Raphael D'Amico: You are opening the conference with a fundamental challenge to design research. Tell us a bit more about how you came to your conclusion that design researchers should "leave it to the technologists"?
Don Norman: I try to examine our basic beliefs and question them. Not necessarily because they are wrong, but because often we never even thought of questioning them! If you question the most fundamental tenets of design and design research, you learn a lot.
That's why I've been looking at these things, and I think that's not necessarily a bad opening for a conference on design research.
RD: I also read that you're updating Design of Everyday Things.
DN: I intend to. I haven't started yet. I just finished my latest book called Living with Complexity. In it I argue that everyone wants simplicity, and you're probably taught to make simple things, but actually complexity is good. Our tools have to match a complex world. It's that simple. Reviewers of technology say "Why is this so complicated?", but when you give them a simple thing to review they inevitably complain about missing features. The very people who cry out for simplicity don't even follow it themselves.
It's about about complexity versus complicated. It may have to be complex, but it has to be understandable. I define complexity to be in the world, but complicated is in the head. So the question is, how do we manage complexity? How do we get rid of the complications?
Look at things we take for granted, like automobiles. People complain when they have to spend a half hour learning some new piece of complex technology, but they sometimes spend months or even years of practice to become good automobile drivers. The world is complex - so get over it. Once again, you have to step back to look at what people believe and ask yourself: "Is that really true?”
RD: Bruce Tognazzini talks about Apple living in flatland - making software that is simple when it doesn't have to deal with much, but which becomes unusable when the data adds up (e.g. iPhoto with several hundred albums). Given that it's often held up as an example of simplicity, how do you think Apple's approach is working?
DN: Bruce is correct, as usual. It is very difficult to develop systems that scale nicely. Take the iPhone, with its simple interface and lack of menu structure. It is great for simple things, but I often struggle to remember how to change a setting, or get some complex result, or trembler just which magical part of the screen I need to touch for this particular action to happen. I push the image up, down, let, and right, trying to remember just which way gets me back to where I started. Sometimes I succeed, but with no idea why. Often I fail.
But Apple usually leads the way. I think the iPad is going to dramatically affect the design of laptops. It's interesting what it does not have. For example, no external storage: it assumes that we're all living in the cloud. The iPad isn't really about production, it's about consumption, entertainment and watching.
That said, the thing that intrigues me most about the iPad is the iWork suite. A spreadsheet, presentation tool, and word processor, all controlled with your finger. And they did it very nicely from what I can tell. Obviously none of us have used it yet, but I think that's going to be a major change. People think it's killing e-books, but really it's killing laptops.
RD: Do you think that the issue of creating overly complex products is new and getting worse, or is it something designers have always done?
DN: It's something designers have always done, except that computers have made it worse. With mechanical things you could sometimes look at and maybe tease them apart, whereas there's nothing to see in electronics. It's even worse with the internet as it's distributed all over the world. You can't even envision where the different components of a single web page come from.
Things are confusing and frustrating when they can't be understood. It's not complexity, it's a lack of understanding.
RD: So what direction do you think you will go when updating DOET?
DN: I want to change as little as possible, but there are a few concepts I have to include, such as social networking. That wasn't there before and has had a major impact.
That and gestural interfaces. I wrote a piece for Interactions magazine about "natural interfaces", the name Microsoft is giving to "gestural interfaces". I was amused -they're not natural! Gestures are really unnatural and will be a real problem if they're hard to learn. Even headshaking - have you been to India? [demonstrates The Indian Head Shake http://www.newsweek.com/id/80006] To an Indian, they are clear and natural, to a Westerner, they are befuddling: we are never sure if they're saying yes or no!
So even a simple thing like a headshake that we take for granted is not to be taken for granted. It varies across cultures.
Some of the gestures are natural. It's clear that dragging the fingers together to make something larger is natural. Lifting your hands up to mean more, louder, faster, that's natural. But beyond very simple ones, they mostly have to be learned. Even a mouse click had to be learned. One click for select, two clicks for right click. Three clicks for a paragraph - how many people know that?
RD: So, to brings us back to design research not being the way to come up with new things.
DN: No - It's the way to come up with new uses, and modifications to things that exist. The important breakthroughs, which only happen every couple of years, never come out of design research. If you look back in history to before design research existed and take the light bulb, the telephone, the automobile, television, radio; none of those came out of design research.
I challenge people to give me a counter example. Give me one major breakthrough that came because of design research - nobody has yet succeeded.
RD: So what is the role of design research in coming up with products and services that meet people's needs?
DN: Inventors are the creative ones, and it's almost always driven by some new technology. They see it and wonder if they could use it, so they create something. Sometimes it's something they need for themselves, and they think everybody will too, or they build it just because they can. Most of these fail, but occasionally they don't, and then design researchers can come along to find the real use and also make it work better. Often these inventions are only usable by the very dedicated early adopter.
My favorite story about Thomas Edison: he invented the phonograph and six months later he had a factory making them. He didn't waste any time. But what was it for? He said he had invented the paperless office. It took a competitor to discover that the killer application was pre-recorded music by the great musicians of the day.
Gene Young: So inventions are this generative force that happen almost randomly, and once they've started to take shape, design research can come in and reconceptualize or refine them.
DN: Right. I'm not saying that's the way it has to be, I'm just saying that's the way it is. Maybe that will change in the future.
GY: Do you have any hypotheses about what might change it?
DN: There's a simple reason why that comes about. It's really hard to imagine some brand new technology that doesn't yet exist. Those imaginations often come from novelists or inventors. The videophone was invented, conceptually, in the 1700s or 1800s when there was no technology, but they could sense that need to see and talk to people from a distance. Was that design research? Did anybody find a real need? No! When there is no technology there is no need.
For example, do you need flushing toilets? Do you need indoor plumbing? Do you need hot and cold running water? People lived for thousands of years without any of that. Now that we have it we consider it a fundamental need but that wasn't always true for human beings. Even after the telephone was invented and started to be used, the first question people asked was: "Well, what's it good for?".
RD: What about fundamental human weaknesses, like memory (e.g. what you guys are doing with ReQall)?
DN: The need for memory aids is long known, it's not novel. People write things down. The Greeks used use mnemonic techniques, so did the Romans. Technology allows you to modify memory and maybe what's new is that you can be pre-emptive. Instead of having to remember to look at a list, it buzzes me and tells me.
So the problem with memory has long been known. In that sense, reQall is not solving a novel problem: it automatically can present reminders based upon time and location: that is what is novel. It is what secretaries used to do for their bosses. It can also share reminders across groups. But the important thing is that it is not discovering anew need: it is applying modern technology to a well-documented, well-understood need.
The need for location-based reminders and information has been around for a long time. Look at location based messaging. Now when you walk past a building, you can see notes that people have left either for themselves, a friend, or for anybody to read.
Jim Spohr, now at IBM, was already talking about that when he was working for me at Apple in the early 1990s. He didn't go out and do a lot of research about people's needs and noticed that they really needed to leave messages for other people in strange locations. He thought it was neat that you could be in a strange city, pass a restaurant and read the reviews that people had left on the virtual wall of the restaurant is.
Well today we have that. Several of the new smart, screen phones, are starting to provide that. But that didn't come from research. Twitter didn't come from design research. Facebook didn't come from design research. None of these came from design research!
Are social networks changing our lives? Yes! Did they come from design research? No.
RD: Is there anything that's come out of design research that's inspired you?
DN: What I will talk about at DRC is the "research-product" gap. I just gave a talk at the Stanford D.School about some of these issues. I discussed the research-product gap. This didn't concern them. I said that if they were not interested in how their work got into a product, they were wasting their time.
And they said: "We're just doing the research, we're not responsible for the product." And that's the problem (even with you folks at the Institute of Design). You guys do the research - who does the product? And you complain: "Why don't they ever take our brilliant ideas and make them into products?"
RD: So can you think of any people or companies who are bridging that gap?
DN: When I have this conversation with my friends, they always give me examples: XEROX PARC, Microsoft, IBM, Intel research labs. In my opinion, every one of those fails, they always have the same problem.
RD: At Smart design there's this amazing group of female designers - the Femme Den - who came together to look at the differences between men and women in more detail (and are actually speaking at DRC this year). One of the things they discovered is that most hospital scrubs are designed for men, but 75% of the people who use them are women. Their new version is now spreading through the medical community.
DN: That's good, and that's where design research is good, but it's also consistent with my argument. That's taking an existing product, seeing its flaws and making it better. I'm not arguing that design research is worthless - it's extremely valuable for the transformation of an existing product - but it has its limits.
And your example is an interesting one. Does it take PhD to discover that the body shapes of men are different from those of women? Doesn’t every teen-ager know that? Gee, you know, I can tell the difference between a man and a woman just by looking. And noting that more women than men wear scrubs? Oh yes, that certainly requires a PhD and advanced courses in statistics. Or maybe, in counting.
There is this gap because a lot of the research is done by academics (including corporate research labs by the way). Those people often don't know very much about their own product. If you give talks at conferences, and publish in Design Studies, and get a job in a university because you write more papers and your students read them, then that does no good because the people doing products never read them.
Design research is at its best when the product is out on the market and people are interacting with it. But anyway I'm part of the design research community, so if I'm going to go out and scold them in this way, it's from a friend to a friend. Let's think about what we're doing and do it better.
RD: Let me ask you a final question. Your initial books were so interesting because they used cognitive science to understand the objective parts of what makes a design good. Then with books like Emotional Design you shifted towards the more subjective aspects. What makes a great design that really "gets" people?
DN: When you talk about physical products and the ways we use them, the factors are physical. You can be more objective about it. But when you want to know what really "gets" somebody, that really has to be subjective. We're starting to understand the importance of emotions, the physical nature of the interaction, the way it feels - to hold something, to rub something That's why gestures have taken off so much. If you don't like the result, shake the machine! That's developing into a standard gesture. That's also one of the reasons why music is so compelling: firstly, you use your whole body in playing the instrument, but second of all you feel the vibrations.
We're moving towards the touch and feel, and probably later to smell and taste. That's subjective.
That's what I argue in my book. People think it's a trade-off between complexity and simplicity. Those are not opposite, they're different. Simplicity is in the head.
I show a picture of an airplane cockpit in my book. If you just glance in and don't know anything about flying it looks horribly complicated, but if you spend a lot of time in a cockpit, it's not. Everything is grouped in logical places and lots of things are duplicated. Many are in quadruplicate as there's one set of controls for each engine. As soon as you know that you cut the complexity by a quarter! Pretty soon it becomes fairly straightforward. Above you have all those switches that look messy, but they're circuit breakers.
Complexity is in the world, simplicity is in the head. The more you understand, the simpler things become. So the real trick is understanding.
So if the question is about my books becoming more subjective, it's because I'm talking about more subjective things.
RD: Do you have an inkling of the direction you're going now?
DN: No, I never know where I'm going. I only know where I've been. That's what makes life fun!
If I knew where I was going it wouldn't be as exciting! I go wherever the world takes me. I sit down to write one thing and something completely different comes out. I sit down to work on a problem and someone calls me up on something completely different and I say, "Hey, that's exciting!"
I never know what I'm going to do until I'm finished - but once I’m finished I’m not interested anymore.
RD: Thanks for your time, and we look forward to seeing you at DRC in May!
