lately, the word “Design” has become a buzzword that is thrown around everywhere to the point that it almost lost its meaning. All companies are integrating ‘Design’ into their products, all the labs are renaming themselves to ’something Design lab’, etc etc. So it was refreshing to read about design from one of the pioneers of the field of the field of design in general and Human-Centered Design in specific, Don Norman A.K.A The Design Don himself. The Design of Everyday Things is widely considered to be one of the fundamental books on design.
I specifically like what he was saying about Experience Design, because it is an aspect of design that I notice is often overlooked. One example of experience design that comes to mind is the BMW i8. It is a hybrid car, having both an electric and a small gasoline engine, and it is incredibly quiet. It is absolutely a feat of engineering to have a supercar that is this quiet. However, BMW realized that the roaring sound of an engine is an important part of the experience of owning a supercar and decided to feed artificial engine sound through the speaker.
All that being said, there is a problem with The Don’s approach of Human-Centered Design. HCD doesn’t allow much room for technological innovation. It is a design process that improves current technologies in a way that the user wants. However sometimes, as Steve Jobs would say, the user does not know what he wants. If Jobs followed the HCD approach to design, the iPhone would not be the way it is today. We may still have had physical keyboards on phones! Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for debate.
P.S. Here’s a good video about the ’Norman doors’ discussed in the reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI