From doors to phones, Norman’s lesson on why modern design needs exit points

Don Norman is an irritable, 89-year-old man. After listening to two minutes of platitudes on what an inspiring man he is, he says with a weary wave of the hand, “Why don't we just begin?”

- Charles Assisi

The issue here is, where to begin. Because Norman is the kind of man who didn’t just design objects; he redesigned how we think about them. Long before “user experience” became Silicon Valley jargon, he gave it meaning. His fingerprints are on everything; how we open doors, use phones, the checkout buttons on e-commerce website, even how governments think about engaging with citizens. Even some of those who worked on Aadhaar continue to use him as a sounding board. In the design world, Norman's language is the grammar — the rules by which everything else makes sense.

He is speaking from the new BITS Design School in Mumbai where he is an advisor. He has a reputation for having disrupted design disproportionately. If user-centered design had a birth certificate, Don Norman's name would be on it as progenitor.

But what kind of design makes him uncomfortable? He's spent a lifetime cutting through the niceties of form to reach what really matters in design—function, empathy, moral clarity. Don Norman is famous for the concept of the Norman Door—a badly designed door that’s confusing to use, one that may say, PULL but demands that you in fact PUSH. At the hotel he’s staying in Mumbai, he couldn't find the bathroom in his room for ten minutes because the architect had hidden the door behind a seamless wooden wall. Beautiful. Immaculate. Useless. “It’s not design,” he chuckles. “It's sculpture.”

That irritation with things which are pretty but thoughtless has morphed into a lifelong discipline. His seminal book The Design of Everyday Things turned that frustration into a theory: when objects confuse people it isn't their fault, it's poor design. Every confusing interface, he wrote, is a small act of disrespect; every elegant one, a moral choice.