Getting down to the nitty-gritty of design snags

A champion of design thinking and an innovator on user-focused design, Don Norman, Director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, wants designers to ask what the real problem is.

“You don’t need a pencil – you need something that allows people to write,” he says. “As designers, we are not problem solvers but rather problem definers. My rule is: don’t solve the problem you were hired to solve. That’s almost never the real problem. Find the real problem, and the initial one often goes away,” he says. According to Norman, design education needs to stop telling students that problems are problems – instead, students should be taught that a problem is a tool to help you learn.

“The worst way to teach is in lectures”, Norman explains. “We need to excite students by giving them problems and saying: go out and solve them. Solve the problem before you even understand it!” By examining problems, students experience design theory and education first hand. According to Norman, design thinking should be human-centred. “We need to watch and observe to understand the perspective of the user, and that’s why design students need to solve problems and get stuck. That’s when you learn the most and when the theory starts to make sense.”

Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, is famous for its examples of where design thinking fails. Doors with no hardware or visible pillars so you don’t know how to open them; a newly minted coin the same size and weight as a differently-valued one that’s already in circulation; kitchen hobs arranged in a rectangle while the control buttons are arranged in a line – all of these, Norman says, are instances where the designer didn’t put ease-of-use first.