Don Norman is Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. He is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, former Vice President of Apple and former executive at Hewlett Packard. Norman serves as an IDEO Fellow, honorary professor of Design and Innovation at Tongji University (Shanghai), and as advisor or board member of numerous companies.

The Design Lab focuses upon the complex sociotechnical problems facing the world, emphasizing the need for solutions generated by local inhabitants of the region: community-driven design. We call this area of design. DesignX. They require world-scale collaboration. The Design Lab philosophy is to facilitate and mentor local knowledge, proceeding slowly and incrementally, learning from each step along the way.

At UC, San Diego, he served as chair of the Psychology Department and founder and chair of the Cognitive Science Department. At Northwestern University, he is the Breed Professor of Design, emeritus. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Industrial Design at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has honorary degrees in psychology from the University of Padua (Italy) and in Design from the Technical University of Delft (the Netherlands) and the University of the Republic of San Marino. He received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from SIGCHI and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer & Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia). He is a member of the American National Academy of Engineering, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Association for Computing Machinery, American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, Human Factors & Ergonomics Society, and the Design Research Society. He serves on the Board of Trustees at IIT’s Institute of Design in Chicago.

He is well known for his books “The Design of Everyday Things,” “Emotional Design,” and “Living with Complexity.” He lives at www.jnd.org.