A collection of 17 posts

Human-Centered Design works well for mass-produced products and traditional products and services. But today, we owe our allegiance far beyond individual people -- we owe it to all humanity.

The great spiritual and humanistic power of design has been lost in its current emphasis upon business and industry. Design can be much more powerful than that: Design is a way of thinking that can be applied to almost any issue, but most importantly, to the major societal issues facing the world.

Does design education prepare designers to work with the multidisciplinary teams required for the complex issues of the 21st Century? Join us in rethinking design education. Help us find people who will provide diversity of age, gender, race, interests, socioeconomic status, and political views.

The 21s Century brings new challenges to design The implication? Design Education must change.

Updated: April 2, 2020. We recommend a procedure for updating design education through curricula that match their goals and abilities of every school, producing practitioner and academics who will fully realizing the value of design in the 21st century.

Design started out as a craft, primarily focusing upon the creation of beautiful objects to become a powerful force in industry. Today, design has gone far beyond its simple origins as a craft to develop powerful new ways for people to interact with the world, emphasizing experience, not technolo...

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) has asked me to return to help develop a Design program. How could I resist? Starting June 1, I return to be Director of Design at UCSD, housed in the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (Calit2). We start off with s...

For design to succeed, grow, achieve its potential, and train future leaders, we envision a new curriculum. In our vision, these new programs combine learning the art and craft of beautiful, pleasurable well-crafted design with substantive courses in the social and biological sciences, in technol...

I'm frequently asked how to find a job or a place to study, either in industrial design or user-interface design (Human-Computer Interaction). Rather than answer it anew each time, let me summarize my answer here. You either need real work experience or a graduate degree, or both. I cannot tell ...

We are now in the 21st century, but design curricula seem stuck in the mid 20th century. In the 21st century, design has broadened to include interaction and experience, services and strategies. The technologies are more sophisticated, involving advanced materials, computation, communication, sen...

My videos have been resurrected!  Let me explain. One upon a time, many years ago -- 1994 to be precise -- The Voyager Company produced a delightful CD-ROM that included copies of several

The field of Human Factors and its many descendants -- Cognitive Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Ergonomics, Human-Systems Integration, ... -- has made numerous, wonderful advances in the many decades since the enterprise began. But the discipline still serves many to rescue ra...

(Updated July 2012 from an earlier essay on finding a job.) I'm frequently asked how to find a job or a place to study, either in industrial design or user-interface design (Human-Computer Interaction). Rather than answer it anew each time, let me summarize my answer here. You either need real ...

No, I am not in favor of deception, trickery, fraud, or swindle. What I wish to change are the curriculum and examination practices of our school systems that insist on unaided work, arbitrary learning of irrelevant and uninteresting facts. I'd like to move them toward an emphasis on understandin...

We will solve the fundamental problems only through social policy, through organizational change, and through deep understanding of organizations and the people who comprise and are served by them. We need to change the way we think about education, and through that understanding, change the way ...

We learn not by having our heads filled with the great thoughts and ideas of others, but by constructing them within our own conceptual structures. But this construction works best when the scenario is rigged so as to lead us to the ideas, to force us to confront them and understand them. This is...