From doors to phones, Don Norman’s lesson on why modern design needs exit points

That irritation with things which are pretty but thoughtless has morphed into a lifelong discipline for Norman.

Don Norman is an irritable, 89-year-old man. After listening to two minutes of platitudes on what an inspiring man he is, he says with a weary wave of the hand, “Why don’t we just begin?”

Donald Arthur Norman at BITS Design School in Thane on Thursday. (SATISH BATE/HT)

The issue here is, where to begin. Because Norman is the kind of man who didn’t just design objects; he redesigned how we think about them. Long before “user experience” became Silicon Valley jargon, he gave it meaning. His fingerprints are on everything; how we open doors, use phones, the checkout buttons on e-commerce website, even how governments think about engaging with citizens. Even some of those who worked on Aadhaar continue to use him as a sounding board. In the design world, Norman’s language is the grammar — the rules by which everything else makes sense.

He is speaking from the new BITS Design School in Mumbai where he is an advisor. He has a reputation for having disrupted design disproportionately. If user-centered design had a birth certificate, Don Norman’s name would be on it as progenitor.

But what kind of design makes him uncomfortable? He’s spent a lifetime cutting through the niceties of form to reach what really matters in design—function, empathy, moral clarity. Don Norman is famous for the concept of the Norman Door—a badly designed door that’s confusing to use, one that may say, PULL but demands that you in fact PUSH. At the hotel he’s staying in Mumbai, he couldn’t find the bathroom in his room for ten minutes because the architect had hidden the door behind a seamless wooden wall. Beautiful. Immaculate. Useless. “It’s not design,” he chuckles. “It’s sculpture.”

That irritation with things which are pretty but thoughtless has morphed into a lifelong discipline. His seminal book The Design of Everyday Things turned that frustration into a theory: when objects confuse people it isn’t their fault, it’s poor design. Every confusing interface, he wrote, is a small act of disrespect; every elegant one, a moral choice.

Norman’s early career was in cognitive science. This is where you study how the human mind remembers, perceives, forgets. That’s what led him to design: not the allure of creativity, but the pain of confusion. And that, he says, is where he realised early on that bad design isn’t an aesthetic problem but an ethical one. “When you blame people for mistakes that design has caused, you’re punishing them for being human.”

He had once said good design was “invisible” which he now recants. “That line is wrong. Invisibility breeds opacity, algorithms, AI, all the things we can’t see and don’t understand.” This leads us to a small philosophical detour. I mentioned to him a line in one of my favourite books, The Little Prince: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

He’s quick to cut me off. “Nothing doing! That’s wrong” before going on to impart a quick lesson right there on Microsoft Teams. “See that little green dot? That’s the only way I can look you in the eye,” he says pointing to the camera on my laptop before explaining the flaw. When he looks at my face on the screen, it seems to me that he’s looking away. To appear as though he’s making eye contact, he has to stare at the camera . But then he can’t actually see me. “That,” he says, “is bad design.” The technology works, but it breaks something human which is actually looking at one another while talking. When design gets in the way of connection, it isn’t clever, it’s broken, he says.

The rebel at Apple

Norman’s impatience isn’t acquired with age. It’s what made him a rebel even inside Apple where he served as the company’s first User Experience Architect. This is a title he invented. He joined the company when Apple was still the paragon of useability, the company that believed technology should feel human.

But somewhere along the line, he says, the pendulum swung from empathy to aesthetics. “What used to be the easiest machine in the world is now one of the hardest,” he says flatly. Industrial design began to dominate interface design; beauty swallowed clarity. His views made him unpopular at Apple and resulted in his departure.

It’s a pattern which defines his life. He builds institutions, questions their assumptions, then walks out when they stop listening. That restlessness is why his ideas travel better than he does. He’s worked at MIT, Harvard, UC San Diego and now lends his name to the BITS Design School in India. But he has never stayed long enough to fossilise.

He insists that failure is the only honest teacher. His students at BITS are forced into uncomfortable groups and told not to design anything until they’ve spent weeks observing local communities. “At first they hate it,” he says. “Then they come back and say it changed how they see the world.” It’s classic Norman: a pedagogy of irritation. He creates friction, then waits for understanding to catch fire.

For a man feared for his bluntness, Norman is disarmingly self-aware. “I used to be difficult to work with,” he confesses. “I gave my opinion too fast. I’m better now.” Better, for him, means gentler. He runs the Don Norman Design Award for young designers working on social good projects. Each year, dozens apply; only a handful win. But the real story is what happens to those who don’t. He personally writes to every rejected applicant, explaining why they didn’t make it and how they might improve. “More thank-you notes come from them than from the winners,” he says, amused.

The limits of empathy

Norman’s biggest worry now isn’t ugliness; it’s seduction. Engagement design, the psychology of “almost succeeding” has turned empathy into manipulation. “Games keep you trying again and again, TikTok keeps you scrolling, there’s no natural stopping point. It’s a perfect design for engagement but terrible design for life.”

He pauses, and his voice hardens. “These systems don’t just capture attention. They capture time. And when you take someone’s time, you take their life.” It’s why he believes the next frontier of design is restraint — knowing when not to pull the user back in. “We don’t need friendlier traps,” he says. “We need exits.”

Can people escape the kind of design now that follows them everywhere? From their phones to their refrigerators? He thinks it’s possible, but only if designers stop calling it innovation and start calling it what it is: addiction by design. “If you can’t walk away from it, it doesn’t serve you, you serve it,” he says.

That, perhaps, is what makes Norman so restless even at 89. He began his design career by fixing confusing doors. Decades later he’s warning us of invisible digital doors that keep us locked in. If there’s one thing Norman has taught the world, it’s that every design is a moral act.