Technology, Connected - Don Norman Issues His Final Warning To Humanity

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Don Norman is not happy. The same mindset that gave us convenience also gave us climate collapse, inequality, and fragile institutions. Design isn’t decoration. It’s power. It built the products we use, the systems we depend on, and the crises that now threaten us.“Human-centered” design sounds good, but it isn’t enough. Norman argues it has blinded us to bigger responsibilities , ecosystems, culture, and the generations who will inherit our mistakes. We need Humanity Centered Design.In this conversation Don Norman Thinks on Paper with Mark and Jeremy about:Has human-centered design failed?Why are climate summits designed to fail before they begin?How did STEM education strip out wisdom?Can empathy ever be built into systems at scale?Can humanity centered design help us survive, or will it keep driving us toward collapse? Please enjoy the interview with Don Norman.--Timestamps(00:09) Why Design Shapes the World We Live In(00:37) How Design Shapes Human Behavior (Often Without Us Noticing)(06:00) Why Most Solutions Don’t Matter — and What Real Design Should Do(09:10) Humanity-Centered Design: What It Really Means(22:16) Can Design Help Us Avoid Collapse?(26:51) Why Communities Hold the Answers, Not Just Experts(28:49) The Spark That Starts Humanity-Centered Design(30:18) How Young Designers Can Change the Future(33:16) Working Together Across Borders(35:39) Measuring What Matters, Not Just What’s Easy(37:06) Why Empathy Can’t Be an Afterthought(42:05) Thinking Beyond the Next Quarter — Business for the Long Term(45:02) Rethinking Education for the Next Generation(46:43) The Hard Questions We Still Need to Answer--Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]

Disruptors and Curious Minds. My name's Jeremy. This is Mark. This is thinking on paper. Mark, let's jump in. Don Norman needs no introduction. Don is here on the show to speak about his new book, Design for a Better World,

meaningful, sustainable, humanity-centered design for a better world. Welcome, thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Morning, Don. Thanks for being here. Mark, do we want to start with our carryover question? To what extent do you think misconceptions about people or society hold back design?

I would say, I would reframe. the question. To what extent does it rephrase society? Because as I will talk about design, I want to make sure that people realize that I don't necessarily mean design that's done by someone whose occupation is a designer. Because everyone is designing. And moreover, the world was designed over tens of thousands, 100,000 years by people who were changing the world, either inventing tools to make life easier or make warfare more deadly. Or they invented forms of government and the end of the notion of countries. That's design. Anytime that people try to modify the way they live or the world or the tools or even how they think, in order to change it,

usually for what they think is better, that's design. So yeah, all these different faculties in human behavior and belief structures, that is one of the barriers to good design, but it's really the barrier to getting along in the world. So it's greater than just design. We as humans want to organize things. We want to organize things to generate meaning. Is that a design mechanic that we have innately in our bodies? Isn't that backwards? I mean, yes, that's how we are wired, if you will, how we learn, et cetera. We form categories, even where in nature, there are really no strict categories or no simple boundaries. And yet it makes life simpler to assume that we assume simple things. We assume simple causality, that if I do one thing, it leads to another. Well, real causality is

much, much more complex. The categories are much more complex. Everything is more complex, but that's how we get along in the world. And is that a factor of design? Well, as I said before, yes, but look, design comes from people. And so the way people are is, of course, the way design is. We have many biases. We have many, many flaws.

So vis-a-vis design has many flaws as well? Yes, I think anything designed by people has certain biases and prejudices and, if you will, flaws. But part of the design process is to recognize that. So that here's how you, here's the way we design, at least the way I teach and the way most modern designers work. It's not one brilliant person sitting down saying, I have the idea and then creating it.

No. First of all, it's almost always a team. Modern design requires teams of people. And actually even old-fashioned design required teams, except they were never given credit. They were in the background. But second, we have to figure out what is the real issue I want to address, what is the need I'm trying to address, how do people, are people working, how will they use these new ideas? And I have to say ideas, because it isn't always a physical product. It may be an organizational structure. But then we test it because the way I tell people is, look, I'm a world's authority on human behavior, and I will tell you, here's how we should do it so that people can use it. But I know better than to believe that. I know. that quite often I'm wrong. And so what we do is simple prototypes. So we test it. And then that

modifies what we're doing and then we make a slightly better prototype. You know, the first prototype could be a piece of paper. You know, I wanted to make a little device that's about this big and we're going to carry it around with us. The first Palm Pilot, some of you may remember, was done that way that they made a little piece of wood that was the size of the device they were trying to make and carried it with them all the time. And so often they wanted to take a note. So they wanted to take it. out and they would take a pen and they would make believe they were writing now it was a piece of wood so it wasn't electronic but it gave them an understanding of how it might work that's how you that's how you begin and you make it more more working working working our point is wonderful for

devising prototypes of digital objects because PowerPoint looks real but it isn't but we change so we change it and modify it so that's how we also overcome the biases and and and misinformation that each person's mind gives by trying it out on as large a group of people as possible. And if you take a look at commercial products, like someone like Apple or Microsoft releases a new operating system or a new major application, not only do they test it internally, but then they'll test it on selected testers, you know, like a million of them, but then they release it to the world and oops, there's now a billion people using it and they discover all sorts of new things and they have to modify. But as long as you keep modifying and adjusting, that's how we overcome these issues.

I want to back up to something you said earlier related to defining the problem. Humanity in general, isn't that why we struggle with defining problems? Because we tend to want to converge too quickly on how to solve them. I think that most people would prefer to solve the underlying issues. But in today's commercial world, there's always this pressure to be out fast, get it out fast before the competition. does. And so that often leads to premature release of ideas. I say I never solve the problem I'm asked to solve because it's almost always the symptoms and not the problem. And it's really important to try to understand the underlying problems. Because otherwise, if you solve the symptoms, they'll come back. I guess this is kind of two questions here. It's why did you

write this book designed for a better world? And what is the biggest challenge, the biggest problem that we are or should be trying to solve. Let me give a short history of why I decided to write the book. One has to do with my age, 88 years old now. So I said, well, how many books for do I have left in me? I don't know. Maybe this is the last one. Who knows?

But I also said that if I look back at my past, I've written all these nice books and they help the world make things that are easier to understand, easier to use, and that's nice. But, wow, the world's a mess. The books I'm writing don't deal with it. But if I think about my own history, I started off as an electrical engineer, two degrees in it. I ended up accidentally as a psychologist, but what's called a mathematical psychologist at the time I got the degree, which became what's called cognitive psychology today. But also I then switched from psychology to cognitive science.

I started the first cognitive science department in the world. And then I retired early. I retired in 1993 and went to Africa. where eventually I became a vice president of advanced technology, where I not only did I have a wide range of things that my team was working underneath me, but I also went off to Congress and testified to help get the very first Wi-Fi band, and I testified to get today's HD high-definition television standards. So I begin to understand how Congress works and the importance of not the Congress people so much as their staff.

They're very important to the staff, and they're very good. but also how the political process worked. I said, well, maybe I can, maybe this is a different, I have a different point of view than most of the people have written about it because of this experience. And so I said, let me write about the problems.

Gee, I don't have to write about the problems. They're well understood. People have done a really good job. So let me write about the solutions. It turns out every problem that I interested in, there are really good solutions. So I don't have to develop solutions, but how come nothing has happened?

How come the United Nations has been meeting for 28 years to discuss climate change? And every year they produce some sort of document, a policy statement that every country in the world must sign and agree on. And that's the trouble. Since if every country must sign, there's so many compromises that they're sort of empty policies. And over 28 years, almost nothing has happened. Well, that's human behavior. And I said, well, gee, maybe I understand human behavior.

And so that's what I wrote about. But the main issues, there were so many issues in the world, you can't name one as the most important. But I think our economic system is one of them, that the economics drive a lot of anti-social, anti-environment conditions. Another one is the way that the Western world has sort of taken over the world. By the way, when we talk about west and east or northern countries, southern countries, those are not geographical terms. They originated geographically, but no, because Australia, for example, is one of the northern powers. And so, but these powers have sort of destroyed cultures all over the world by dominating and saying, well, we know how to do things. Why don't you run your country the way we run ours?

Well, these are the problems that we face in the world. So I presume you're going to ask me about them. You mentioned something interesting, Don, this idea of a Western bias in a first-age approach to problem solving. How can we create an awareness of that bias? It's interesting because if you actually read the history of the world, most of the early developments took place in the Middle Asia, that's where, have you will, science and government and new ideas came from. The early empires were all there.

And yet we tend to think of it and it all came from the West. It all came for Greece and Roman. and Roman Empire and then moving up through Western Europe. But no, that was a secondary. In fact, the Romans used to look east towards Asia for the riches, for the wealth, and for their intelligence and the way people were living. So it isn't just Western, but the problem is that we've developed in the West, we've developed this very logical way of thinking.

And we've decided, and we apply that to everybody. But logic is not the way people think. Logic is not a natural thing in nature. Logic was invented by philosophers and mathematicians, and it's not at all the way we think. And then there are all sorts of beliefs that seem natural to those of us who are educated and born in the West, like, if you can't measure something,

that means you don't understand it. Yeah, well, Lord Kelvin said that, except that's not quite what he said. He said, if you can't measure something, you don't understand it. Yeah, that's true. So the economist now forced ourselves to measure everything, even things that can't be measured. We put everything in numbers, and once you put things in numbers, they're becoming extracts. You lose sense of the context.

And not only that, but the numbers are meaningless often. Because if you can't measure it, well, what do you do? Well, you measure something else that you think is related. And then you forget that what you've measured is not what you cared about. But what Lord Kelvin said was not that. He said, in the physical sciences. Now, the physical sciences have a very important property. Mostly, before we get to quantum physics, let's say classical physics, it's history independent.

The path that you got to the state doesn't matter. If I drop this pen, I can predict exactly how fast it's going and how much time it would take to hit the bottom. And if I do it again and again and again, it's always the same. But when we talk about people or any living thing, know that the history, really matters. Try dropping a cat seven or eight times. I mean, yes, it's not going to be the same each time. And so people are very, very path-dependent. Our history really determines what we do and how we think. And so when we're born into a society, the way we've experienced society in the first formative years, we assume that's the way it is. The way people think, the way people act, the kind of structures we have,

the clothes we wear, what we eat, all that seems to be. And it's very difficult when you go and travel to some other weird economy. Today, it's hard to find a new place because they're all based on this Western way of thinking. But that's not the only way of thinking. And so why are we imposing our Western way on everybody else? Especially because we think it's normal, but it isn't for everybody else. What's happened in the educational system, basically most of the professors in universities across the world were educated in the West, either the United States or Europe. And by now, they can be educated in their own country because that's what they've learned,

the European and American way of thinking. And the American way of thinking is similar to the European because our educators also were educated originally in Germany, in England, and so on. So it isn't, but it isn't necessarily natural or appropriate. And different people of different ways of living and different beliefs, different belief systems, different religions, different understandings of the nature of God, or in some cases, God's plural. And personally, that makes a life a much richer life and a richer world. It used to be, I love to travel to other countries because I could experience new ways of eating and new ways of

living. That went away. Because now when I travel to other countries, they all seem the same. You can't just, in fact, you can forget what country you're in if you're not careful. You spoke about measurements and one of the things I don't particularly like in the moment is this obsession with measuring happiness as if the happiness can be measured. You wrote part of your book on meaningful? What is meaningful? What should or could we be looking at to measure? What many people don't understand is a whole theory of measurement and there are different kinds of measurements and different kinds of numbers in fact. Numbers have different powers and qualitative assessments are very important and actually can be put on a kind of scale. That's what psychologists are good at. It's doing measurements. In fact,

that's what I studied is when I was a graduate student is because I worked with people who were in measurement theory. You know, I'm running a contest right now, and the software we bought wants you to judge the entries on various categories, and you've given numerical number, and then they average those numbers, et cetera, and so then you compare different entries by the different averages. Well, when you rate something on a rating scale from one to five, say, five is a really wonderful, perfect, one is horrible, three is the middle, you can't average those numbers. Those are subjective numbers. They're qualitative. Every judge is a different notion of what a five might mean or what a four or three or two might mean. You know that two is better than

one and four is better than three. So they're ordered, we call it an ordinal scale. But what's the spacing? The spacing is unknown. And you can't average them because some of those numbers may be far apart in some measure and close in other measures. So the kind of ordinal scale, is simply ordering. It's like I'd line everybody up in a row according to their height, and now I'll try to what I'm going to number them according to their height, and now I'll take the mean of the numbers. That doesn't make any sense.

And so the scale where the intervals are the same from number to numbers, called an interval scale. The temperature scale is one of those. But the temperature of 10 degrees, doesn't matter whether it's Fahrenheit or Celsius, A temperature of 10 degrees is not twice as hot as one or five because where's the zero point? It's different actually for Celsius than it is for Fahrenheit. Now, Lord Kelvin is the one who determined the real zero point is minus 300 or something degrees

because there is a real physical moving point when the molecules don't move. That's the definition of zero. But that's an interval scale. And if you know where the zero is, then we can call it a racial scale. because if I know, well, when I measure your height in inches or meters, it doesn't matter, I know that a height of 60 inches is twice as tall as 30 inches, because I know where the zero is, and I know that the intervals are always the same. But in most important things, we don't know any of that.

But we can't order things quite often. And on top of that, it's amazing how the psychologists are really good at asking people, which is better, this or that? And if you do that in enough dimensions, you can actually put together a very nice understanding of the system. So I say the economists always want to measure things. They always want to measure in terms of money. And therefore, they want to optimize the numerical value, a monetary value. And I don't want to optimize money.

I want to optimize quality of life. And now back to your question of happiness. Well, actually happiness is only one of the multiple variables in the quality of life. In fact, happiness is a complex one, because you know when you're happiest, you're happiest when you've had a period of unhappiness. And now you have a relatively better thing. And that's when you're much more happy than you can't be happy all the time. Because if you're happy all the time, the amount of happiness you're having keeps going down and down and down and down. And so it's a contrast that's really important.

But psychologists know how to measure quality of life. And there are a few countries that have even tried to do it. it. But shouldn't we be optimizing the world for quality of life and not for the gross domestic product, which is a meaningless number, which includes how much a country is spending, sometimes for bad and sometimes for good. If some company in the country spends a lot of money but pollutes the earth, and now the company, the government has to spend a lot of money to clean up the pollution, that counts twice. See, I spent money in two ways. And so that's good. No, it isn't. It's a stupid measure. the way, leading economists have said that over and over and over again. And I think the worst part

of it is not we should substitute a different measure. We should get rid of a single number to try to characterize as complex as human beings or how a country works. And so what I'm looking for is a dashboard or where you look at one of the most important things in the country about education, health, welfare. And what are the factors that destroy it? Well, you know, polluting the atmosphere or, you know, not, or using poisonous fertilizers or whatever. And that's a dashboard. And that's what I recommend. And it comes from a group of economists, actually, at Oxford.

What's the first step in getting something like that pulled together? Plastics are really valuable. They give us, in many ways, a much better life because you can shape them and use them in many, many interesting ways. And when they were first invented, they've expanded since then. but everybody understood the real value of it, didn't even understand all the different things, ways you can use it.

And we didn't appreciate the waste problems that would happen. Or for that matter, the waste that happens even in their manufacturing. So there are now many, many people trying to overcome that. Now, on the one hand, people say, well, we should always use, well, here's my example. So first of all, I use the same glass over and over and over again. But second of all, it's glass. And glass is one of the most easily recyclable.

Glass and metals are the easiest to recycle. Paper might come third. Paper, though, is almost invariably weakened as it's recycled, whereas aluminum, for example, is the same as you can't distinguish recycled aluminum from newly made aluminum things. And also glass, the color may change. You buy a lot of glasses, glassware in Mexico, and they're always green or brown, and that's because they're made from discarded beer bottles.

But they work just fine. So there are a lot of people trying to say, well, maybe we can do plastics differently. We don't have to make them out of oil, and we don't have to make them in such complex ways that they can't be recycled or reused. Maybe we can make biodegradable plastics, and they're starting to do that. And maybe we can make, maybe we can discover chemical ways of pulling apart the molecules of plastic and sort of recreating the original source. That means we can remake it into anything else we want. And so there are other solutions. The solution that we should all carry around the metal or glass containers for our water

doesn't really work because we'll have to carry around many different containers with many different things in our lives and it's not always there. So despite the fact that my wife and I are fully against single-use plastics, we end up using a lot of them. But I think we can change that because that's a choice of what immaterial is you manufacture out of and it's a choice of how we manufacture the plastic itself. There are many, many people now working to try to change that. Is it an educational problem as well, though?

No, I don't think it's fundamentally an educational problem at that level. Because if we had a better solution, I think it would simply get adopted. And maybe we'll require some laws because suppose that we have really better solutions of stuff that is easy to redo, but it might cost more. So companies are going to resist making it. And that's where policies and governments come in. they can simply require you to use the new materials or not to use the old ones. The better ways, they shouldn't require what you should use. They should require that there's a goal that we're aiming for and you have to, you have

to fit the goal. If you require some specific material, then what you do is you stop innovation. But if you require a particular goal, then you can still innovate in many ways. But I think we could do that. Now, if it's going to cost more, well, that's a price that the country's letter be going to pay. And if everybody's forced to follow these rules, then it doesn't change the competitive nature of the business. Because I'm doing things that's good for the world doesn't penalize me because it's more expensive because everyone has to do it.

How do we get this message to more people? What is humanity-centered design? And how does it differ from human-centered design and just regular design? So this is the book, The Design of Everyday Things, that teaches human-centered design. I started off with a book called user-centered system design. I decided I didn't want to call people users. But the reason we called it users, this user-centered system design, first of all, we've thought it way.

You had to think about the system. And second of all, UCSD, user-centered system design, is the name of the university I was working at, University, California, San Diego. Too clever, yeah. But human-centered design has been very important because it really does focus on things that are important to people, the quality of life is basically the result of humans that are designed in part,

that we try to design for people understanding how people think and work and how they understand things. And so I teach it. But I also say this book is wrong. Now, it's not wrong. There's nothing inside the book that's wrong. I still teach the principles here. There are basically four principles. The four principles are, just don't solve the solution of the issue you're looking at. Try to try to figure out what caused that and solve the underlying issues or else the symptoms will come back. And second, you have to have a major focus on people, not on cause, not on this, not on that, but on quality of life for people. Third, you have to take a system's point of view, user-centered system design, realizing that almost everything is interacting with the things around you and so on.

And so you have to take an account of that system interaction. And finally, when you're designing for people, We don't know enough, and people are so varied and clever and manipulative that it may not work the way you would think it will. And so you have to test and iterate. Don't just do one thing and launch it, but try little things. Do it incrementally and then learn and modify and slowly, lowly, improve until you're ready to launch. And you may need different systems for different cultures or different groups of people. So that's the four principles.

So what's humanity-centered design? Well, what's wrong about this book and what's wrong about humans that are designers are things it does not talk about. What's wrong is what's left out. And so what's left out is we didn't think about the harm to the ecological systems of the world or the harm to cultures or the harm to the waste products that we produce, which are poisonous, clogging up the oceans and the air and the land. So that's the difference.

So I say there are four major principles. the same four, but modified. So solve the core, not the symptom. That's the same as her both. Second, focus on the system, yes, but focus on the entire system, the ecosystem of people, all living things, and the physical environment. So that's an important addition. Third, take a long-term systems point of view, recognizing that the complications result from interdependence of multiple parts, in fact, in the distance. Because the way we use our modern stuff, Well, what's polluting the air when I use my cell phone? It's possibly the power station, which is thousands of miles away,

which is burning coal to make the electricity, which I'm using for my devices. Quite often the designers who work on digital things say, well, I'm not polluting the air because we're just making, you know, electronic pictures, symbols, et cetera. And I say, well, every digital product runs on a physical product. And that physical product uses energy. And if we go to modern AI to answer a question, uses a tremendous amount of energy. And then to train the system uses an incredible amount more than many towns use in the entire year, just to train the one system.

So that's the third principle. And the fourth principle is the same as human-centered, test, test, and refine. But there's a fifth principle as well. That is, when we're designing for a society, we don't go in and say, oh, you have a sewerage problem, you have a public health problem, or you have an education problem. or whatever, don't go in and say, here's the solution. People don't like to be told that they're doing things wrong and that here's a better way. Some outsider comes in.

That's colonialism. That's what the colonialists did. They went to other countries and said, oh, you can't govern the country. We'll govern it for you. You should be proud and happy that we're helping you. No. So the point is that we have to do is we have to design.

Well, first of all, the people living there know their problems. In human-centered design, we send out the anthropologists and design researchers to go and understand what the real issues are that people are having. Well, we're working in a community. They know their problems. We don't have to send out the anthropologists. And they're smart people. Intelligence is distributed all over the world. They may already be trying to solve their problems. But they need help. First of all, if you're doing a health problem, whether it's medicine or public health, they need to have better information than they may have. Second of all, if you look at the core issues,

the core issues are almost always require you to go higher up in the chain of government. And they may not have the ability to do that. And so sometimes the outsiders can help them do that. But we go in as advisors and as facilitators, not as colonialists. In fact, last week I was in Boston at a conference and there was this wonderful group at MIT called the D-Lab where the woman in charge, A.B. Smith gave this wonderful talk about how critically important. It is not to design for people, but to design with and buy people. And I thought her talk was one of the best descriptions of this I've ever heard. And so I'm running a conference myself in November. You can ask me about it later. And I invite her to come in and give that talk at this conference.

So that's the difference. By the way, these differences are talking about the design process as we normally do it, which is these, but we can design products, but we can also design communities and laws and policies. And these same principles get slightly modified in each of these different areas, but they can be applied. And the humanitarian, humanity-centered one is simply a broader approach. And one last thing, because people say, well, yeah, well, what about life-centered? Why isn't it planet-centered? And these all exist, by the way, people championing them. And I say, look, I wanted to do it in three words. And I wanted to say center design is two of them.

So I'm left with one way. And if you look at what people wouldn't fly, centered or planet-centered are really doing. It's the same thing that I'm talking about. We're all together. Is there an opportunity to look at little micro-epicenters of success in humanity-centered design that we could try to connect and build momentum that way? And if so, what are some examples of these little epicenters of success related to using this philosophy? Well, nice of you to ask that, because that's what I'm devoting the rest of my life to. Awesome. Wow, okay. So, a bunch of people, a bunch of my friends said, oh, Don, you've led her wonderful life and you're well-known in the design circles. Why don't we gather, get some money from donors and they thought that they could get a sufficient money?

Well, offers prizes to people who are doing wonderful things in design, humanity-centered design. So we'll get to give it to, you know, distinguished people who've done wonderful stuff for a lifetime. Well, first of all, I resisted using my name on the award, and I finally gave in. But second, I said, no, I'm not going to give a prize to somebody who's really good and well-established. Why? Because it doesn't do any difference. It doesn't make any difference. I bet big prizes now, and so what? It's really nice. I mean, I'm not trying to say it's not nice. But I come home and if I look around me, I'd say, oh, I have a new trophy. Where am I going to put it? And there's no more room. And it doesn't change what I'm going to do. When you're just starting out, that's when you need the reward. Because you're struggling and you think, think, and you may not be succeeding all the time.

And so getting an award then can make a difference. Acknowledgement can be rocket fuel for somebody at the start. Absolutely. In fact, it doesn't even require a monetary award. The name could be enough. In fact, I had an early advisor. He was actually a former student who struck it rich with one of the companies. So he gives out a lot of money and gives out awards.

And he said that some of the awards he gives out are career changing. This is an award for early career academics. So in the field of cognitive science, they look at the PhD thesis and they give awards to the most promising ones. And that allows them, it's much easier for them to get jobs. They get, first of all, to get invited. The competition is fierce. And so even if you get invited to give a talk and then also to get the job. And so I said, career changing, that's what I want to do.

And that's what I'm trying to do. So anyway, we've established, we're a charity. official United States charity. I have a board of directors of five people. I am not the CEO. And second, we have, I have 18 advisors from around the world who are helping. And we submitted, we sent out notices and to people explaining what we're doing. We're trying to do just exactly what Jeremy was asking about. Finding people who are doing these things, small things all around the world. We got nominations from 26 different countries. I also said we should give awards to educational groups. Doesn't have to be a formal university of college, but groups that are educating people to do this kind of work.

And we have 22 requests from that. These people are not a contest. If they fulfill the requirements, wonderful, we want every place in the world to be part of it. But both groups have to provide evidence. It isn't enough to have an idea. It has to actually be working. It will be small and tentative, but they need evidence that is actually helping the groups they're working in, and they must have followed the Humanity Center Design Principles, and the educational institutions have, their evidence is not the curriculum, but okay, what are your graduates doing? How many graduates are working in this area?

And so we're in the middle now of judging the entries, and we're hoping to finish in August, and we'll have a big conference in San Diego in November, where we bring in together not just the people who won the awards, but as many people as we can find from around the world who are doing this kind of work to first of all show people what they're doing, but not just to say, here's the wonderful stuff I'm doing, to say, here are the difficulties you're going to face. And, you know, here's where I fail and when I learn from that failure, because I want this

to be a learning experience. And I make sure we've turned down a lot of people. We already weeded out a number of people who aren't ready. And I wrote a personal letter to each one saying why. trying to say, here's what you could do in the future. What I'm proud of is the fact that I get letters of thanks from the people we turn down. And so we're partnering with the Aga Khan Foundation, which is a major foundation doing. They called it Human Center Design around the world, mostly in Africa and in Asia, so people in the United States have not heard of them. But when I

looked at what they were doing, I flew to Geneva to have a meeting with them. That's her headquarters. I said, you're not doing human center design. You're doing what I call humanity center design. And so we're actually talking about trying to bring humanity center design across the world. And I found another group which is called Commit Global, which is working with immigration crises around the world. They say they help a million people, they're partnered in part with the United Nations. And so they're going to be at the conference. Aga Khan is going to be at the conference.

Two of the applications I got were from Tijuana, Mexico. and they look kind of related. And it turns out they're both groups of things called Core 32. So I said, I'm not sure you qualify as an early career because you're working with this other organization. But this other organization is wonderful. And so I invited them to come with the conference and tell us about the work they're doing in Mexico.

And so we're trying to bring together. Almost every time I go someplace, I learn of new groups. The meeting I was at in Boston was. the International Congress called the Design Research Society. There's usually in Europe. This was the first United States. So I had people from all around the world. And I've learned about even other groups doing these very same things. Now, the United Nations is a list of 16 societal, what they call it, sustainable development goals. And those are the ones that I'm after. Now, actually, the United Nations says we have

17, but it's only 16 are the real goals. 17 is what I'm doing. Number six, 17 says, and this is to Jeremy's point, these projects are, these issues are so large that no single group can really accomplish it. And so there are lots of small groups working on these areas. And number 17 is we must all band together to solve this. And so one of the things I'm hoping is that after this first conference we have in San Diego, we're going to do it again and again and again. And this will lead to a society where all the people doing humanity center design every year, get together to share their knowledge and their approaches as learning tools, not as bragging tools as learning tools. That's amazing. I mean, I think what's great about

that is it's a place where people can see this stuff being applied and being successful, not only in their individual ventures, but collectively. Are you guys planning to track outcomes over time as well? We're hoping that we'll have a history and that we'll get to, that we hope that to be able to continue to mentor the people who receive these early awards But that over time, all the advisors that we have and the people who won awards, they become themselves mentors and facilitators. And I'm hoping to grow that. But the truth is, for this first year, we're struggling to get this first year done because

it's a new program. And so there's a lot of – I sometimes complain. I say, that was really great that you honored me with this award program. But you never told me it was going to be a full-time job for me. And it's a more than, if it's full time, I don't mean 40 hours a week. I mean 80 hours a week. But it's rewarding. It's really wonderful.

And when I read some of the applications recently, it was emotionally draining for good reasons. I just said, wow, look at what they are doing. And some people are doing things that never occurred to me that people could do. And this has really been wonderful. November 14th and 15th come. And if anybody wants to learn about it, the U.S. R-R-L is very simple. It's the Don Norman Design Award. That's d-N-D-A dot design. In order to do the things that you want to do on a humanity-centered design, there has to be

an activation of empathy. And I think we as humans can get better of that. But we talk to a lot of change agents. You are certainly an agent of change. And change happens from the outside and inside out of these big systems. What would your ask be from chief product officers at major enterprises and also like aspiring product designers as they come up the chain to try to affect change in these large political systems and enterprises. You have to improve your education and what you know about because it isn't enough to go to a company and say, oh, I have an idea for a new product. You have to know how to talk to your bosses. And you know, in design, we say you really need to understand the people you're building for. And so we go out

and send out the anthropologists, or we send the designers out to be with the community and understand the community. Well, but some of the people you're building for is the people you work for. So why don't you understand their language? Their language, look, they're very much worried about cost because they're selling their products and they need to make a profit or else the company goes out of business and that doesn't do any good. So they're worried about costs. So you can't go and say, here's a wonderful product. And what do you show them? What pictures of it, models or letters from people, think you're a wonderful designer? No, that's not how they make decisions. They make decisions, but they want a spreadsheet showing you increased costs and maybe increase sales and increased whatever

and show that it as profitable. Well, my design friends always say, well, how would we know those numbers? We've never made this thing. We don't know what the sales will be. Well, marketing does this all the time. They make up numbers. They make them up. So you can make them up. And if you don't know how to make them up, to ask marketing to help you. And the executives who are looking at this, they're smart. They know you made up the numbers. That's what they used to do themselves. So they say, so where did the numbers come from?

What assumptions were you making? Are those reasonable? And then they can judge. And you like to tell stories? Yes, stories are very important. But give them the numbers and then tell them a story that shows a context in which what you're trying to do would fit because the combination is very powerful. Now, one of the manufacturing methods

that is really the one that we need all to do is called circular economy, where we reuse things, we make things that last longer, they're easier to repair, when they break down and you finally have to replace them, you can take it apart and reuse the components. And there are a number of companies already doing that, but it's going to change. It's expensive. And so companies will resist it.

They'll say it's a really excellent idea. We love that idea, but it will cost more money to do that. And we make our money by selling products, and you know, you're not, you're saying they're not going to be as money. If they don't buy a new product every two or three years, how will we stay in business? So you have to change the business model. And there are answers. The most common answer is, well, we're going to sell services. You know, we used to sell, that's how telephones used to be in the old days. You went to the phone company, you say, I'd like a phone.

And they would charge you a certain amount per month, and they would give you a phone, and they would maintain it and fix it if it broke. and it wasn't your phone, it was theirs. They offered that service. And today we actually, we think we're buying the phone. But if you think about it, we're not really buying because we go to the cell phone company and they say, there's a special price and you can buy it. In two years, you can get a new one. They're offering a service.

And so that's the way. If you want to change things to the company, you have to understand how the company works and present a solution, first of all, that are sensible for the company that they can understand. And second of all, in the language of people understand, which is going to be, they will love to see the product. They do want to know what it will do to people, but they want to know how does it impact our cost structure. So you have to know how to do that. But, you know, engineers were trained as just in engineering, just as narrow as designers are trained just in design. And the ones that moved right on the top, they expanded their own knowledge. I'm a good

example, when I became an executive at Apple, I was pretty clueless. And I learned by asking people questions. I learned by living through difficulties and problems. I thought that the marketing people were, how did you do those impressive analyses and talks and so on? And they would laugh at me. And they say, there's no magic here. And so they explained what the tools they were using, so much so that eventually after I had left and was a professor doing a design program at Northwestern in the computer science department, but for Julio Otino again. And what I was doing was a joint program with the MBA program at Northwestern, where I taught design. So that meant I had to understand how businesses work, which I do because I've worked in several different businesses.

Our companies that do this, and of course the common one that people love to talk to is Patagonia, which says that's their principles and that if you buy their clothes, if it gets ripped or torn or something, send it back to us. We'll fix it and send it back to you. When it's too badly damaged that can't be used it again, send it back to us, we will reuse the components in new clothes. And moreover, its company is owned by the employees, and it's a B-Corp. It's not a C corp. The C corp is that Milton Friedman once said a company owes its responsibilities to its shareholders, not to its employees, not to its customers, not to the place where it's located.

First of all, that's not a law. It was just his opinion, but it has become a law, and it's become ingrained in the court system. So a B corp is one that says, no, we owe our responsibility to the world, basically. B for better. We're going to be a better company. We talk on this show often about the impact on the next generations of what's happening. I think that we have a very ecologically minded group of millions of billions of people who maybe we'll hopefully see more of those be-ups very soon.

A million people isn't enough. When we have eight billion on the population, a million is in the round-off era. Or billions then. I love your optimism. I love this philosophy. I think it resonates with a lot of people, most people, And it's just refreshing to see that there is a structure that we could implement today to make things better. Yes.

And by the way, another thing is the educational system. I'm starting to write an article with a good friend who works at the National Academy of Engineering against STEM, why we are against STEM. And both of us are highly educated in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. What we're against is, well, first of all, there's no people in there. Now, the solution is not to add A, so it's steam or add H, so it's stream or something, humanities and arts. The principle is to teach differently because at the moment we still teach science separately than technology, than engineering, the mathematics. And within science, there are all the different disciplines, and each one is taught separately. Whereas if you're trying to build something and change the world,

it comes together. So I think we should not teach disciplines. We should teach problems. Because if you teach about problems, you automatically have to bring in all the disciplines, including history, including the humanities. And I tell people, you know, we have to understand people. So where do you understand people? Not from psychologists or sociologists or anthropologists. You understand people from people who write novels. You can't let it know without understanding people because the people who read the novels have to say, yeah, I know people like that. I really hate them.

Well, I really love them or whatever. And so I want to bring this together. You know, the country I've discovered that is doing the most innovative types of education is India. They're developing all new schools all around. And they're doing what's called liberal education. So instead of majoring in some very narrow specialty, they're trying to give it all to you at once, but it's not as separate courses, but bring them together to show you

know how they're integrated. Because when I was a student, I went to MIT, my first course. first college. So I learned the mathematics. I don't know why I'm learning it, but in the physics and engineering courses, they start to use that same mathematics. And that made it easier to understand why I was trying to learn the mathematics, except they weren't in sync. Quite often, the engineering course would teach me the mathematics before the mathematicians got there, or vice versa. Why shouldn't it have been taught as one course or one sequence where they work together? And it's hard because in an existing universities, professors don't want to change what they're doing. They get promoted because of their

excellence in a narrow discipline, and they love to teach what they know. So it's only new universities that are incapable of changing the way that they teach. And I love the liberal education that's going on in India and in a few places in the United States as well and in Europe, but it's harder to do it in an established universities because you don't know that professors often run the university. and professors are incredibly conservative. And part of it is the reward structure. They're rewarded on getting papers published in these wonderful specialized journals. You mentioned new universities, new companies.

I think there's this call for something new everywhere, bringing the new out of the old. I couldn't agree more, Don. A fantastic conversation, and we really appreciate you being here today. Thank you. Mark, any closing thoughts before we get out of here? I think I speak for everybody here when I say thank you, thank you for your books. Thank you for Humanity Center Design. What you're doing is powerful.

It's important and appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Good. Thanks everyone for listening. Be curious. Stay disruptive. Thanks Jeremy and Mark for a great conversation.

Thank you, Don. Take care.