Don gave a fantastic talk at DLab on March 4, 2026 about what he has been building after retirement, especially the Don Norman Design Award and the bigger idea behind it. He also did the full hour just standing there holding the mic the whole time, choosing not to use the mic stand, at 90 years old. Extremely cool!
After the talk, I got to chat with him, get the famous Yellow Book (The Design of Everyday Things) signed to Sirui, and somehow even grab a selfie. That honestly made my whole day. Don rarely takes selfies with people, so I was extra happy he said yes 😃 On top of that, he shared really insightful takes on how to better educate the next generation in age of AI and pointed me toward some really exciting research directions! I am genuinely super grateful for that. And yes, this photo is absolutely going into my intro slide the next time I TA CogSci and DSGN courses to impress my students a little, haha 😉
If you are into design, go check out the charity and buy his newer book, Design for a Better World - he told us it is much more correct than The Design of Everyday Things!
Update: I also just read Don’s recent Substack piece, Why I Am Against STEM Education, and it made the education part of his DLab talk click a little more for me. The title is mischievous: he is not against science, technology, engineering, or math as knowledge. He is against education that turns them into isolated specialties, teaches at students instead of helping them learn actively, and treats collaboration as suspicious even though real work is collaborative. I was especially interested in his cautious optimism about AI tutors. I have been wary of that idea, but his framing made me feel more positive about AI as scaffolding: not to make students narrower or more dependent, but to help them connect across areas, debug their thinking, and become a little more generalist. That also connects to project-based classrooms and to Don’s larger point that we should teach problems rather than disconnected disciplines. Don’s original piece says all of this much better than my tiny summary; go read it.
