Technology, Connected - Our Last Design Choice

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

We speak to Don Norman about humanity centered design. The godfather of design explains why we need Humanity-Centered Design—a shift from individual users to society, planet, and long-term impact.The problem: "What's wrong is what's left out."Every digital product relies on physical infrastructure. Power systems. Data centers. Electricity. Rare earth mining. You can't design a phone without designing its supply chain.Traditional human-centered design optimizes for the user. It ignores environmental and social consequences. Norman says we must widen the frame.We talk about:- Why designing for individual users is no longer enough- How hidden costs show up far from your device (mining, energy, waste)- Why efficiency isn't always a virtue (optimizing one thing breaks another)- How simple metrics distort real outcomes- What it means to design with communities instead of imposing solutions- Why responsible design must consider ecosystems, not just usability- How to avoid "colonial" patterns (extracting value, externalizing harm)Norman's core argument: The responsibility is collective. So is the impact.Humanity-Centered Design means:- Long-term impact over short-term convenience- Community collaboration instead of top-down solutions- Systemic thinking (not just product features)"We're all together," Norman says. Technology either strengthens communities—or weakens them. Design decides which.The future of design isn't better interfaces. It's understanding how products influence society, policy, and the planet.---Guest: Don Norman, Godfather of Design, AuthorTopics: Design, humanity-centered design, sustainability, systems thinking, communities, long-term impact--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]--Watch On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thinkingonpaper/videos

What is humanity-centered design and how does it differ from human-centered design and just regular design? 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. There are basically four principles. The four principles are just don't solve the solution of the issue you're looking at. 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 cost, 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 and 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 center design? Well, what's wrong about human center design is the things that 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, or the harm to the waste products that we produce, which are poisonous and 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, all 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 polluted. in 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 sewage 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 here's a better way some outsider comes in. That's colonialism. That's what the colonialist 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 the that we have to do is we have to design. Well, first of all, the people living there know their problems. In Human Center 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. There are 8 billion people in the world. 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 by 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 and, 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? Or 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 word.

And if you look at what people in life centered or planet centered are really doing, it's the same thing that I'm talking about. So we're all together.