02 Don Norman: Human(ity) Centred AI – Pt.1

And that's all he's done his whole life. And yes, he was really wonderful. But it turns out that for sports, yeah, very useful. But not But in fact, lots of successful people were not successful at first, because they're interested in everything. And so they flitter around, and they do this, and they do that, and they do something else, and so on. this book is by David Epstein. It's called Range. And I said, that's me.

He's best known in design circles for coining the phrase user experience when he was at Apple in the early 90s and for generally evangelizing user centered design, particularly through his seminal book, Psychology of Everyday Things, or some of you will know it as The Design of Everyday Things. But he began in electrical engineering. He then moved to computer science. He was one of the founders of cognitive science as a new discipline.

And while he claims later that there's no general arc or direction to his career, there is a sort of general shift from the hard sciences and engineering over to psychology and human society. He's won multiple awards, holds many titles, but what I most admire about Don are his humanistic perspective. He's, he knows a ton about technology, but he's also developed a deep Deep and heartfelt understanding of how people tick and what their underlying motivations and needs are.

And he's a great champion for those in a, an increasingly technological world. He's also a deep and erudite thinker, as an alumni of MIT, Harvard, Cambridge, and other universities, his, the quality of his working and thinking is, you know, very rare, Then there's his intellectual influence. I normally steer clear of using the term thought leader, but I think if that, if anyone is worthy of that term, Don is, because he's managed to pioneer and popularize so many important concepts.

And related to that is clarity of communication. there's lots of smart people around, but, um, there's few people who are smart and as clear as Don is so very impressive. So today I want to talk about Don's views on user experience in the age of AI. It ended up being quite a long conversation. So I split it into two. Part one covers his very busy retirement, his wide ranging career.

And then we get onto the evolution of how we've interacted with technology over the years, up until roundabout now and around AI, and then part two solely focuses on AI. Now for me, Don's a living legend. He's been a champion and a friendly critic of design over the years. I always enjoy our conversations. So I hope you do too. And without much further ado, I give you the Don.

days?

And so, okay, I'll write about the problems. Okay. But actually I, there's nothing I can add that isn't already well known. Okay, I'll write about what the solutions are. And I looked around and I found good solutions already out there, well known. So, what am I going to talk about? Wait a minute. How come we know the problems and we know the solutions and nothing is happening? And I said, ah, human behavior. So maybe that's where I can add something.

so I decided to write a book about this and I spent, it took me, I don't know, three, four years because I did a lot of history, learned a lot of new things, talked to many groups around the world and people and, learned about colonialism and learned about the history of modern society And of course the economic systems that we now are under. So what I try to do is give a new perspective on the issues.

And I'm proud of the fact that there's nothing new in the book in the sense that all the problems they describe are well known. So, it's not just me complaining. Uh, other very well established credentialed people are complaint, making the same complaints. And I also have a rule which I should never complain unless I know a better solution, unless I know a solution. And so I found solutions for everyone. And they're not my personal solutions, with one exception.

Uh, so again, it's not just me, it's other people are doing it and doing good work on it. It just hasn't been accepted around the world. And the one exception has to do with what I'm calling humanity centered design. But what I realized was that What I've been teaching, human centered design, is wrong. And I've been teaching it for 20 or 30 years, and it's the book, Design of Everyday Things.

And what I usually do at this point is I hold up the book in front of the microphone, in front of the camera, and you can see the book, and I say, this is wrong. Well, why is it wrong? Well, there's nothing wrong in the book. I still believe everything that's in there. What's wrong is what's not in the book. what's not in the book is, well, what today's issues are. It doesn't talk about sustainability.

It doesn't talk about when we make these wonderful, beautiful objects, how we mine the earth and destroy the ecology to get the materials we need. And then we have to transform it, smelt it, into materials that we can use for manufacturing. And then the manufacturing. All of these steps pollute the atmosphere, and the water, and the land. worse, we have now the, in part because of our economic philosophy, we want to sell, and sell, and sell, and sell.

So we make products that don't last very long, and that are very difficult to repair. And Some of the difficulty is deliberate, I think, by the marketing people. And, but some of it is that, well, we want to make these products thin and lightweight and beautiful. And that requires gluing them together and not using normal ways of fastening things and making it really hard to get in and change things. Ha. So, that's left.

And we also didn't talk about, so, people who do digital products say, well, that's not us, we're not polluting. Well, first of all, all digital products work on physical products. more and more, especially the new AI systems, take a tremendous amount of electricity. And where does that electricity come from? And then, we're also polluting mines. that we have deliberately made things addictive. And, you know, I used to teach how to make things. We called it, it was a lock in.

We said it was wonderful. You know, you want people to come back to your product or once you get there, not, never to leave because it's so exciting and important to them.

And we'll show you the better way to govern, and the better way to have a religion, and the better way to do this, that, and the other. Come on now, we destroyed wonderful cultures all around the world. But designers do the same thing. send out the anthropologist to see what the issues, to see how people work and so on. And then we build things and we say, isn't this wonderful, all these wonderful devices we are giving you.

And No, so that if you're doing things especially for societal benefit, it should come from them. again, this is hardly a new concept. It's called participatory design or co design. It is well known in design circles, but surprisingly little done because it doesn't fit the it doesn't fit the business models of companies. companies, they want to bring out new products on a particular schedule.

And it's really, they barely give the design team enough time to do it well, and they seldom give the design team enough time or money to go out and actually see what the customers really need and how they work with things let alone to have it come from the customers. So that's what we have to change and that's what's missing in centered design. So I'm calling it. Humanity centered design, if human centered design is HCD, humanity is HCD Same principles, but a bit more.

And, uh, we said, what we want to do is not reward great designers. They don't need a reward. When you're, when you're well known, rewards don't mean much. It doesn't change what you're going to do. It's nice. But it doesn't change anything. We want to reward people who are just starting out. when you need the reward the most. But they have to be practitioners. I don't want, I don't want lovely concepts. Because that's what designers do.

They draw the plans and maybe they'll make one model or something. they'll test it among friends. But it's not real. So it has to be a practitioner. I don't care how you were trained or what your background is. But it has to follow my HCD plus principles. They come in many versions, by the way. It's not just called that, it's also called life centered design or planet centered design and other things. But we all mean the same thing. and they have to have evidence.

And I also wanted to reward the educational institutions that are training these people. And for them I wanted two kinds of evidence, a statement of what their curriculum is. It doesn't have to be the whole department, it could be just a small section a specialty. But they also have to have graduates who are out. And the best evidence is that they have graduates who are out doing work for societal needs. So that's what I've been doing. And so the first year.

On August 2nd, or, no, on August 1st, we actually released the results of the first year.

We had applications from 26 different countries, and we ended up giving, for the practitioners, three awards for Alexa, for excellence, and two awards for promising, in education we gave eight awards, and then we realized there were a whole bunch of things that didn't fit our categories, so We invented a new category called Special Recognition, and that's eight awards, but it was actually eight pro eleven projects because some of them were multiple projects from one non profit organization.

And so, we have now eleven countries got awards.

bit. Cause I'm, I've always been fascinated by your, cause I've never, we've never talked about this, your formative influences, cause I've always been impressed about what a Renaissance man you are. With such a breadth of kind of interest, passions and skills from I had got written down engineering, science, design, business, academia, writing and speaking. And you've just explained with the research for your latest book, you're adding in Sort of history and. economics into the mix as well.

But I'm just fascinated

And that's all he's done his whole life. And yes, he was really wonderful. But it turns out that for sports, yeah, very useful. But not But in fact, lots of successful people were not successful at first, because they're interested in everything. And so they flitter around, and they do this, and they do that, and they do something else, and so on. this book is by David Epstein. It's called Range.

They were invisible, and I loved that, and I still do. I started learning and reading a lot about electronics when I was still in high school. And so I decided I wanted to be a circuit designer. And I went to MIT in the States and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, which is the field. that does this, except computers were just starting to come out then. So I decided I wanted to learn more about computers and build intelligent machines, but there was no place doing it.

So I went to the University of Pennsylvania, where the first computer had been built in the United States, and but nobody was there anymore. They had all left and started companies. So, by accident I got into psychology.

I went up and talked to him, and he said, you don't know anything at all about psychology. And I said, that's right. And he said, good. And When I entered the psychology department, I got my PhD in two years, by the way, which is pretty

So Donald Broadbent, he was at Oxford, no, Cambridge, and he was writing this wonderful stuff, and so I got, that's what I liked. So.

every time you switch fields I discover that happens because the fields are so narrow and specialized they don't know what other fields are doing. so, you just take obvious stuff in one field and put it in the other field, and wee, wow, aren't you brilliant? No, I'm not brilliant at all. But so I, but I thought psychology was too narrow. Had very special ways of doing it and doing experiments and only in the laboratory, they didn't go out to the world.

And so, I wanted to bring in computer science. I was already publishing in the artificial intelligence journals. And I wanted to bring in computational thinking, and anthropology, and sociology, and language, and psychology. No, they just stuck to what they were doing. And so, I started the first department of cognitive science in the world. Actually, the people in Sussex think that they were the first. It doesn't matter. The two of us were very early in this business

Why were they so stupid? We decided they were very intelligent and they did the best job they could, but the design of that plant led to the errors. If you wanted to design something to cause errors, you could not have done a better job, we said. And I said, oh. I'm supposed to understand people. I'm a psychologist, and I understand technology. Maybe this field of design is something I should work in.

And wrote, I, then I went to Cambridge, England for a sabbatical where I couldn't work the water taps and I couldn't work the light switches or the doors. I went to Cambridge because it was a good place to be and there were lots of good, smart people. I didn't intend to do anything, but I Wow, I wrote this book,

I met him at a conference, I asked him to read my manuscript, and he read it briefly and said, Look, there are a couple of real designers here, let's go meet and talk to them. And they told me that all the complaints I had, they had the same complaints. And all the kind of solutions I was trying to suggest, they already were doing that. But I actually changed a lot of my book to, to reflect what I had learned.

In fact I blamed the designers at one point, and there's a section of my book called Pity the Poor Designer, who is trying to do this, but the economic pressures and other pressures prevent them from doing the job properly. So that's when I discovered design.

But today, fortunately, we both know about each other and we work together. Would

I, I went to parts of India that my Indian friends have never been to, because they just live in the big cities. So he's been a lifelong friend, and I've been an advisor to a number of companies he's set up, you know, after Apple. He said he's the one who wanted to start a prize in my honor. And that's

think originally was

Or, the big mechanical, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution the when England mechanized the making of cloth To run those machines was fairly complex. But you could understand all the steps, because you could see it. You could see it working. You could see when the thread broke, how it just, you know, you had to stop everything and reset everything.

And you could see how all these different levers, because to do, to weave, Something with a pattern in it required really incredible kinds of, uh, mechanical devices. But, uh, once again, you could look at each one and figure it out all by yourself. But when electric devices came into going, being, the first ones were still easy to figure out because they were basically motors and uh, light bulbs. But there wasn't much to it.

But as they got more and more complex, and especially once we got What's called vacuum tubes and then transistors. it could do all sorts of things and there's no way of figuring it out. You had to learn about it and learn the theory behind it. And so I think that was the beginning of complex devices.

For the first time instead of being able to figure it out, you were at the mercy of the person who designed it and what kind of controls they decided to give you and how they explained what they were doing. Take a look at some of those early radios or the early TV sets. They'll have about seven or eight different controls. And trying to use them, it was, never understood them. They would just twiddle in each of them until something seemed okay. So, the next step is that, You're absolutely right.

Once we got to these more general purpose things run by computers was interesting is in the early days of the internet, I was one of the first users in the first couple thousand users, I guess. Because first of all, I was at MIT and I was at Harvard and I was writing papers with a friend at MIT and they had a time shared computer system and we could write papers together.

And And then when I moved to the University of California in San Diego, we could still keep writing because we had an internet connection. There weren't very many of them. But we had one of those connections. It was called the ARPAnet, the Advanced Research Project Agency Network. And, but you know what? we use the word processor all the time. It was really effective for Irish writing, but the head of the computer center came to my, came to me and said, I should stop. He said, you're costing us.

Do you know what it takes to, to write a paper on this? You had a waste of the use of the, of a powerful computer.

And But the other thing that happened is I began to learn that when you have a power device and people are starting to use it and it's creating, doing, because it's really helping them, you shouldn't go and say, hey, that's not what this is for. So you use the example of a spreadsheet. The first spreadsheet revolutionized. It came out on this tiny little machine called the Apple II. don't remember how much memory it had. 48, 000 words or something? No, probably less.

And it revolutionized the way accountants were doing their jobs. But guess what? It's a spreadsheet. It's, it turns out to be a document rows and columns. And then each cell can have a value that's determined by a computation based on surrounding cells. So people started playing, making computer programs out of it. The game of life. which is a wonderful game, is, you can build it on the spreadsheet. It's really wonderful. You don't have to know any programming language, you just built it.

And and people realized that, oh, they could store you know, a catalog of the items they own. They could make it into a database. And you could use it for your, lists. And it did all sorts of wonderful things, and And you said this led to the, you know, the great confusion because once the companies discovered this, they said, Oh, well, let's help you. We'll add a new special command that is helpful just for that purpose. So yes, these things got more and more complex.

But in some sense, it's because you built this general purpose tool and people were using it in ways you'd never dreamed. By the way, this is true of mechanical tools, too. Take a look at a hammer, a screwdriver. people use a screwdriver, what do they use it for? Well, they sometimes use it to pry open devices. They use it like a hammer, or like a chisel, and they bang on the top and the, and they do all sorts of things you're not supposed to do with it.

But, the solution in the mechanical thing is we invented specialized tools that did that. Or, we simply let people use the tools the wrong way. And the professionals said, Oh, you should be using a specialized tool. But no. Everybody just said, Look, my, my screwdriver is really great. I use it for screws. I use it for chipping away wood. I use it for scratching my back. I use it for reaching into a, you know, a dark area. And if it breaks, okay, I buy a new one.

So, that's a good lesson, and yes, specialized tools are easier to use, they're made for the function, and they actually do a better job. But, you end up with lots and lots of specialized devices, and that's our cell phone today. The cell phone is a platform, and inside we have different, what we call them, apps, specialized devices that, in theory, are very simple to use, because they're, you know, designed for one function only. but we have a lot of them.

But actually, the problem is though, that each one of the ones that was designed for just one thing, people discovered other ways of using it, things it could do that nobody ever thought of, and so pretty soon, it was no longer specialized.

The smartphone was almost like half an information appliance. It was still one box. It was even A bigger universal box than the PC, because it incorporated cameras and alarm clocks and calculators and things. But you had all these dedicated little tools inside it. The software tool. So How do you, looking back on the information appliance kind of concept, how do you see that compared to the smartphone?

But, because there's sort of a conflict between having something small that fits in the pocket, but then it's very hard to use and to read or to do, to work on a spreadsheet on a tiny little screen is really difficult. But, yeah, I think it's an information appliance. And mind you, we're getting more and more information appliances that are real physical devices that are small, that do things, like our watches.