CONCEPT
Resilience Design
Norman's framework for designing systems that maintain human capability even as technology changes the conditions under which capability is exercised — and the design orientation Chapter 6 of the Norman volume proposes as the antidote to the silent redesign of human cognition.
Resilience design, developed in Norman's later work and extended in Chapter 6 of the Norman volume, asks a question that capability-focused design does not: given that the person is using this tool, what design choices will ensure she emerges from the experience more capable rather than less? The approach does not reject the tool or demand refusal as principle. It insists that the coupling between person and technology should be designed to develop the human component, not merely deploy it. The resilient system is one where the person's independent capability grows alongside the coupled system's output, rather than atrophying while output accelerates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The resilience framing responds to what Norman called the silent redesign of human capability — the gradual atrophy of skills the user no longer exercises when the tool handles them. Distributed cognition has a structural vulnerability: capabilities that lived in the coupling disappear when