Season 1 Finale: Design for a Better World (w/ Don Norman)

 Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn. 

What happens when human-centered design is no longer enough?

Designers are trained to make things easier to use—but what if ease and elegance are no longer the point? What if the systems we need to change go far beyond screens and interfaces, touching global structures and collective futures?

Our guest, Don Norman, coined the term "Norman Door" to describe a door that gives the wrong signal about how to open it—pull vs. push—highlighting poor affordances and feedback in everyday objects. 

This simple yet profound observation helped launch a new era of design awareness, making him one of the most influential voices in the psychology of design. His decades-long career has shaped the fields of human-computer interaction, design thinking, and usability. He is the author of the seminal book The Design of Everyday Things, and now, Design for a Better World, a work that challenges us to design for the full complexity of human and planetary needs.

WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE

• What makes some errors easy to catch and others dangerously hard to detect
• How decades of design decisions have shaped today’s global challenges
• What it means to shift from human-centered to humanity-centered design
• How co-design empowers communities over outside experts
• The surprising design lessons learned from nuclear accidents, faucets, and guinea pigs
• The role of failure in progress—and why we should embrace it
  
  

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Designing for ease is not enough—today’s challenges demand designing for systems and long-term impact.
• User-centered design can fall short when it fails to consider environmental, societal, and ethical dimensions.
• Human error is not always a failure of attention—it’s often a byproduct of bad design.
• To scale real change, we need dandelion models—spreading seeds of knowledge and training others to do the same.
• Participatory design ensures that communities are not passive recipients but active creators of their own solutions.
• The service economy offers a path toward sustainability—if companies rethink profit and longevity.

The future of design psychology isn’t about better buttons—it’s about understanding people so deeply that we can redesign society itself.

thedesignpsychologist.substack.com is the podcast newsletter. Get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.