Donald Norman

Critic; Writer; Lecturer / Product Design / United States / Nielsen Norman Group

Donald Norman is a graduate of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, with degrees in electrical engineering and psychology. He has served as a faculty member at Harvard University; University of California, San Diego; Northwestern University; and KAIST (South Korea). Other previous work includes a position as a vice president at Apple and an executive position at HP.

Currently, Norman’s focus is design strategy: how designers and design thinking can drive both incremental and radical innovation within a company. Through this work, he seeks to aid technology companies in structuring their product lines and business.

Norman is the co-founder and principal of the User Experience/Usability consulting firm, the Nielsen Norman group. He is also an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT’s Institute of Design in Chicago.

He is member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award from from SIGCHI, the professional organization for computer-human Interaction. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Technology, Delft (TU Delft), in the Netherlands, and the University of Padua in Italy.

An author of a wide array of books and essays, Norman has most recently published Living with Complexity (2010), an exploration into the merits and management of complex technology, and a newly revised and expanded edition of The Design of Everyday Things (2013), first published in 1988 under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things.

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