Design for a Better World - Don Norman ***

Don Norman is, without doubt, one of the most influential figures in design - and particularly in making designs fit for human use. In his definitive The Design of Everyday Things he identified designs that 'probably won a prize' but that totally fail to make clear to the user how to use them. He pointed out that something as simple as a door, for example, had opportunities for design failure. Whether it was glass doors that couldn't be distinguished from windows, or doors you had to push that were fitted with a pull handle, he showed how a focus on appearance over usability could make for terrible design.

In this book he attempts to take on an even bigger target - the way that we move the world away from its natural state, what can go wrong with that and how better design - and more inclusion of design in our approach - could change things.

In principle, this is great, but unfortunately the book fails to deliver beyond broad brush concepts. Norman addresses how to communicate in meaningful ways, the importance of sustainability, moving from 'human centred' to 'humanity centred', transforming human behaviour and the possibilities for action. And in each of these areas, he comes up with some good ideas, but part of the problem is that the book itself falls over on the design front. 

I'm not talking about the dull cover, or even that the font is just a bit too small to read comfortably. It's more that designing a piece of writing to get a message across effectively involves making the text well structured and readable. It means telling stories well. But that just doesn't happen here. The whole thing is verbose - Norman doesn't get past the introduction before page 57. The text is extremely repetitive and feels very thin on detail. It simply doesn't read well.

There are a few other issues. Some of the arguments seem forced. A central message is that, while STEM is extremely important, we drive things too much from science and maths. Norman gives the example of the seasons, claiming the four seasons are arbitrarily based on astronomical data and don't reflect real experience. This is true in some countries - however, in the UK, for example, no one cares about the astronomical seasons, but there are four very clear, very different periods in the year that arise from a combination of weather and the behaviour of nature. There are also one or two oddities in the science Norman mentions. It's not too bad that he seems to say that tides are higher because the Moon is full, rather than because of the same reason that the Moon is full. At one point, though, he describes hydrogen as a power source like wind and solar, where it's actually an energy transmission medium.

I am a huge fan of Don Norman's work on design, but for me, this book doesn't do what I'd hoped it would in giving clear design-based guidance on building a better world for humanity. In some ways, this book parallels aspects of Hans Rosling's remarkable book Factfulness. It even overlaps in places, where Norman argues for better presentation of data rather than meaningless single figures like GDP, and gives examples of ways of presenting data that aren't as good as Rosling's. It's a shame Norman ignores Factfulness, rather than building on its starting point, which could have produced a much stronger outcome. In the end this isn't the design-based manifesto for the future that it might have been.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here