Design for a Better World

Don Norman [DN]: I have to back up a little bit and discuss the origin of design. And I believe that almost everything I say will apply to engineering, as well. Both design and engineering have been essential to producing the products that bring benefits to people and profits to companies. The first real designers worked at Wedgewood, the ceramics company in England. Their job was to paint pretty designs on the porcelain so that it would sell better. Design started off as applied art. I make the observation in the book that design’s history as an aesthetic discipline has been most unfortunate in defining for many people what design is all about. In this view, designers have been the ones who could make a product pretty, make it attractive. In a very real sense, designers became tools of industry. But not all of us believed that our role should be to help companies sell more. I say that, but I have to admit that I used to teach people how to design attractive products. I am sad to say that I even taught at one point how to make products addictive and how to use design to lock-in customers so they couldn’t easily leave your domain because it would be too expensive to switch to a different company. All these practices today we say are wrong and bad, but they were part of what we used to teach. My favorite story about design of attractive products is from my time at Apple. Jony Ive showed up in my office one day and held something up in the air. I said, “Wow! I want it! What is it? How much does it cost?” That’s the point; Jony could design something that you wanted without even knowing what it was. He made stuff so beautiful and so elegant that everyone wanted one. Part of the attractiveness was that the device was so thin and so light! But how do you make a computer thin and light? Well, you use special materials, and you glue them together, and you take care not to waste any space. And that aesthetic choice has design consequences that go beyond the product. What are those consequences? I was playing with a new Apple Air yesterday, and although it was screwed together (not glued together), they used really tiny little screws with a weird slot. It required a special instrument to open the case. To save space, the batteries had no enclosure, just the exposed battery, so it wouldn’t waste space. These things made it almost impossible to change a battery. And, of course, it’s also difficult for anybody to take apart one of these computers and reuse the components. It’s interesting, but we can’t even recycle a milk carton. A milk carton is cardboard, so there’s a very fine layer of plastic that protects it from the moisture, and you can’t recycle the milk carton unless you can remove that layer of plastic. Only a few recycling companies have equipment that can do that.