Don Norman

These are important principles, but they ignore the problems of sustainability, inequity, and bias. In addition, the emphasis is usually on the immediate issues, not the long-term impact. In other words, they describe the way we did things in the past, not the issues in this book, and not the way we need to do things in the future.

Instead of having people do the parts of a task that machines are bad at, let’s reverse the process and have machines do the parts that people are bad at. Instead of requiring people to work on technology’s terms, require the machines to work on human terms.

Human error is blamed for over 90 percent of industrial and automobile accidents. It is the leading cause of aviation accidents, and medical error is reported to be the third-largest cause of death in the entire United States. Horrifying? Yes, but why do we label it “human error”? It is design error.

If the people can decide, even if they come up with the same, identical solution as the expert people or machines, they will trust them, implement them, and abide with them.

Solve the fundamental, underlying issues, not the symptoms. We recommend starting with field studies and observations of actual practice (an applied ethnography). Ask “why?” at each issue.

We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.

Affordances control what actions are possible. For designers, signifiers are far more important. Signifiers are how communication takes place, how one signals the appropriate controls and operations.

It is by questioning the obvious that we make great progress. This is where breakthroughs come from. We need to question the obvious, to reformulate our beliefs, and to redefine existing solutions, approaches, and beliefs. That is design thinking.

I was correct in my original article: what we call design thinking is practiced in some form or other by all great thinkers, whether in literature or art, music or science, engineering or business. But the difference is that in design, there is an attempt to teach it as a systematic, practice-defining method of creative innovation.

But if you examine the business impact of innovation, you will soon discover that the most frequent gains come from the small, incremental innovations, changes that lower costs, add some simple features, and smooth out the rough edges of a product.

Technology first, invention second, needs last.

I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.