Don Norman

Don Norman built his career on a single, subversive conviction: when a person struggles with a door, a stove, a nuclear power plant, or an artificial intelligence, the fault is the design, not the user. This conviction produced a framework of remarkable durability—the Gulf of Execution, the Gulf of Evaluation, affordances, signifiers, conceptual models, resilience design—that has organized human-computer interaction as a discipline for forty years and that met its most consequential application only in the final phase of Norman’s career, when AI inverted the very structure it had been built to analyze. The entire history of interface design, from the command line to the touchscreen, was a sustained effort to narrow the Gulf of Execution—to make the person’s crossing easier. AI eliminated the need to cross. The machine learned the person’s language. And in doing so it blew open the Gulf of Evaluation—the distance between what the machine has done and what the person can understand