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Donald Norman, one of the fathers of user experience design (ux design), retracts his well-known speech. He now argues that good design should not focus on people, it should focus on humanity, which includes the environment and the use of natural resources.
“I teach how to make something easy to use and understand so that people buy it. Thus, design is a tool for the industry. But we have many problems in the world and it is not helping to solve them, in fact it hurts many times,” Norman said in an interview with América Futura during his participation in an event to celebrate the designation of Tijuana and San Diego as World Design Capital 2024.
Designers and architects from different parts of the world gathered at the Tijuana Cultural Center (Cecut) to reflect on how their disciplines can contribute to the change that the world requires in the face of the environmental emergency and in their different interventions they urged a change of vision and of speech.
Norman, also a professor of behavioral science, was ruthless with himself and recognized that his reflections and contributions in the field of design have been important but incomplete because he did not consider the environment.
In his famous book The Psychology of Everyday Objects, Norman postulates that good design should be human-centered, simple, practical and as pleasant as possible. “What is wrong is what is not in the book. I’m not talking about how we destroy the environment to make materials, so that something cannot be repaired or reused, and that you have to buy a new one every two or three years,” he said when referring to cell phones. “Consumer electronics generates 50 million tons of waste every year. “Data centers use enormous amounts of electricity,” he added.
In his new book Design for a better world: meaningful, sustainable, humanity centered, published in 2023, corrected his earlier teachings. Design should think about humanity, he says. This word includes not only the human being but everything that surrounds him and allows him to live. “Design must consider all living things, animals, plants, people, insects, and the use of the environment, air, water, land,” he warned.
For Norman, there must be a complete change of the economic system, of which designers must be part. The focus should be on quality of life first and productivity and other benefits second. To do this, designers must occupy senior management positions in companies such as chief design officers (design heads), get involved in politics, and put their knowledge at the service of education and health systems, to contribute with their designs to make better use of resources without harming the environment.
“For people to have a better life, we must take care of the environment. It doesn’t mean I focus on you, I focus on everything that affects you, the political system, the economic system, the environment,” she said.
Reuse, the slogan of architecture
Much has changed since Christopher Hawthorne, senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture, wrote the book in 2005. The Green House: new directions in sustainable architecture, focused mainly on residential housing.
Interviewed by América Futura at Cecut, he warns that currently sustainable architecture must consider issues such as land use, density, education, job creation, and mobility. “Sustainable architecture has to be thought of holistically,” said Hawthorne.
“If I wrote that book now I wouldn’t include any single-family homes because it’s not sustainable regardless of what kind of materials it uses or whether it uses solar panels. Much less would it include totally new constructions,” she assured.
The expert, who was also the first Director of Design for the city of Los Angeles, a position he held until 2022, said that architects should think less about making new buildings and more about reusing existing ones. “It’s what we call adaptive reuse, or reusing an older building. “Sometimes it involves dismantling a building and taking its materials to another place to build something different, instead of an entire construction with new materials.”
But wouldn’t using used materials go against the quality of the property? Faced with this challenge, Hawthorne raises the need for architecture schools to change the way they teach new generations to build. responded: “That’s where architectural education and skill needs to evolve in how to design a building with reused materials that is as efficient, as economical, as beautiful as one where all the materials are new off the shelf,” he said.
