Don Norman

Cognitive scientist and usability engineer, author of The Design of Everyday Things — the book that put Human-Centered Design into the popular vocabulary. His central claim: when an everyday object frustrates us, the failure is the designer’s, not the user’s. “If the system lets you make the error, it is badly designed.”

Norman insists on designing for people as they actually are rather than as engineers wish them to be (“You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are”), on direct Observation of users in their natural environment, and on reframing Failure as a “learning experience.” His notion of “taught helplessness” — bad design conditioning people to blame themselves — is a designed-in cousin of Learned Helplessness.

Where this appears

• The Design of Everyday Things — Kyle’s 2017 read; the source of the HCD, taught-helplessness, and error-as-design-failure arguments.