PERSON
Don Norman
American cognitive scientist and design theorist (b. 1935) whose four-decade project of rescuing users from badly designed technology produced the foundational vocabulary of human-computer interaction — and whose principles, as this volume argues, apply to the AI era with renewed urgency.
Donald A. Norman (b. 1935) earned his doctorate in mathematical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania before joining UC San Diego, where he co-founded the Institute for Cognitive Science and contributed to the Parallel Distributed Processing research group that helped establish the connectionist approach to neural networks. His 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things introduced the foundational vocabulary of human-computer interaction — affordances, signifiers, the two gulfs, conceptual models — and his subsequent career expanded this framework from individual artifacts to emotional design, complex sociotechnical systems, and ultimately the humanity-centered paradigm that reframed design as ethical practice.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Norman's early career was shaped by the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. His doctoral training in mathematical psychology gave him the analytical tools to treat usability as a scientific question rather than an aesthetic one. At UCSD through the 1970s and 1980s, he helped build one of