The Design of Everyday Things

Originally published in 1988 under the title The Psychology of Everyday Things, The Design of Everyday Things remains a foundational text in the field of HCD nearly 30 years later. Revised and expanded to address the rapid technological advances of the last decades, the book’s longevity attests to the strength of its core thesis—namely, that good design is human-centric. For Norman, the continued relevance of the book rests on the relative stability of people, reflecting his training as a psychologist and cognitive scientist. As he writes, “technologies may change, but people stay the same” (259). Norman is so certain of this that he predicts the book will remain popular for decades to come: “If this revised and expanded edition lasts an equally long time [as the first], that means fifty years of The Design of Everyday Things” (259).

Technology has changed dramatically since the late 1980s, but Norman’s principles of good design remain relevant. Although many of the examples he included in the first edition of his book are no longer applicable and the technology of interaction has undergone radical transformation, Norman’s fundamental design principles of discoverability, feedback, affordances, signifiers, mappings, constraints, and conceptual models still apply. By replacing sections on now-obsolete machines, such as VCRs, with discussions of new technologies, such as smartphones and other intelligent machines, Norman demonstrates that his design principles remain highly applicable for contemporary designers.

The ubiquity of The Design of Everyday Things on college syllabi also attests to its continued relevance. The book is a staple not just in design schools, but also features in psychology, computer science, and education courses in the United States and abroad. For example, Norman’s book is required reading for the Design Management Program at the Pratt Institute, one of New York City’s premier schools for art and design. Similarly, it is the focus of a course on design and psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a research institution of global repute. Norman’s book also features in a course called “Beyond Bits and Atoms” at Stanford University, which focuses on how to design, build, and critique constructionist educational technologies. The book’s broad appeal reflects Norman’s interdisciplinary approach to design. Indeed, cooperation between designers, product managers, engineers, salespeople, and other groups in order to create successful products is one of the key takeaways from his book, as is the importance of psychology and human cognition in HCD.

Scholars in a variety of fields have commented and built upon The Design of Everyday Things. In 2021, for instance, Karl Wiegers published The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things, a clear homage to Norman’s book. A software engineer by training, Wiegers promoted HCD using 150 products and systems that violate Norman’s fundamental design principles, providing 70 lessons for designers. Similarly, Jenny Davis, a sociologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, engaged Norman’s idea of affordances in her 2020 book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. In contrast to Wiegers’s book, Davis’s study is theoretically-oriented, situating the concept of affordances within the broad history of technology studies. Davis also shifts the emphasis from what technologies afford (which was Norman’s focus), to how, for whom, and under what circumstances they afford. Davis and Wiegers’ studies, alongside others, attest to the lasting influence of Norman’s book.