Donald Norman was the founding chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, and a former Apple Fellow at Apple Computer. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has authored a number of books, including The Design of Everyday Things, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles, Things That Make us Smart, and The Invisible Computer.

Norman currently is a director at UNext, a distributed learning start-up company, and a consultant at the Nielsen Norman Group, whose goal is to help companies move toward developing human-centered products and internet interaction. According to Norman, and others at Nielsen, “success in human-centered design requires giving equal weight to user experience, marketing, and technology....the major barriers to success are not technological: they are social, political, and organizational”.

Norman, like Susan Bodker is interested in the “task artifact cycle.” Norman contends that when one puts an artifact between a user and a task the task changes.

Don Norman's basic premise is that technology should conform to human needs through the interface design and not the other way around. He heralds the creation of information appliances, but insists they be designed with a user-centered methodology. Norman believes that education is primary, technology is simply an enabling tool.

By Norman's own omission: "I am a technology enthusiast annoyed by unneccesary complexity of today's products. My goal is to humanize technology, to make it disappear from sight, replaced by a human-cenntered, activity-based family of information appliances. Easy to learn, powerful and enjoyable". This he does through his numerous consulting engagements, research and publications.

Norman is often quoted for the idea that effective interfaces render technology invisible -- we don't notice it because it works effectively.

The design of an artifact (any man-made object) gives us cues to its use, Norman refers to these cues as "affordances."

Norman has worked on the ergonomics of airplane flight controls and other technological applications. Norman argues "what makes for bad design is trying to solve problems in isolation, so that one particular force, like time or market or compatibility or usabilility, dominates."

Publications

User Centered System Design (1986)

The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988)

Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (1992)

Things That Make Us Smart (1993)

Defending human attributes in the age of the machine (1994)

The Invisible Computer (1998)