Hi. I'm Don Norman, and over the many, many decades that I've been alive, I've transformed myself from – well, in the beginning, a technology nerd; and all I cared about was the latest circuit design and the latest new device, the latest new technology. And I've changed to now where I'm worried more and more and more about the state of the world,
about the many societal issues that we are facing – some of them are political; some of them are economic; some of them have to do with education, hunger, food, pure water, sanitation – *major issues*. How do we address them? Design is a *mechanism* because designers *do* things. They go out and they change the world. But we have to move design from designing small simple things to designing *systems*,
to designing *political systems*, to designing *solutions* to clean water and education and health care. How do we do that? Well, over the years I've come to develop something which we now call *human-centered design*. But we're talking about these big problems. It goes beyond individual people. So, is it really *human-centered*? Well, I could argue that yeah, it's human-centered
because suppose we say we focus on the tasks or the activities or the community or the full needs – it's still all about people in the end, but it's bigger than human-centered. So, lately, I've been entertaining the idea of letting HCD stand not for "Human-Centered Design", but maybe *Humanity-Centered Design*. Now, some people even criticize that, saying, "Well, shouldn't you be designing for the environment?"
And that's not part of humanity. You could kind of argue it *is* because the reason we had to worry about the environment is because humanity – humans – have destroyed the environment. But... I don't know... We have to *find a way* that really tackles the *most important* problem, but it has to be *small enough* that we can manage to *do something*. There are other issues. One is, I'm concerned about the way that we *do* design where experts come in and study and send out the anthropologists, understand what's going on
and come back with proposals that we present to the people who live there. And I think that's the wrong way – that's a dictatorship. That's the privileged people coming in and helping the poor underprivileged people. On top of that, most of us live in a *monoculture*. We live in a highly educated, usually a Western technology, a Western-based philosophy. And the "Western" includes, though, the developing nations in the East – in Asia, for example.
But because we're all learning from the same universities and we're reading the same books and we're going to the same conferences and we're talking to each other, so we all tend to be a monoculture – and we all think the same way. And that can be a danger. *Any* monoculture is bad. Planting the same plants all over is very efficient ... until a disease comes and wipes them all out at once! Whereas if we had many, many different plants, one disease couldn't wipe them all out. Monocultures are dangerous.
We all tend to think the same way. It's not working well. Or, it's not very robust and resilient when something happens. Now, there are other problems, too. The economic systems of the world I think are in bad shape. Adam Smith wrote this wonderful book called "The Wealth of Nations" in which he talked about *the invisible hand of the market* that can lead to wonderful results – just like when ants are all doing their little things,
no ant is intelligent, but the combination of millions of ants are incredibly intelligent. And that's what Smith was talking about. *Except*, that gets corrupted. And – in fact – in his book, he talked about the different ways that this could be corrupted by people *colluding*, trying to work the system to their own private benefit. And that's happened in the world now; too much of our economic system is being diverted from the rich and wealthy
*to* the rich and wealthy as opposed to everybody else. And so, we have huge discrepancies in availability of resources between the very wealthy and the very deprived. The political systems are also damaged. And, you know, the internet today has become *the internet of lies*. How do we know what's true and what's not true? How do we do *evidence-based thinking*, *evidence-based decision-making?
Too much of what we do is based on hearsay, anecdotes, folktales, rumors and downright lies where people deliberately try to misinform us so we might do something that is harmful for us and perhaps good for them. So, there are many, many different issues in this world and I am concerned about all of them, but I obviously can't address all of them. But what I *can* do is to try to band together with other people who might be addressing these similar issues, because I believe that
we must change *many* things in this world; we must change the economic model we're following; we must change the dependence upon a monoculture where we all tend to think similar ways and similar thoughts and we're ignoring a lot of the cultures that come from the non-Western technological traditions – cultures that are very valuable and could teach us a tremendous amount of things. So, that's what I worry about; that's what I lose sleep over, and that's what I hope to work on for the
few decades remaining in my life.