Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 1
WHY DESIGN EDUCATION MUST CHANGE
DONALD A. NORMAN1
Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up
for in craft skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing
or rendering, designers take an inordinate amount of pride in
honing key techniques over many years. Unfortunately many of
these very skills have limited use in the new design domains.
(Core 77 columnist Kevin McCullagh:
(http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/is_it_time_to_rethink
_the_t-shaped_designer_17426.asp)
I am forced to read a lot of crap. As a reviewer of submissions to design
journals and conferences, as a juror of design contests, and as a mentor and
advisor to design students and faculty, I read outrageous claims made by
designers who have little understanding of the complexity of the problems they
are attempting to solve or of the standards of evidence required to make
claims. Oftentimes the crap comes from brilliant and talented people, with
good ideas and wonderful instantiations of physical products, concepts, or
simulations. The crap is in the claims.
In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon
physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure
and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many
problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have
become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for
the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and
the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce
novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom
implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce
insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable.
Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train
students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of
human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and
business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and
experimental design.
Related problems occur with designers trained in engineering, for although
they may understand hard-core science, they are often ignorant of the so-
called soft areas of social and behavioral sciences. The do not understand
human behavior, chiding people for not using technology properly, asking how
they could be so illogical. (You may have all heard the refrain: “if only we
didn’t have people, our stuff would work just fine,” forgetting that the point of
1 Donald A. Norman. http://www.jnd.org email to: don at jnd.org. Column written for posting at
core77.com
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 2
the work was to help people.) Engineers are often ignorant of how people
actually behave. And both engineers and designers are often ignorant of the
biases that can be unwittingly introduced into experimental designs and the
dangers of inappropriate generalization.
The social and behavioral sciences have their own problems, for they generally
are disdainful of applied, practical work and their experimental methods are
inappropriate: scientists seek “truth” whereas practitioners seek “good
enough.” Scientists look for small differences, whereas designers want large
impact. People in human-computer interaction, cognitive engineering, and
human factors or ergonomics are usually ignorant of design. All disciplines have
their problems: everyone can share the blame.
Time to change design education
Where once industrial designers focused primarily upon form and function,
materials and manufacturing, today’s issues are far more complex and
challenging. New skills are required, especially for such areas as interaction,
experience, and service design. Classical industrial design is a form of applied
art, requiring deep knowledge of forms and materials and skills in sketching,
drawing, and rendering. The new areas are more like applied social and
behavioral sciences and require understanding of human cognition and
emotion, sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge of the scientific
method, statistics and experimental design so that designers can perform valid,
legitimate tests of their ideas before deploying them.
Designers need to deploy microprocessors and displays, actuators and sensors.
Communication modules are being added to more and more products, from the
toaster to the wall switch, the toilet and books (now called e-books).
Knowledge of security and privacy, social networks, and human interaction are
critical. The old skills of drawing and sketching, forming and molding must be
supplemented and in many cases, replaced, by skills in programming,
interaction, and human cognition. Rapid prototyping and user testing are
required, which also means some knowledge of the social and behavior
sciences, of statistics, and of experimental design.
In educational institutions, industrial design is usually housed in schools of art
or architecture, usually taught as a practice with the terminal degree being a
BA, MA, or MFA. It is rare for in design education to have course requirements
in science, mathematics, technology, or the social sciences. As a result the
skills of the designer are not well suited for modern times.
The Uninformed Are Training the Uninformed
My experience with some of the world’s best design schools in Europe, the
United States, and Asia indicate that the students are not well prepared in the
behavioral sciences that are so essential for fields such as interaction and
experience design. They do not understand experimental rigor or the potential
biases that show up when the designer evaluates their own products or even
their own experimental results. Their professors also lack this understanding.
Designers often test their own designs, but with little understanding of
statistics and behavioral variability. They do not know about unconscious biases
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 3
that can cause them to see what they wish to see rather than what actually has
occurred. Many are completely unaware of the necessity of control groups. The
social and behavioral sciences (and medicine) long ago learned the importance
of blind scoring where the person scoring the results does not know what
condition is being observed, nor what is being tested.
The problem is compounded by a new insistence by top research universities
that all design faculty have a PhD degree. But given the limited training of
most design faculty, there is very little understanding of the kind of knowledge
that constitutes a PhD. The uninformed are training the uninformed.
There are many reasons for these difficulties. I’ve already discussed the fact
that most design is taught in schools of art or architecture. Many students take
design because they dislike science, engineering, and mathematics.
Unfortunately, the new demands upon designers do not allow us the luxury of
such non-technical, non science-oriented training.
A different problem is that even were a design school to decide to teach more
formal methods, we don’t really have a curriculum that is appropriate for
designers. Take my concern about the lack of experimental rigor. Suppose you
were to agree with me – what courses would we teach? We don’t really know.
The experimental methods of the social and behavioral sciences are not well
suited for the issues faced by designers.
Designers are practitioners, which means they are not trying to extend the
knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge. The designer’s
goal is to have large, important impact. Scientists are interested in truth, often
in the distinction between the predictions of two differing theories. The
differences they look for are quite small: often statistically significant but in
terms of applied impact, quite unimportant. Experiments that carefully control
for numerous possible biases and that use large numbers of experimental
observers are inappropriate for designers.
The designer needs results immediately, in hours or at possibly a few days.
Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient. Yes, attention must be
paid to the possible biases (such as experimenter biases and the impact of
order of presentation of tests), but if one is looking for large effect, it should
be possible to do tests that are simpler and faster than are used by the
scientific community will suffice. Designs don’t have to be optimal or perfect:
results that are not quite optimum or les than perfect are often completely
satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is perfect, nor need they
be. We need experimental techniques that recognize these pragmatic, applied
goals.
Design needs to develop its own experimental methods. They should be simple
and quick, looking for large phenomena and conditions that are “good enough.”
But they must still be sensitive to statistical variability and experimental
biases. These methods do not exist: we need some sympathetic statisticians to
work with designers to develop these new, appropriate methods.
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 4
When Designers Think They Know, But Don’t
Designers fall prey to the two ailments of not knowing what they don’t know
and, worse, thinking they know things they don’t. This last condition is
especially true when it comes to human behavior: the cognitive sciences.
Designers (and engineers) think that they understand human behavior: after
all, they are human and they have observed people all their lives. Alas, they
believe a “naive psychology”: plausible explanations of behavior that have little
or no basis in fact. They confuse the way they would prefer people to behave
with how people actually behave. They are unaware of the large experimental
and theoretical literature, and they are not well versed in statistical
variability.
Real human behavior is very contextual. It is readily biased by multiple factors.
Human behavior is driven by both emotional and cognitive processes, much of
which is subconscious and not accessible to human conscious knowledge. Gaps
and lapses in attention are to be expected. Human memory is subject to
numerous biases and errors. Different memory systems have different
characteristics. Most importantly, human memory is not a calling up of images
of the past but rather a reconstruction of the remembered event. As a result, it
often fits expectations more closely than it fits reality and it is easily modified
by extraneous information.
Many designers are woefully ignorant of the deep complexity of social and
organizational problems. I have seen designers propose simple solutions to
complex problems in education, poverty, crime, and the environment.
Sometimes these suggestions win design prizes (the uniformed judge the
uninformed). Complex problems are complex systems: there is no simple
solution. It is not enough to mean well: one must also have knowledge.
The same problems arise in doing experimental studies of new methods of
interaction, new designs, or new experiences and services. When scientists
(and designers) study people, they too are subject to these same human biases,
and so cognitive scientists carefully design experiments so that the biases of
the experimenter can have no impact on the results or their interpretation. All
these factors are well understood by cognitive scientists, but seldom known or
understood by designers and engineers. Here is a case of not knowing what is
not known.
Why Designers Must Know Some Science
Over the years, the scientific method evolved to create order and evaluation to
otherwise exaggerated claims. Science is not a body of facts, not the use of
mathematics. Rather, the key to science is its procedures, or what is called the
scientific method. The method does not involve white robes and complex
mathematics. The scientific method requires public disclosure of the problem,
the method of approach, the findings, and then the interpretation. This allows
others to repeat the finding: replication is essential. Nothing is accepted in
science until others have been able to repeat the work and come to the same
conclusion. Moreover, scientists have learned to their dismay that conclusions
are readily biased by prior belief, so experimental methods have been devised
to minimize these unintentional biases.
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 5
Science is difficult when applied to the physical and biological world. But when
applied to people, the domain of the social sciences, it is especially difficult.
Now subtle biases abound, so careful statistical procedures have been devised
to minimize them. Moreover, scientists have learned not to trust themselves,
so in the social sciences it is sometimes critical to design tests so that neither
the person being studied nor the person doing the study know what condition is
involved – this is called “double blind.”
Designers, on the whole, are quite ignorant of all this science stuff. They like
to examine a problem, devise what seems to be a solution, and then announce
the result for all to acclaim. Contests are held. Prizes are awarded. But wait–
has anyone examined the claims? Tested them to see if they perform as
claimed? Tested them against alternatives (what science calls control groups),
tested them often enough to minimize the impact of statistical variability?
Huh? say the designers: Why, it is obvious – just look – What is all this statistical
crap?
Journals do not help, for most designers are practitioners and seldom publish.
And when they do, I find that the reviewers in many of our design journals and
conferences are themselves ignorant of appropriate experimental procedures
and controls, so even the published work is often of low quality. Design
conferences are particularly bad: I have yet to find a design conference where
the rigor of the peer review process is satisfactory. The only exceptions are
those run by societies from the engineering and sciences, such as the
Computer-Human Interaction and graphics conferences run by the Institute of
Electronic and Electrical Engineers or the Computer Science society (IEEE, ACM
and the CHI and SIGGRAPH conferences). These conferences, however, favor
the researcher, so although they are favorite publication vehicles for design
researchers and workers in interaction design, practitioners often find their
papers rejected. The practice of design lacks a high quality venue for its
efforts.
Design Education Must Change
Service design, interaction design, and experience design are not about the
design of physical objects: they require minimal skills in drawing, knowledge of
materials, or manufacturing. In their place, they require knowledge of the
social sciences, of story construction, of back-stage operations, and of
interaction. We still need classically trained industrial designers: the need for
styling, for forms, for the intelligent use of materials will never go away.
In today’s world of ubiquitous sensors, controllers, motors, and displays, where
the emphasis is on interaction, experience, and service, where designers work
on organizational structure and services as much as on physical products, we
need a new breed of designers. This new breed must know about science and
technology, about people and society, about appropriate methods of validation
of concepts and proposals. They must incorporate knowledge of political issues
and business methods, operations, and marketing. Design education has to
move away from schools of art and architecture and move into the schools of
science and engineering. We need new kinds of designers, people who can work
across disciplines, who understand human beings, business, and technology and
the appropriate means of validating claims.
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 6
Today’s designers are poorly trained to meet the today’s demands: We need a
new form of design education, one with more rigor, more science, and more
attention to the social and behavioral sciences, to modern technology, and to
business. But we cannot copy the existing courses from those disciplines: we
need to establish new ones that are appropriate to the unique requirements of
the applied requirements of design.
But beware: We must not lose the wonderful, delightful components of design.
The artistic side of design is critical: to provides objects, interactions and
services that delight as well as inform, that are joyful. Designers do need to
know more about science and engineering, but without becoming scientists or
engineers. We must not lose the special talents of designers to make our lives
more pleasurable.
It is time for a change. We, the design community, must lead this change.
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