Don Norman: Design for a Better World
03/12/23 • 63 min
1 Listener
What role does design have in solving the world’s biggest problems? What can designers add? Some would say that designers played a role in getting us into our current mess. Can they also get us out of it? How can we design solutions for problems in complex systems that are evolving, emerging, and changing?
To answer these questions, we talked with Don Norman about his book, Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered. In his book, Don proposes a new way of thinking, one that recognizes our place in a complex global system where even simple behaviors affect the entire world. He identifies the economic metrics that contribute to the harmful effects of commerce and manufacturing and proposes a recalibration of what we consider important in life.
Don Norman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Psychology and founding director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego from which he has retired twice. Don is also retired from and holds the emeritus title from Northwestern University, the Nielsen Norman Group and a few other organizations. He was an Apple Vice President, has been an advisor and board member for numerous companies, and has three honorary degrees. His numerous books have been translated into over 20 languages, including The Design of Everyday Things and Living with Complexity.
It was a true pleasure to talk with Don, someone who we have read and followed for decades. His work is central to much of today’s design practices and we loved talking with him about where he hopes design may take us.
Learn more about Don Norman.
Learn more about Don’s book Design for a Better World.
About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards:
Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world.
We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.
Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world.
If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds.
Learn more about Sonder Studio
Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your email
Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on Amazon
Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world.
#ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai
What role does design have in solving the world’s biggest problems? What can designers add? Some would say that designers played a role in getting us into our current mess. Can they also get us out of it? How can we design solutions for problems in complex systems that are evolving, emerging, and changing?
To answer these questions, we talked with Don Norman about his book, Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered. In his book, Don proposes a new way of thinking, one that recognizes our place in a complex global system where even simple behaviors affect the entire world. He identifies the economic metrics that contribute to the harmful effects of commerce and manufacturing and proposes a recalibration of what we consider important in life.
Don Norman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Psychology and founding director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego from which he has retired twice. Don is also retired from and holds the emeritus title from Northwestern University, the Nielsen Norman Group and a few other organizations. He was an Apple Vice President, has been an advisor and board member for numerous companies, and has three honorary degrees. His numerous books have been translated into over 20 languages, including The Design of Everyday Things and Living with Complexity.
It was a true pleasure to talk with Don, someone who we have read and followed for decades. His work is central to much of today’s design practices and we loved talking with him about where he hopes design may take us.
Learn more about Don Norman.
Learn more about Don’s book Design for a Better World.
About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards:
Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world.
We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.
Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world.
If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds.
Learn more about Sonder Studio
Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your email
Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on Amazon
Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world.
#ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai
Previous Episode
Jamer Hunt: Not to Scale
What are the cause and effect of my actions? How do I know the effect of the small acts in my life? How can I identify opportunities to have impact that is much larger than myself? How can we make problems that seem overwhelmingly complex feel more manageable and knowable? How might we use the scaling tools of designers to tackle some of the world’s largest and most complex problems?
To answer these questions, we talked with Jamer Hunt about his book Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible. The book repositions scale as a practice-based framework for navigating soci al change in complex systems. Jamer is Professor of Transdisciplinary Design and Program Director for University Curriculum at the New School’s Parsons School for Design. Jamer was the founding director of the Transdisciplinary Design graduate program at Parsons that was created to emphasize collaborative design-led research and a systems-oriented approach to social change.
We’re big fans of Jamer’s book and have incorporated his concept of scalar framing into our work. We encourage you to check his book out as well and see how zooming in and out can help you frame complex problems in a way that makes them more addressable.
Learn more about Jamer Hunt
Learn more about Jamer’s book Not to Scale
Learn more about the Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons
Watch the Powers of Ten by Charles & Ray Eames
About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards:
Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world.
We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.
Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world.
If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds.
Learn more about Sonder Studio
Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your email
Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on Amazon
Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world.
#ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai
Next Episode
Juan Noguera: Generative AI in Industrial Design
We’ve heard a lot about how generative AI may negatively impact careers in design. But we wonder how might generative AI have a positive impact on designers? How might generative AI be used as a tool that helps designers rather than as a replacement for designers? How might we use generative AI in design education? How do design educators and their students feel about generative AI? How else might generative AI help designers in ways that we haven’t uncovered yet?
To answer these questions, we talked with Juan Noguera about his individual design work, his teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and about his recent article in The Conversation entitled DALL-E 2 and Midjourney can be a boon for industrial designers. Juan proposes that AI image generation programs can be a fantastic way to improve the design process. Juan’s story about using generative AI working with bronze artisans in Guatemala is particularly compelling.
Juan Noguera is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A Guatemalan, he was raised in a colorful and vivid culture. He quickly developed an interest in how things were made, tearing everything he owned apart, and putting it back together, often with a few leftover pieces.
We enjoyed talking with Juan about his teaching, about his student’s projects, and about ideas he has for how AI might be able to help designers more in the future.
Learn more about Juan Noguera.
Read Juan Noguera’s article in The Conversation.
Learn more about Juan Noguera’s work on AI in Design.
About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards:
Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world.
We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.
Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world.
If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds.
Learn more about Sonder Studio
Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your email
Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on Amazon
Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world.
#ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai
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