Full automation is good. But the path toward full automation must traverse the dangerous stages of partial automation, where the very successes of automation may make human drivers less able to respond to the unexpected, unavoidable imperfections of the automation. The appropriate design path to deal with this requires us to reconsider the driver and automation as a team, as collaborative partners.

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January 01 2014 Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change Donald A. Norman, Donald A. Norman Donald A. Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Group, an IDEO fellow, Trustee of IIT's Institute of Design (Chicago), and former Vice President of Apple. He is professor emeritus of Computer Science and Design at Northwestern University and professor emeritus of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Korea's Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), he has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Industrial Design. 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 (Netherlands). Donald Norman is author of numerous books including, Design of Everyday Things, Emotional Design, and Living with Complexity. He can be found at www.jnd.org. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Roberto Verganti Roberto Verganti Roberto Verganti is Professor of Management of Innovation at Politecnico di Milano. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School twice, Copenhagan Business School, and Mälardalen University in Sweeden. He serves on the European Design Innovation Leadership Board of the European Commission. His book, Design-Driven Innovation, published by Harvard Business Press has been nominated by the Academy of Management for the George R. Terry Book Award as one of the best six books published in 2008 and 2009. He can be found at www.verganti.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Donald A. Norman Donald A. Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Group, an IDEO fellow, Trustee of IIT's Institute of Design (Chicago), and former Vice President of Apple. He is professor emeritus of Computer Science and Design at Northwestern University and professor emeritus of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a member of the American National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Korea's Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), he has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Industrial Design. 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 (Netherlands). Donald Norman is author of numerous books including, Design of Everyday Things, Emotional Design, and Living with Complexity. He can be found at www.jnd.org. Roberto Verganti Roberto Verganti is Professor of Management of Innovation at Politecnico di Milano. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School twice, Copenhagan Business School, and Mälardalen University in Sweeden. He serves on the European Design Innovation Leadership Board of the European Commission. His book, Design-Driven Innovation, published by Harvard Business Press has been nominated by the Academy of Management for the George R. Terry Book Award as one of the best six books published in 2008 and 2009. He can be found at www.verganti.com. Online ISSN: 1531-4790 Print ISSN: 0747-9360 © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2013 Design Issues (2014) 30 (1): 78–96. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00250 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Donald A. Norman, Roberto Verganti; Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change. Design Issues 2014; 30 (1): 78–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00250 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDesign Issues Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Why we don't really want simplicity, and how we can learn to live with complexity.If only today's technology were simpler! It's the universal lament, but it's wrong. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It's not complexity that's the problem, it's bad design. Bad design complicates things unnecessarily and confuses us. Good design can tame complexity.Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools. Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding?but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

column Share on Gestural interfaces: a step backward in usability Authors: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern UniversityView Profile , Jakob Nielsen Nielsen Norman Group Nielsen Norman GroupView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 17Issue 5September + October 2010 pp 46–49https://doi.org/10.1145/1836216.1836228Online:01 September 2010Publication History 128citation5,544DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations128Total Downloads5,544Last 12 Months395Last 6 weeks32 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

I believe we will look back on 2010 as the year we expanded beyond the mouse and keyboard and started incorporating more natural forms of interaction such as touch, speech, gestures, handwriting, and vision— what computer scientists call the 'NUI' or natural user interface. " —Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft Gestural interaction is the new excitement in the halls of industry. Advances in the size, power, and cost of microprocessors , memory, cameras, and other sensing devices now make it possible to control by wipes and flicks, hand gestures , and body movements. A new world of interaction is here: The rulebooks and guidelines are being rewritten, or at least, such is the claim. And the new interactions even have a new marketing name: natural, as in " Natural User Interface. " As usual, marketing rhetoric is ahead of reality. Fundamental principles of knowledge of results, feedback , and a good conceptual model still rule. The strength of the graphical user interface (GUI) has little to do with its use of graphics: It has to do with the ease of remembering actions, both in what actions are possible and how to invoke them. Visible icons and visible menus are the mechanisms, and despite the well-known problems of scaling up to the demands of modern complex systems, they still allow one to explore and learn. The important design rule of a GUI is visibility: Through the menus, all possible actions can be made visible and, therefore, easily discoverable. The system can often be learned through exploration. Systems that avoid these well-known methods suffer. Gestural interfaces are not new. Gestures have been part of the interface scene since the very early days. Brad Myers' 1998 review describes work in the 1960s and reminds us that they were first commercially deployed in systems for computer-aided design and with the Apple Newton of 1992. Myron Krueger's pioneering work on artificial reality in the early 1980s was my first introduction to gestural interaction with large, projected images. Multiple-touch systems have been around since the 1980s: Bill Buxton's review correlates the date of the first multi-touch system designed for human-computer interaction with the 1982 M.S. thesis of Nimish Mehta. Specialized sensors for detecting human location and movement have long played a role in game design. Musical instruments are both multi-touch and gestural, and electronic input devices such as drum pads and electric guitars extend these modes of …

argued for the critical importance of doing research first, but with continual failure. This should be a signal that the logical time course simply cannot be accommodated by the reality of product schedules , so that other solutions and approaches must be developed. We cannot continue to argue that everyone else is wrong. The research-practice gap is real, I have argued, and we should stop pretending that researchers and practitioners speak the same language. Human-centered design (HCD), I argued, can be harmful, for, among other things, it is really a sophisticated take on design by committee, guaranteeing continual good results. But what if the goal isn't merely the good but rather the great and wonderful? Then HCD gets in the way. Great designers do not use HCD. And as a corollary, great designers have both great successes and great failures. HCD promises to avoid both these extremes. Everyone, it seems, cries out for simplicity: We need simpler products, goes the cry. But when I examined simplicity, I found that even those who cried the loudest actually complained when given simple products. Simplicity, I have argued several times, should never be the goal. The world is complex and so too must be our tools. Complexity is good. The quest for simplicity is misguided—what people need is Over the past five years, I have written approximately three dozen columns. What has been learned? What will come? Obviously, it is time for reflection. My goal has always been to incite thought, debate, and understanding. Those of us in the field of interaction—whether students, researchers or practitioners ; whether designers or programmers, synthesizers or analyzers—all share some common beliefs and ideals. One of my jobs is to challenge these established beliefs, for often when they are examined, they rest on an ill-defined platform with no supporting evidence other than the longevity that exempts them from examination. We need a rigorous foundation for our work—to question that which is not firmly supported by evidence, even if it appears obvious. Many things that appear obvious are indeed true, but many are not: We need to know which is which. I've questioned the role of usability in products, suggesting that although it is important, it is never the most important characteristic. I've questioned the time-honored prescription that we should design products by first engaging in user research, then a period of iterative rapid prototyp-ing, assessment, and reconceptu-alization. …

research-article Share on The research-practice gap: the need for translational developers Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, KAIST Industrial Design Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, KAIST Industrial DesignView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 17Issue 4July + August 2010 pp 9–12https://doi.org/10.1145/1806491.1806494Published:01 July 2010Publication History 70citation3,254DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations70Total Downloads3,254Last 12 Months826Last 6 weeks80 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

column THE WAY I SEE ITThe transmedia design challenge: technology that is pleasurable and satisfying Share on Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, and KAIST Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, and KAISTView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 17Issue 1January + February 2010 pp 12–15https://doi.org/10.1145/1649475.1649478Online:01 January 2010Publication History 8citation1,378DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads1,378Last 12 Months134Last 6 weeks12 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

research-article Share on Technology first, needs last: the research-product gulf Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, KAIST Industrial Design Nielsen Norman Group, Northwestern University, KAIST Industrial DesignView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 17Issue 2March + April 2010 pp 38–42https://doi.org/10.1145/1699775.1699784Online:01 March 2010Publication History 38citation2,274DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations38Total Downloads2,274Last 12 Months475Last 6 weeks38 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

research-article THE WAY I SEE ITMemory is more important than actuality Share on Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 16Issue 2March + April 2009 pp 24–26https://doi.org/10.1145/1487632.1487638Published:01 March 2009 46citation1,062DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations46Total Downloads1,062Last 12 Months189Last 6 weeks25 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We live embedded within a supporting network of technology, much of it invisible but essential to our existence. Some of it is mundane, such as the structures that provide water, gas, and electricity and carry away waste as sewage or garbage. Some is more profound, such as the institutions of business, government, and education. But all are sustained by an ever-growing network of services and facilities. The result is colossal and threatens to overwhelm society. Huge expanses of earth paved over for cities and highways, for parking lots and playgrounds. Under the streets lies an entangled mess of wires, cables, pipes, and pas-sageways [1]. We tend to ignore the infrastructure when we design. Infrastructure is often ugly— the mass of wires overhead or the pipes and valves in front of many buildings. Its visibility forces us to think about things we would prefer to ignore. We would rather design our new devices without concern for the wires and cables that support them. Infrastructure must be serviced , upgraded, or superseded, and with time, it becomes increasingly expensive, difficult , or even impossible to maintain. Eventually, we become slaves to old-fashioned infrastructure, for once the fabric of a technological architecture has been established, society is so dependent upon it that it is difficult or impossible to replace, even when far better technologies exist. Often multiple standards and techniques arise for the same service. Agreement upon a common standard can be difficult, fraught with technical, political, and business prejudice. As a result, we tend to end up with multiple, noncompatible standards for the same goal. For example, today there is a wide variety of ways to pay for things. I just spent a month in Korea, where one could pay for a taxi ride with an interesting variety of cash alternatives: cell phones; bank credit cards, and cards for the public transportation system. Transportation cards with embedded chips could be placed upon a pad to transfer funds; cell phones with embedded chips could be placed on a different pad to transfer funds; and certain bank credit or debit cards lacked the chips but had a scannable magnetic strip. The payment system also included a digital taxi meter that displayed the fare and a printer that provided receipts. The infrastructure for payment had so many separate pieces of equipment that there was little room left for anything else. Still, as Figure 1 attests, …

column Share on THE WAY I SEE ITWhen security gets in the way Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 16Issue 6November + December 2009 pp 60–63https://doi.org/10.1145/1620693.1620708Published:01 November 2009Publication History 62citation1,072DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations62Total Downloads1,072Last 12 Months84Last 6 weeks11 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Prologue: In the summer of 2008, I locked myself away in a secluded, secret location and wrote a book. My publisher didn't like it. "Boring," he said. Boring! Me? So I rewrote the beginning, which I present here to you. (Interested readers can find the original version, "Sociable Design," on my website, jnd.org.)

column Share on THE WAY I SEE ITCompliance and tolerance Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 16Issue 3May + June 2009pp 61–65https://doi.org/10.1145/1516016.1516030Published:01 May 2009Publication History 3citation656DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads656Last 12 Months34Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

column Share on THE WAY I SEE ITSystems thinking: a product is more than the product Author: Donald A. Norman Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 16Issue 5September + October 2009pp 52–54https://doi.org/10.1145/1572626.1572637Published:01 September 2009Publication History 27citation2,222DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations27Total Downloads2,222Last 12 Months153Last 6 weeks27 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Publisher SiteGet Access

I'm with a group of surprisingly awake, cheery physicians and nurses doing grand rounds on the pediatric-care ward of one of the best hospitals in the United States. I'm part of a study group for the National Academies, looking at the ways in which information technology is used in health care. This hospital is a leader: I see computers everywhere. I've been spending a lot of time in hospitals recently. No, not as a patient, but as an observer— following doctors and nurses on their grand rounds, watching patients get admitted, nurses doing shift changes, pharmacists filling prescriptions, and then watching nurses actually deliver the prescribed medication to their patients, waving bar-code readers over the prescriptions, the medication, and the patients. We walk down the hall toward the first set of patents. We are quite a crowd: the attending physician and approximately five medical residents, physicians completing the last stage of their training, plus one or two nurses. The attending physician is responsible for treating patients and is also supervising the residents, each of whom is wheeling a computer cart. The hospital calls them " COWs " — Computer on Wheels. (One hospital switched the name to WOW, Workstation on Wheels, after a patient heard physicians outside her room talking about " the cow " and thought they were referring to her.) A COW is a chest-high cart with computer screen and keyboard at a height appropriate for stand-up reading and typing; the computer itself and batteries are located at the bottom of the unit. Five COWs, plus a nurse wheeling a big filing cabinet of papers, plus the attending physician , plus the members of my observation team. We take up a lot of space. We stop at each patient's doorway to review progress. The attending physician asks for a review, and each of the residents flips through the windows displayed on their computer screen and summarizes status: " Calcium level is fine, white count low. " Each resident has different information for the patient, or to be more precise, has screens that describe test results from different laboratories. The patient was a bunch of numbers. Moreover, the numbers were not organized by symptoms or diagnoses: They were organized by what tests were run and which laboratory within the hospital had processed the results. The patient's history, the record of past events and health care, was in a different …

Technology users are technology observers as well, monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges for everything from detecting situations to responding to situations to changing the tools to match a changing operating environment or the observer's changing knowledge. An interface needed to overcome these challenges, and the process of designing such an interface must take all of these challenges into consideration. I present "heed": a scale and framework to help observers of a system evaluate which situations need scrutiny and when, along with an example heed-based interface that encourages the development of situation awareness. By presenting the importance of attending to each situation on a scale instead of in a binary state, observers are able to classify which situations need their attention and which can be safely ignored, and by presenting how that importance is changing, they can estimate if a situation might need their attention soon. The heed framework makes it possible for observers to describe situations in terms of a rich set of conditions and logical operators, and the interface enables them to refine their descriptions and perceive the importance of attending each situation. I discuss how the framework and interface can be applied to the monitoring of four very different situations: server performance, a business's finances, user experience in a community forum, and the risk of disease outbreak at a veterinary clinic, and how these examples can be generalized to guide the application of heed to many other situations.

For years I have been pondering the similarities and contradictions among the ways of coming up with new ideas for products. “Design research,” as this phase is called, offers a wide range of methods. The marketing community has long championed focus groups, surveys, and questionnaires, whereas the user-centered community favors observation, contextual analysis, and ethnography. Each method has its proponents and detractors. I have also pondered the emphasis by most practitioners, abetted by many product-design courses, to invent novel products and services to fill the needs discovered through whatever form of design research the group practices. This pondering led to my “Filling Much-Needed Holes” column in the January + February 2008 issue of interactions, where I suggested that although many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs, most are far better off if they stay unmet [1]. Where do new ideas come from? How should designers create, transform, innovate? Some assume that inspiration strikes suddenly in the night: Without warning insight strikes, and the inventor astounds all with a powerful, innovative idea. Psychologists agree that this can happen, but they add the important caveat that chance favors the prepared mind. These insights usually follow a prolonged period of intensive thought and study of the problem. Do we need formal observational methods? When I talk to today’s foremost designers, most are scornful. At first, I was quite disturbed by this attitude: Why were they so dismissive of these methods? Was it just arrogance? The problem is, I found their work excellent; if they were arrogant, it was well deserved. But further interaction with them convinced me that they were experts at human-centered design, except that they did it informally, without the fuss and formality that we ascribe to the activities. Great designers are like great novelists: scrupulous observers of human behavior. Although they are scornful of formal methods, they themselves are expert practitioners of observation, and if you can corner them in a quiet room (or better yet, a noisy bar), they will brag about those abilities. Moreover, the great inventions that have changed our lives did not come into being through our ethnographic methods: They preceded the invention of these techniques. Think lightbulb, radio, automobile, telephone, television, home computer, cooking equipment, and for that matter, almost everything that we use on a daily basis. Does this mean that we should ignore the formal methods? No, because great designers are rare. And all of us have seen the horrors that result when unskilled, unobservant designers, engineers, or programmers create their products. So what methods should those of us who are less skilled use? I am not a fan of undirected, explorative ethnography. This is an excellent procedure for developing our scientific understanding of human behavior, but it is too diffuse for practical application. I prefer directed observation: Search out the workarounds, hacks, and clever improvisations of everyday life. That’s where the answers lie: someone else has already encountered the need, someone else has already hinted at a solution. Nokia’s designers, the New York Times tells us, visited China and noticed people using the backlight from their mobile phones as a source of light, so they added a penlight to some of their phones [2]. [1] Norman, D. A. “Filling Much-needed Holes.” interactions 15, no. 1 (2008): 70–71.