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Design for a Better World with Don Norman

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03
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54
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28
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How This Course Will Help Your Career

Don Norman, the father of user experience, puts it bluntly when he says, “the world is a mess.” So, how do we clean up this mess? Through design. Let’s learn how to design for a better world with Don Norman.

What You Will Learn

  • How to design for sustainability and beyond.

  • How to use circular design to shape the circular economy.

  • How to use humanity-centered design to address complex socio-technical problems. 

  • How to use incrementalism to tackle large-scale projects.

  • How to use incremental modular design to overcome challenges of large, complex projects.

  • How we measure progress and why it is important to change the metrics.

  • How to incorporate meaning in the way we measure and communicate data.

  • Why designers must move into leadership roles.

  • How to overcome resistance to change and mobilize people to act towards a common goal.

  • How we can use new technologies such as artificial intelligence to redesign and address problems.

“Because everyone designs, we are all designers, so it is up to all of us to change the world. However, those of us who are professional designers have an even greater responsibility, for professional designers have the training and the knowledge to have a major impact on the lives of people and therefore on the earth.”

— Don Norman, Design for a Better World

Our world is full of complex socio-technical problems:

  • Unsustainable and wasteful practices that cause extreme climate changes such as floods and droughts.

  • Wars that worsen hunger and poverty.

  • Pandemics that disrupt entire economies and cripple healthcare.

  • Widespread misinformation that undermines education.

All these problems are massive and interconnected. They seem daunting, but as you'll see in this course, we can overcome them.

Design for a Better World with Don Norman is taught by cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Don Norman. Widely regarded as the father (and even the grandfather) of user experience, he is the former VP of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Don Norman has constantly advocated the role of design. His book “The Design of Everyday Things” is a masterful introduction to the importance of design in everyday objects. Over the years, his conviction in the larger role of design and designers to solve complex socio-technical problems has only increased.

This course is based on his latest book “Design for a Better World,” released in March 2023. Don Norman urges designers to think about the whole of humanity, not just individual people or small groups.

In lesson 1, you'll learn about the importance of meaningful measurements. Everything around us is artificial, and so are the metrics we use. Don Norman challenges traditional numerical metrics since they do not capture the complexity of human life and the environment. He advocates for alternative measurements alongside traditional ones to truly understand the complete picture.

In lesson 2, you'll learn about and explore multiple examples of sustainability and circular design in practice. In lesson 3, you'll dive into humanity-centered design and learn how to apply incremental modular design to large and complex socio-technical problems.

In lesson 4, you'll discover how designers can facilitate behavior-change, which is crucial to address the world's most significant issues. Finally, in the last lesson, you'll learn how designers can contribute to designing a better world on a practical level and the role of artificial intelligence in the future of design.

Throughout the course, you'll get practical tips to apply in real-life projects. In the "Build Your Case Study" project, you'll step into the field and seek examples of organizations and people who already practice the philosophy and methods you’ll learn in this course.

You'll get step-by-step guidelines to help you identify which organizations and projects genuinely change the world and which are superficial. Most importantly, you'll understand what gaps currently exist and will be able to recommend better ways to implement projects. You will build on your case study in each lesson, so once you have completed the course, you will have an in-depth piece for your portfolio.

Gain an Industry-Recognized UX Course Certificate

Use your industry-recognized Course Certificate on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.

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Our clients: IBM, HP, Adobe, GE, Accenture, Allianz, Phillips, Deezer, Capgemin, Mcafee, SAP, Telenor, Cigna, British Parliament, State of New York

Is This Course Right for You?

This course addresses a broad spectrum of professionals and is a practical handbook for anyone seeking systemic change.

In particular, this course will benefit:

  • Designers looking to apply their skills outside traditional roles.

  • Entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on the economic opportunities in sustainable and circular design.

  • Professionals in government and non-government agencies looking to improve the results of their work in various sectors such as education, healthcare and climate policy.

  • Anyone interested in working on large socio-technical problems and looking to design a better world.

Learn and Work with a Global Team of Designers

You’ll join a global community and work together to improve your skills and career opportunities. Connect with helpful peers and make friends with like-minded individuals as you push deeper into the exciting and booming design industry.

Course Overview: What You'll Master

  • Each week, one lesson becomes available.
  • There's no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines.
  • Estimated learning time: 13 hours 6 mins spread over 8 weeks .

Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction

Available once you start the course. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 16 mins.

Lesson 1: The World Is Artificial and the Way We Measure It Is Wrong

Available once you start the course. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 45 mins.

Lesson 2: How to Design For Sustainability and the Circular Economy

Available anytime after Apr 28, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 6 mins.

Lesson 3: How to Apply Humanity-Centered Design to Solve Global Challenges

Available anytime after May 05, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 3 hours 13 mins.

Lesson 4: How Designers can Drive Positive Behaviors

Available anytime after May 12, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 57 mins.

Lesson 5: How Can Designers Build a Brighter Future

Available anytime after May 19, 2025. Estimated time to complete: 1 hour 49 mins.

Lesson 6: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up

Available anytime after May 26, 2025.

How Others Have Benefited

Nena Gačić

Nena Gačić, Croatia

“The instructor excels at effectively communicating complex ideas in a clear and concise manner, making it easy for students to understand and grasp the material.”

Alexandre de Oliveira Lot

Alexandre de Oliveira Lot, Brazil

“The videos were amazing and concise, and the text was direct and very well written! The readings available to download and some templates were really helpfull too. Don is an amazing figure and an awesome teacher.”

Renato Castilho

Renato Castilho, United States

“It's Don Norman, just brilliant. Considering the complexity of the subject at hand, which, albeit familiar to the more experienced, always evolves quicker than one keeps up, was well compartmentalized.”

See other reviews

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  2. Get a Course Certificate

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  3. Advance your career

    Use your new skills in your existing job or to get a new job in UX design. Get help from our community.

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Join us to take “Design for a Better World with Don Norman”. Take other courses at no additional cost. Make a concrete step forward in your career path today.

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Design for a Better World with Don Norman
Closes in
03
hrs
54
mins
28
secs
57% booked

Design for a Better World with Don Norman

1.3 - Anything Artificial We Can Design Better

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:33

    When I looked out of the window of my  house, almost everything I could see was artificial. The homes, the streets, the cars, the city of San Diego, in the distance, of a wonderful Mission Bay, which was a recreational area – well, it was a swamp and it was changed by people to make it comfortable and bulldozed  and it's now a recreational area.

  2. 00:00:33 --> 00:01:02

    And the city is obviously human-made and the streets and the cars – sure. Even the trees were planted. This made me realize that things like the seasons are artificial. Where I live we have four seasons of the year, but they're artificially defined by the position of the Earth as it goes around the Sun, not by temperature changes. Some places only have two seasons; if you live on the equator, there's not much difference from month to month over the course of a year.

  3. 00:01:02 --> 00:01:31

    Many countries on the equator have either no seasons at all or just two – one when it rains and one when it doesn't. But the other thing that's even more important are things like laws, country boundaries, the way we live, the customs that we all obey, the way  we interact with each other, our cultures. These are all artificial. And if they're artificial, it means they were designed,

  4. 00:01:31 --> 00:01:52

    designed by people over the course of many, many centuries – a long period of time – not by professional designers, but by people who were trying to arrange things to make it better for whatever their goal was. If almost everything is artificial and therefore designed, then maybe designers can change things for the better.

Design for a Better World with Don Norman

1.4 - Use More Meaningful Measurements in Design and in the World

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:35

    In the early 1900s, Lord Kelvin, a  very well-known, well-respected physicist   in Britain said if you can't measure anything, you don't understand it. And that set the theme for the role of physics and the role of science and for all of the fields almost in university. And he was wrong. Everybody goes around trying to measure  things, including things that can't be measured.

  2. 00:00:35 --> 00:01:04

    So, how do we do that? Why do we do that? Well, first of all, Lord Kelvin didn't say that we should measure everything because people forget when they quote him; they forget that he started the statement with "In the physical sciences, if you cannot measure something, you don't understand it." Physical sciences – it's easy to measure in the physical sciences, well, relatively easy because if I pick up ... a pen and I drop it,

  3. 00:01:04 --> 00:01:34

    I can compute just how long it's going to take to drop and what speed it's going to be going, etc. And if I do it a second time, it'll be the same answer. If I do it a third time, it'll be the same answer. Now, if I do this to a cat, I'll get different answers. If I do this to a person, I'll get different answers. People are not like the physical sciences. We call this path-dependent  or path-independent. In physical sciences, the way in which you got to a place doesn't matter.

  4. 00:01:34 --> 00:02:00

    With human beings, the state that you're in is *highly path-dependent*. It really depends upon your history,  how you got there. It depends upon how and when you were born, the culture that you acquired,  the experience you had in growing up, and the knowledge that you have therefore acquired. And so, you're very path-dependent. When we measure things in the physical sciences, yeah, we measure something.

  5. 00:02:00 --> 00:02:31

    In the social sciences, no, not at all. But, unfortunately, the social scientists and especially the economists have really picked this up and insisted on measuring everything. And so, we measure everything even though we can't measure them. So, what do we do? We measure *something* – anything that we can measure and then we name it by the thing we care about and we forget that what we have actually measured is not what we care about. And the economists measure everything in terms of money. But those are arbitrary. What's a person's life worth?

  6. 00:02:31 --> 00:03:00

    Economists try to measure it: how  would you do that? Why do they do that? And so, what's the value of a country? They measure that by measuring how much money the country spends every year. But if a country spends money to manufacture something and spits out lots of pollutions into the waters, well, they spent money – that's good – but the pollutions are negative; they're harmful. That isn't even taken into account. And worse, if now the nation has to

  7. 00:03:00 --> 00:03:31

    spend money in order to clean up the pollution, oh, that's good too – that's spending money, so the harm is actually counted twice: once because we spent money doing  it and once because we spent money cleaning it up. So, why do we use these *meaningless measures*? So, one thing that's very important is that we must change the meaning of what we measure. We must move from things that talk about quality of life. Are we actually leading a good life? Do we  have good educational systems? Good health care?

  8. 00:03:31 --> 00:03:47

    Do we have families that actually are surviving in a way that's comfortable for them? Now, we actually can do some measurements but not the same kind of measurements that the physical scientists do. We don't use rulers, but rather we can say, "This is better than that."

Design for a Better World with Don Norman

2.2 - Recycling is Not Enough. Let's Design for Reuse

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:31

    We live in the Age of Technology where  technology has made many useful wonderful devices, made our lives easier; for example, we have remote controls for all sorts of things and we have packages – nicely packaged so it's easy to find what we need, easy to keep them together, otherwise they would get lost. And we have wonderful technology. So, for example, we have the mobile phone,

  2. 00:00:31 --> 00:01:04

    small, lightweight, very powerful, very beautiful. We have a modern computer – thin, lightweight, beautiful texture, known for its looks, known for its utility. But suppose that you need to change the  battery. Well, we just open it up ... Gee – how do you open it up? How do you change the battery? What happens when new chips come out, so it would make it faster?

  3. 00:01:04 --> 00:01:31

    Can you add the chips? No. Can you upgrade it? No. New camera? No. Same with a cell phone – the batteries go bad; can you change it? Well, yeah, a professional can change it but not the average person. So, we live in the Age of Plenty, we live in the Age of Technology and Luxury, but we also live in the Age of Waste. The Age of Plenty has led to the Age of Waste.

  4. 00:01:31 --> 00:02:02

    And why is that? Well, some of it is because we try to make things so convenient, we forget that the convenience comes at a cost. So, for example, a package of grapes. Interestingly, these grapes were grown in Peru, and I'm sitting here in the United States, in California, so this has been shipped a long distance. And it's packaged – you can hear it – in a plastic bag. Now, when I'm finished with the grapes, what do I do with the plastic bag?

  5. 00:02:02 --> 00:02:33

    I throw it away. And where does it go? Can  it be decomposed? No. Can it be reused? No. It goes into a waste, big landfill. All around the world there are these big waste piles – piles of things that are burning often because we throw away our electronics there as well. And when the electronics get old, the batteries start getting  hot and catching fire. And so, *waste*. We carry things in plastic bags. It's really convenient to do that.

  6. 00:02:33 --> 00:03:00

    When you're finished using them, we throw them away. Coffee cup. Well, you know, it's paper, right?  We can just recycle it – we can reuse the paper? No, because you don't really want coffee  in cardboard; it would soak into the paper. So, the cardboard is coated with a very thin coating of plastic; and unless the company that does the recycling

  7. 00:03:00 --> 00:03:33

    can remove that plastic, it cannot recycle it. How do you know the company which does your recycling can remove the plastic? There's no way. So, let's take a look at what nature does. Well, take a banana, for example; it's nicely packaged, easy to open, easy to use – and when we're all finished,  the banana peel can be reused by nature.   If we throw it away on the ground, for example, it naturally decomposes and

  8. 00:03:33 --> 00:04:00

    adds fertilizer and nutrients to the soil so other plants can grow. So, why can't we manufacture things in this way? We call this *the circular economy*. That is to say, *no waste*. Everything that is built, everything that is used can be *reused*, *recycled*. Not just recycled the way we do it today, which is actually quite wasteful, but recycled so that the same parts can be reused or in the case of nature

  9. 00:04:00 --> 00:04:05

    it naturally decomposes into useful nutrients for the next cycle.

Design for a Better World with Don Norman

2.3 - Sustainability Is Not Enough

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  1. 00:00:00 --> 00:00:32

    Sustainability is important, but it can't be the goal. To sustain something means to keep it in the current state. And today's current state – uh, no; we don't want to live in today's current state with the kinds of fires and droughts and winds and hunger. No. But we don't let it to get worse. So, the first step is, yeah, let's not go any worse,

  2. 00:00:32 --> 00:01:00

    which means stop releasing all the carbon  products into the atmosphere or into the land or into the ocean. When I say the current state is not sustainable, what do I mean by that, and how did we reach the current state? More waste is generated in the manufacturing and in the mining and in discarding and in lots of other activities. And it's fine if we had waste of the sort that nature has,

  3. 00:01:00 --> 00:01:30

    where the waste itself is valuable substances that can be reused by nature. What we need to do is stop making and using objects that create great harm to the planet. This means changing the way that we do things, changing the way we make things, changing our designs, making designs that – the stuff can be repairable and can last a long time without being thrown away, that can be upgraded without having  to buy a new item.

  4. 00:01:30 --> 00:02:00

    It means changing a lot of things – not just the design, but the companies have to change their business models because today the business model is based upon the fact that we're going to sell a new product every few years: a new product, a new product, a new product. No. That's what leads to the waste and leads to the harm. What we need is to say we're going to sell  a *system*. But meanwhile the current way of living is destroying the planet. So, we have to change that state – stop doing that,

  5. 00:02:00 --> 00:02:31

    but better than that, recover our former state. So, we have to also change and get rid of the harm that has already been done. You know – the climate scientists like to talk about atmospheric temperature: the average temperature of the world's atmosphere. The problem with that is that *doesn't mean anything*; they say – you know – if we went up two degrees Celsius from the temperature  at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, then great harm will happen. Two degrees Celsius?

  6. 00:02:31 --> 00:03:02

    I mean, the temperature changes more than that every day, up and down, up and down. What does that mean? That's not very much. So, the problem here is the *meaningful statement* made by the climatologists. The climatologists are talking about the heat of the entire planet. And for them, two degrees is a huge  amount; whereas we talk about the temperature every day and how it changes up and down more than two degrees. We have to heed what the climatologists are telling us. We have to stop this heating.

  7. 00:03:02 --> 00:03:16

    But let's not talk about degrees Celsius; let's talk about floods and windstorms and drought and hunger and fires – the *results* of climate change.

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