About

Don Norman is hard to pin down. BusinessWeek listed him as “one of the world’s most influential designers” even though he is not really a designer. Several years prior to that, they labeled him a curmudgeon. Norman says he is a design theorist, attempting to understand how designers work their magic. He is both an academic and a business person, being cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group and former Vice President of Apple as well as professor emeritus at Northwestern University and the University of California, San Diego. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science and has honorary degrees from the University of Padua (Italy) and the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). His books include “Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design.” His newest book, “Living with Complexity,” argues against simplicity. “The world is complex,” says Norman, “and our tools must match the world. Moreover, people don’t really want simplicity (no matter what they say), they want understanding.” He lives at www.jnd.org.