Don Norman: Living with Complexity

so I've been concerned a lot about the design community so we trained in traditional design schools exquisite craftsmanship and the result is exquisite products really beautiful products that are fun to look at beautiful to touch and caress and ode to have in your home in your office your workplace your automobile but these tend to be products they stand alone they work with you and it if you take a look at what modern designers are asked to do quite often we go to design school and we spend four years learning at a draw and learning about materials and learning about construction methods and we learning the great craft skill and we may even go on for another two years and get a master's degree and become an even better crafts person and then what are we asked to do oh we may design a health system or an educational system or finance or a transportation system does that training give us the right background to do this no it doesn't because you don't know anything about the world you don't know anything about it's amazing how many designers know so little about technology or about people yet in fact wonders design it's the designers a system that takes technology and fills out human needs so it's the bridge between technology and people so you have to know all three topics designing and people and technology but it's even worse or even more complex if we talk about the social technological systems that we're encountering ever more in our lives like the Hong Kong transportation system which is incredibly complex with many different varieties of transportation I went to Soho yesterday which meant that I went up the escalators walk after block after block after block that must have been you know in concept that's a very simple concept will simply make moving stairs to take you up the hill but it must have been incredibly complex to do because can you imagine basically destroying access to the stores all along that pathway and if you look at it you can see that different blocks at actually different technologies they probably were built at different times because I wouldn't be surprised you're the most difficult part of building that system was the political problems of getting it done because you have multiple stakeholders you have the shopkeepers and you have the city and you have the people who are going to use it near the people were constructing it and you have the problem with paying for it we're dealing with more and more complex problems I don't think designers are trained well now many designers do brilliant work despite the lack of training in fact I sometimes think that great designers do great work because they don't know anything and let me explain why because the great designer integrates together all these different disciplines and that means you have to learn all these different disciplines quickly and when you try to learn the different disciplines you ask questions and you often ask stupid questions so when I was introduced I would you were told there is no such thing as a stupid question and let me explain why because if somebody asks a stupid guy I ask a stupid question of a physician say and everybody in the audience roles arise it says what a stupid question what is a stupid question it's actually one where to the to the people I'm asking it to the answer is obvious so I must be stupid if I don't know the obvious answer but if I ask that stupid question and I get the answer and then I say why is that it's amazing how many obvious things you do in your life where you actually don't know why and when I ask the stupid question it turns out to the profound question that actually lets me make a breakthrough that lesson we say oh this is the way it's always been but maybe it doesn't have to be that way it maybe there's another way of doing it so stupid questions are also the most brilliant but there is a problem many times stupid questions are well stupid they don't get you anywhere so here's the trick how do you ask the right stupid questions so let me back up now about how we train designers because we train designers to be a craft your crafts people make beautiful wonderful things and I'm talking about these complex systems where the craft is irrelevant because we are doing different things what happened is that about a month ago a bunch of us design educators were in Shanghai we were all in the Advisory Board of Tongji University which has a new college of design and innovation and we have known each other for many years and all of us have been concerned about design education and the people with us included the Dean of the School of Design at Delft and the Delft Institute of Technology Delft University of Technology the former dean of design at Swinburne in Australia the Dean of the institute of design in Chicago case t-bone was there originally with us but he left he had to go back but so that's the Dean of poly you here in Hong Kong and actually before that he was a Dean at Delft in the Netherlands and me and of course the Dean at tone G and we said you know it's time for a different kind of education and education that allows people to work on these complex systems and we spent the next month writing a little manifesto just the three page little manifesto and we decided we gotta give it a name we didn't know what name to quote we tried to figure out her name and we ended up calling it X so there's a manifesto that just got released to the world a day or two ago this is the first public presentation and is called design X where X is sort of like the algebraic variable that can stand for whatever you'd like it to stand for so what is design X well here's how we look at it here's a history of design that is inaccurate and rushed and simple but it sort of captures the essence design started off in England with Wedgwood China was called China because it was plate where that you know tableware that was copied from the Chinese so it was called China so Wedgwood China actually designed things for the middle class English people the first time that stuff had been designed for middle class not the upper class and they made an extremely successful business and over the years design became an important part of commerce and a business and well-designed objects did better sold better and then in the 1900s this became sort of a major theme so it didn't even matter how the objects worked as long as they looked like they were designed in a track you for example there was a big push toward streamlining airplanes were streamlined and so pretty soon trains were streamlined and cars were streamlined and even pencil sharpeners were streamlined it was sort of a design motif in recent years although the same kinds of craftsmanship has continued more and more of our devices have computers in them or electronic circuits and those are invisible and so the way something works is not visible we couldn't figure out how things works because it was arbitrary and so design then changed to try to understand how to make things that were understandable to people and this is the basis of what is today called human centered design of interaction design of human-computer interaction or human-computer interfaces which is to try to say well you know it's up to the designer not just to make it beautiful and wonderful but also to make it understandable or resent a coherent conceptual model we can understand and that's where design is today but where is design going to be tomorrow and I think more and more is going to move into the designing of things like medical systems or educational systems or transportation systems or what-have-you and for this the traditional craftsmanship and even with a modern approach and emphasis on the human and the person and interaction that isn't sufficient so design X is an attempt to move to the next level and I want them emphasized we are not trying to replace the current craftsmanship or the current designers we are saying that this is an additional an additional skill so we simply add it to the kinds of different designers we have which is true of all fields if you look at engineering there isn't a single thing called engineering if you say you're an engineer it's meaningless because I need to know what kind of an engineer and even then I need to know what is your specialty your civil engineer does that mean you build buildings does that mean you build railroads or does that mean you do stress analysis you're a computer scientist what does that mean that means you do theory or that means that you do compilers well the people who do compilers they don't even understand what the theory people talk about but they're both computer scientists while design is has to move this way to to become a legitimate academic discipline where we learn some people will learn the craft skills some will be graphic or communication designers some of the interaction designers some will be product designers but some may be system designers so what do you need to do to become a system designer and these are complex systems I'm talking about systems that are require understanding social structures human behavior economics business models culture politics zoning regulations laws medical industries an industry that is badly in need of assistance and it has a huge number of regulatory issues that have to be overcome which makes it actually very difficult even to design products because you have to pass through so many regulatory barriers so what kind of education is going to be required but more importantly you know there's lots of other people who do this already so what is the role of the designer why can designers make a difference and I think that's because of the special skills that we all learn as designers and one of the important things that design is it's a field of doing and of making and we think by doing and making and drawing as opposed to engineers who think by mathematics or as opposed to political scientists who think often with words we think by actually making and trying and experimenting and we focus upon the people there are areas there's there's a science called system science there's another science it's newly developed it's called service science which is an attempt to understand the science of delivering services or the science of complex systems but all of these neglect people they neglect the very skills that designers have and they don't think as we do by trying out things by drawing and using space and two dimensions or three dimensions in our drawing in our models they think by words and tables and bullet charts and questionnaires and automatics and some computer simulation and the person is hardly there these fields optimize they want to make sure everything is as efficient as possible but efficiency and functionality aren't the same in efficiency and pleasure not only for the people being served but for the people who are doing the work makes for a much better system so designers actually bring this wonderful skill service design for example talks about blueprinting blueprint means what you do is you look to see the service that we're offering and then beneath that we say what is has to go on under the surface to make this work now what's important and interesting about our service blueprint is that if I go to the bank and get a service done I interact with a person so a lot of service designers concerned about this interaction but that person who works at the bank then turns around to all sorts of equipment and other people and interacts with that so that person is a customer of the rest of the bank and if you look at the rest of the bank that's composed of lots of people and equipment who are also customers of the rest of it and so what's really neat about servers design is that if we design for the people we design not only for the person doing the banking transaction but we have to design for the people working at the bank and that's a skill as far as I can tell is restricted to designers the whole point of human centered design is to understand the people and to make sure we are dealing with the people so here's the challenge how can we take the special talents that we have as designers of doing human centered design of going by starting by understanding the issue by trying to observe and see what is going on by never solving the problem that is given to us because we are not problem solvers I'm proud of that fact that we are not problem solvers we are problem definers when somebody gives me a problem to solve when I'm hired as a consultant I have a rule which is do not solve the problem I'm asked to solve because it almost never is the real problem the real problem is something else and if you can get and figure out what the real problem is quite often the problem you're asked to solve goes away those are the skills of the modern designer an addict to that the fact that we understand about iteration and test and modification and continual modification we can we can look at complex issues and try to pull it apart the kinds of problems that we will have to be dealing with starting today are what economists and designers have called wicked problems and a wicked problem is one that doesn't even have a good definition and there is necessary there is no solution wicked problems may not be solvable but they can be improved upon and that's something we're good at another comment which is that if we deal with most of the fields that have a scientific background they do very careful experiments and they're very they're very concerned with truth and the best possible answer and great efficiency let me tell you I'm not interested in truth I'm interested in good enough I'm interested in the ability to take a complex medical system and make it better than it is today and then when I'll come back next year or the year after I'll try to make it better than it is then and then better again and keep making it better but it doesn't have to be the perfect system in fact the perfect system may be impossible it's what Herbert Simon one's called satisficing we want to make it satisfactory and we only look for big phenomena if you look at in the university it's interesting the university is some is actually one of the problems the university educational system it rewards people who are experts a deeper and deeper a now or narrower topics and so we get the world's experts in some kind of metallurgy or the world's experts in some kind of computational device or the world's expert in some kind of human behavior that's all very good and it's useful to have but you know if we aren't designers we're trying to make something that's really effective and getting the world's best expert doesn't help us because what we have to do is put together everything and one of the skills that we must have therefore is working across the domains of working with different stakeholders who have different ways of thinking and different beliefs about what is important and we have to learn to work together and the university does the opposite it makes you narrow and instead of broad it makes you analyze what goes on instead of trying to create something that might change the world and it teaches you to work all by yourself if you work on your job and someone asks you a question you don't know the answer you're supposed to ask somebody else for help or if your boss says hey I need a paper you know you will you explain this new technique to me and you don't know what it is yourself what you're supposed to do is not only ask people but if you find someone who's written the good paper copy it or take three or four good papers and copy the best parts and put them together in the university we're not allowed to do that and therefore we have to lie and make believe we did it ourselves and it's called cheating in the workplace it's called collaboration so why doesn't the university insist on collaboration so that if I copy from somebody else I say so and I explain who I copied from and my grade is based upon well did I copy from the right people that I put together a coherent thing which came about from all of the different pieces and actually if I get a good grade the person like copied from should get a slightly could get part of that credit University is up other problems because universities is one of the problems I want to work on it's one of those complex social technological problems I'm talking about because we teach in the university in semesters at Hong Kong Pauling is 13 weeks at my university it's 10 weeks at other universities it's 15 weeks why do we teach in those segments has nothing to do with learning or their knowledge it has to do with scheduling the classroom well let's Hatters how do we solve that and why is it that we go to a university and think that when we're finished we now know everything we need to know for the rest of our lives how do we solve that well I think that's one of the kinds of problems that we need to solve I'd like to get rid of departments and universities we replace them with problems so that we work on real problems and therefore we bring together all the kinds of expertise required to solve the problem because that's what we're going to do in design X design X is going to handle huge problems that cannot be done by a single designer it will require teams of designers and teams of experts and therefore the designers will have to understand a little bit about all of the different topics to come together so they know what experts to bring together so they understand the language of the experts they themselves will not be expert but they have to be able to communicate and they have to work in collaborative teams and we should be training for this in the university and we should be doing more of making and less of analyzing actually my experience is that when I give this argument to university executives and administrators they understand or they approve those deals like that idea the enemy in the university is the professor's because that's all the professor has ever done most professors have never had a job in their whole life even even professors in business schools have never worked in business and what they are promote four is how expert they are and their narrow topic and they think therefore that the topic they study is the most important thing in the world because otherwise why would they study it which makes it really difficult to collaborate it makes it really difficult to change the way we do things but that's a design challenge how do we manage so that's what design X wishes to do design X wishes to take upon these challenges it wishes to actually solve complex issues it wishes to change the educational system to make designers more aware of all the different disciplines that must be better and actually not even just designers I would like everybody to be able to understand how to put things together though social sciences are essential but the engineering is essential the visual arts are is essential the business school is essential we have to put these all together if we're going to make successful human systems so that's sort of the main point I wanted to make but I do I want to give you a little bit of what I'm doing right now because it's kind of interesting I taught at the University of California San Diego for a long time thirty years and I retired in 1993 are retired and after retirement well I became a vice president at Apple and then I went on and became an executive at HP and then I went on and started my own company with jakob nielsen's Nielsen Norman company and then one of my clients hired me I went to Chicago in a start-up educational startup where we went through a tremendous amount of money and collapsed and so then I went to Northwestern University now in computer science but I started The Seagull Design Institute there and then I retired again so I retired twice and I failed retirement twice so I went back to my home in Palo Alto California and was living happily traveling all around the Road far too busy came to Hong Kong a couple of times won lots of boards enjoying life and then the head of the University of California San Diego came to my home in Palo Alto and asked me to please come back and start a design program in San Diego there was no design in San Diego there's hardly any designers in the entire San Diego area which is a from the Mexican border all the way to Los Angeles is almost no design why would I want to do this well because he he gave the instructions of what he wanted me to do and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity here are his instructions I don't care what you do but it has to do two things it has to be important and it has to be exciting that's it here is three million dollars go off as a starting point and make it important and exciting oh well gee so I've actually been back now for about five months and I've been spending my time making it exciting I can do that making you important that's hard and so design X is that first step of the kinds of things we want to work on because we don't see any need for another great design school there's here there's Polly you there's Delft there's the Institute of design there are lots of good design schools we don't need to be one there are lots of them we need to be different design x is a way we want to move now what kind of problems might be working on well here's what's already we're thinking of we are actually experts at what we call distributed cognition where you have different entities all working together do some system and the entities might be people or groups or organizations or political bodies or machines some machines that are dumb some machines that are smart some machines that are completely automatic and how can we make them work take a look at the automobile the modern automobile can do 80 to 90% of the driving all by itself and that modern automobile will soon be talking to all the other automobiles so in fact you don't even need traffic lights anymore because as the two cars come to the intersection they'll just talk to each other and this car will say okay I'll slow down and the other car will say I'll speed up and then they just go whizzing through cars already keep you in your own lane cars already can park themselves cars already could keep a safe distance of the car in front of you cars already can brake when there's a possible accident cars can already the commercial cars can drive 30 or 40 minutes without any hands or no feet no hands by itself and experimental cars can drive for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles a million kilometers with no driver but we also know that these things are really dangerous because they don't work perfectly yet and so today we're saying oh we must have a human there to take over when something goes wrong and we know from aviation this will not work so how can we make this complex system with cars that are getting more and more automatic that are talking to themselves talking to each other the driver is talking to the car in fact if you want to change your lane it used to be you'd use a turn signal to tell the other cars no today you use a turn signal to tell your car that you intend to change the lane so it decides whether it's safe to do so is there a car in the blind spot or not that's a complex system and the automobile manufacturers are very concerned about this and that's one of the ones we want to work on or take Ebola we were asked to work on Ebola I don't know anything about Ebola but it's a complex medical political logistic design problem the suits that you wear to protect yourself against Ebola we got one we put them on they are three layers two pairs of gloves it takes 15 minutes to put it on and we sat in our air-conditioned conference room doing nothing but talking and after 15 minutes we wanted to get out of it it was hot we were sweating we were uncomfortable and now imagine you're in Liberia where the temperature is 30 to 40 degrees and a hundred percent humidity and the patients are uncomfortable and screaming and running around and difficult so here's the question after you've done this for eight hours and you're hot and tired and sweaty you can barely function how do you take off the suit can you imagine taking off your clothes without ever letting the outside of the clothes touch your skin people who designed the suits didn't think of that because it was designed for different kinds of diseases or that wasn't the issue so we want to do a human centered design on what's going on in Ebola places but it's too dangerous to go and do it so the only kind of design problems I want to work on are ones that give us a general principle that we can learn to apply to others design has this problem designers do this so then they do this and then they do this listen to design speeches here's a picture of what I did then here's a picture of what I did and I did this and I did that what do you learn from it nothing I want to do design problems when we learn principles that we give to others so here's a principle here's the question how do we do human centered design when you can't go and watch but we have some answers so let me just give you another example which is in the medical domain in part because San Diego is one of their great resources is medicine and biology is graceful aging another one is individual medication we're going to have personalized medication because of all the sensors and all the information we have about people's genetic makeup about the centers that you wear like the Fitbit that tells you your posts and a few other things but we have lots of other sensors we're gonna have a huge amount of information about the people how do we make it so we could actually put that together so we can give effective medication nobody's closed with one interesting observation as we make more and more automated devices it's Dees killing people and making problems worse but there's another way we should not be automating what we can automate we should be trying to make teams teams of people and teams of equipment and teams of people and equipment let me give you a simple example what's the best chess player in the world and you might have several answers you might list a person who's the best chess player or you might live deep blue.the ibm's computer program that can beat any person the answer is neither of them are the best chess player in the world the best chess player in the world the team of people two or three people who have two or three computer programs the two or three people are not the best chess players in the world some of them are not even international grandmasters they're simply good but not world famous not world class and the chess programs are not the world's best or the kind that you can go out and buy for your PC and the combination of these people have beat every other chess player in the world they beat other teams but they can beat the best human individual and they can beat the best machine because they know how to put it together so one of the challenges for our future as automation takes over more and more of your jobs how do we change it so that what relation is not replacing us but automation is another team member which allows us to do better than we ever could have done before but needs but where our talents are even more required not so those are the challenges for the future and those are the challenges for design X and I see I've simply I've now failed in a challenge I gave to myself which is that I will give a short talk and leave lots of room for questions but thank you

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Id: Tj96KyC9zdI

Length: 33min 35sec (2015 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 23 2014