Donald Norman
Don Norman is an internationally- renowned expert on human-centered design. He is the Breed Professor of Design at Northwestern University, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, and former Vice President of Apple Computer. He serves on many advisory boards, including Encyclopedia Britannica and the Industrial Design department of KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science and ACM's CHI Lifetime Achievement award. He has honorary degrees from the University of Padova (Italy) and the Technical University Delft (the Netherlands). He is the author of "The Design of Everyday Things," "Emotional Design," and "The Design of Future Things."
He will talk about his book in progress tentatively called "Sociable Design." Sociable design extends the arena of design from function, aesthetics, and emotion to the world of social interaction. Much of our activities involve other people, even things we believe we are doing in isolation. In this sense, all tasks are social, for no task is done in isolation of the needs of others.
Sociable design requires system thinking, changing our unsociable products that work well in isolation but horribly in the world of other objects, tasks, and events into ones that work well together, sociably. Forget affordances: it is the signifiers that matter. www.jnd.org
Additional funding for this event: Illinois Informatics Institute, Computer Science, Department of Human Factors, and College of Engineering.
Additional funding for designmatters2: School of Art + Design, Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership; Technology Entrepreneur Center.