Don Norman is the champion of human-centered design. Business Week has listed him as one of the world’s 27 most influential designers. “The well-rounded product,” says Norman, “will enhance the heart as well as the mind, being a joy to behold as well as to use.”

Don Norman is Director of the recently established Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego where he is also professor emeritus of both psychology and cognitive science. He is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, former Vice President of Apple and former executive at Hewlett Packard. Norman serves as an honorary professor at Tongji University (Shanghai), and is on company boards and advisory boards. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as chair of the Psychology Department and founder and chair of the Cognitive Science Department. At Northwestern University, he is the Breed Professor of Design, emeritus and Prof. of EECS, emeritus. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Industrial Design at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has honorary degrees from the University of Padua (Italy) and the Technical University of Delft (the Netherlands), the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from SIGCHI, the professional organization for Computer-Human Interaction, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer & Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Association for Computing Machinery, American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, Human Factors & Ergonomics Society, and the Design Research Society.

He is well known for his books “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Emotional Design.” His book, “Living with Complexity,” argues that complexity is desirable: the role of the designer is to make complex things understandable. His latest book is an expanded and revised edition of Design of Everyday Things. He lives at www.jnd.org.

Photo by Laura Tillinghast.