You know, I've lived a really interesting life. I've had many different careers. I started off as an electrical engineer. In fact, I got *two* degrees in Electrical Engineering, and I worked for electronics companies. And then, I went and I got a PhD in psychology, but a field that was called at that point *mathematical psychology*,
which eventually became *cognitive psychology* and then became *cognitive science*, a field that – well, it used some modern techniques. And so, my electrical engineering background turned out to be of great value in psychology because I was able to introduce new concepts into psychology, new concepts for psychology but actually old concepts in engineering. And my life has been like that – as I change fields and change areas,
quite often the knowledge I'd gotten from the earlier fields turns out to be really useful in the new fields. So, I became an academic; I became a professor – much to my surprise; I never intended that. I taught first at Harvard University, and then I joined the University of California in San Diego where we introduced a field that we called *human information processing*, which is to use basically what we understood about information theory to apply to
psychology, to apply to understanding the person. I won't go into my whole history, but eventually what happened was I got called in to study *human error*. There were some major accidents in nuclear power plants, and we were asked to say why things were so bad; why did the operators make those errors? And the team I was on was really good, and what we did is we analyzed everything and
we came back and said the operators were really intelligent, and they did the best job they could. The problem was that the plant was so *badly designed*. And that's when I started switching to design because I realized that my background in understanding people *plus* my background in technology was perfect for trying to understand how to design technology so people could use it properly. That also meant in academics I wanted to change from psychology,
which was too narrow, I felt. So, I helped develop a field that is today called cognitive science, which includes a wide variety of older fields like neuroscience, like psychology, like linguistics, sociology, anthropology, computer science, especially artificial intelligence. And over the years the work expanded too. We started looking at why people were having difficulty understanding their computer systems.
And that led to the field that today is called human-computer interaction. And that work was so interesting. And because there were so many new computers coming out – the Apple II, first – you may not remember that; it's an old machine. But then Xerox Palo Alto Research Center – I became a consultant with them, and they were developing this new kind of computer that really revolutionized the way computers are done today. And that was called the Alto.
However, that led eventually to the Apple Macintosh. And the Apple Macintosh of those early days is still remarkably familiar. It's very similar to the systems we have today both from Apple – the Macintosh Operating System and from Windows, from Microsoft Windows. So, I got more and more interested in what was happening in industry and so I retired from the university and went to Apple, where I became the Vice President of Advanced Technology.
And that's where for the first time I met real designers who were actually designing the new Macintoshes. So, design, to me, I found was a perfect field because I could use all the science I knew, all the engineering I knew, all of the stuff about people and about technology, but I could produce and build things that were used by millions and millions of people.
And nothing is more exciting than being able to say, "I took part in that, and it's used by so many people around the world. It has changed their lives." What's really neat about design is we *build* things, we *create* things. Sometimes they're physical things like – well, like the computer, the physical computer. And sometimes they are digital things like apps and like the software that's inside the computers.
And sometimes they're procedures like if you're in the operating room in a medical school or in a hospital, how do you actually go about *doing* the operation? Because there might be seven, eight, nine, even ten people all involved in treating the patient; so, how do they synchronize? How do they know what to do? That's a design problem. So, design covers a wide range of things. So, how do you get educated in design?
I *never* got educated in design – I was *self-educated*. But what I brought to bear was first of all a huge amount of previous knowledge about how the world works – about politics, economics; and when I was at Apple, I learned about how businesses work and the importance of the financial side of business, which I had never thought about before, and supply chains and finding the right materials and making sure that a product that you are designing works for millions and millions of people,
and when they get into *difficulty* with the product, designing so they can understand what had happened. You need to know a tremendous amount of different areas. And if you know so many different areas, it means you aren't expert about any of them because there are many specialties where you have *deep, narrow knowledge*. And these specialties are comprised of – you know – they're experts, experts in any given area, and we need those people – that's how we get detailed, wonderful information.
However, if you're a designer, you have to have *broad knowledge*. This way, you have to know *about* all those different disciplines, but how you put them together and how that's done – the designer does that. And that means the designer has to go and talk to each of the specialized disciplines and help them bring together this final product. So, you have to be a *generalist* to be a designer; you have to know a tremendous number of different things, usually none of them very deeply, because I kind of think of it this way:
The amount of knowledge that you're learning to be a specialist is *narrow and deep*. So, think about the *area* – deep and narrow. The area is how much knowledge you have. If you're a generalist, on any given area you don't know much but you know many areas. So, think of it as *broad* – it's wide and not very deep. But the area is the same. So, the amount of knowledge you must have is about the same.
Now, here's the question: How do we train designers? Or if you are already a designer, what do you need to know to be successful? I also want to point out that you don't necessarily need to get this training in a design school. You can do it by yourself. So, you can teach yourself all the material you need to know to become a successful designer.
But in the 21st century we're moving to more and more complex problems that do require the talents of a designer. And these new kinds of problems are going to require new types of knowledge and new types of learning on the part of the designer.