design of Everyday Things (1988, originally under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things) (Newprint 2002)
• Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles (1992)
• Things That Make Us Smart (1993)
• The Invisible Computer (1998)
• Emotional Design (2004)
• The Design of Future Things (2007)
• Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine CD-ROM by the Voyager Company combining "Design of Every Day Things," "Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles," "Things That Make Us Smart," and various technical reports (1994)

See also

• Affordance
• Executive system
• Usability engineering
• Human action cycle
• Human-computer interaction
• Interaction Design
• User-centered design
• Seven stages of action

External links

• Don's homepage
• Publications by Donald Norman from Interaction-Design.org
• List of Don Norman articles
• Don Norman — Userati
• Lecture by Don Norman on "The Design of Future Things" (Stanford University, February 9, 2007)