The Moral Architect: Don Norman on Designing for What Matters

I opened our conversation the way I'd opened with everyone. Here's what I'm thinking about. Here's the problem I'm trying to solve. And Don, in his gracious way, cut right through to the part that mattered.

"Moral and ethics and decisions about what's right and wrong, good or bad are have to be done by the people, not by the AI systems."

It sounds simple when he says it. But in a world where we're outsourcing judgment to algorithms, where a recommendation engine decides what news you see, it's actually radical.

AI systems are powerful. They're getting better every month. But they don't have a deep understanding of what we're doing or what the world actually is. They're trained on things that already exist, picked up from the internet. That means they can't be completely trusted.

But we keep acting like they can.

The conversation moved to design principles, to what still applies in this age of AI. Don pointed to something that felt like the foundation underneath everything: human values first.

"I think quality of life should be the first most important criterion," he said.

But companies don't organize around quality of life. They organize around profit. Then they think about schedule and cost. Everything else, all the foreign aid programs, all the foundations, they leave out quality of life. It's an afterthought if it's a thought at all.

I sat with that for a moment. I can see the same pattern inside the big companies. We measure customer satisfaction, we measure efficiency, we measure cost. We measure whether something is good. We don't measure whether it makes anyone's life better. Those are different things.

When I asked Don about error, about how we should think differently about human mistakes in a world of intelligent machines, his answer wasn't comforting.

"I'm afraid that mistakes, choosing the wrong path, making the wrong decision, may actually increase with the use of these systems, because we'll become so accustomed to their value that we may not carefully check any decision that it makes."

Think about that. Right now, because systems are still fallible, we watch them. We catch the errors. We correct. But as they get better, we'll trust them more. We'll stop watching. And then the mistakes won't be small errors in buttons anymore. They'll be decisions that shape lives, economies, entire communities.

The question he was really asking: Are we prepared for the responsibility that comes with abdicating responsibility?

I told him about the button situation at my temporary apartment. Buttons that don't make sense even though it's 2025 and we've known about this problem since 1988. "How have we not gotten it right?" I asked, almost pleading.

And Don just nodded. He's heard this question a thousand times. He's been writing about it for 37 years.

"We're super charging into this AI space," I said, "and now it's even more important, like the human aspect right now is even more important."

But I think what he understood, and what I'm starting to understand, is that we're moving in the opposite direction. As systems get more powerful, we're paying less attention to the human aspects. We're letting the technology do our thinking for us.

We talked about social networks, about how something that started as benign, even beautiful, has become something that distorts what we see and think and feel. Nobody planned it that way. It happened gradually, through choices made for business reasons that accumulated into something monstrous.

"Can you predict that? It's hard to predict," Don said. "But nonetheless, when you're doing it, you know you're not doing a good thing."

I think about the designers who worked on social media algorithms. They weren't all trying to build engagement traps. Some were just solving the problem in front of them. Each solution created conditions for the next problem. By the time anyone noticed the system was broken, millions of people were stuck in it.

When I asked Don about the future of UX, he got quiet.

"I think user experience should die."

He meant it. Not the concept, the term. User experience used to mean the whole big experience. Now it means "I did an app" or "I did a website." It's been shrunk down, confined, made small.

What actually creates great experiences, he said, is what places like Disney do. They orchestrate every moment. They know the person is standing in line for hours, so they make the line itself an experience. They have people climbing ladders to touch up spider webs because beauty matters even in the details nobody planned to notice.

That's not something AI can do. That requires care. Human attention to human experience.

By the end of our conversation, I was getting emotional. This man has been saying the same things for four decades. Teaching, writing, arguing for human-centered design, for quality of life, for moral imagination about what technology should do.

And the world is mostly still ignoring him.

But then he said something that steadied me. "I'm optimistic that we can overcome today's problems, but to do that, we're going to have to change the economic system. Our values emphasize human rights and quality of life over everything else."

He's not waiting for technology to fix this. He's not waiting for the business world to figure it out. He's actively rewarding people, through his charity work, who are doing good. Looking for the ones already trying.

"So I remain an optimist. When people ask me, How can I be optimistic in this complex and difficult world, I say, what's the alternative? If I were not an optimist, what would I do?"

That's the thing about Don Norman. After 37 years of watching the world ignore good design, he's still showing up. Still asking the hard questions. Still insisting that what we decide to build matters. That the choices we make have moral weight.

And maybe that's the real design principle that still applies in the age of AI: Someone has to care deeply enough to be willing to lose.

Before we ended, I told him what these interviews mean to me. How they're changing the book, changing my thinking, connecting me to a network of people who are actually trying.

"I appreciate your realness," I said. I meant it. Not because he was harsh, but because he was honest. He didn't pretend the problems are smaller than they are. He didn't offer easy answers.

He just kept showing up. Kept asking what matters. Kept insisting that our values have to come first.

In a world increasingly run by algorithms, that kind of insistence feels like an act of resistance. And maybe that's what we need most right now.

Not smarter technology. But people wise enough to know what shouldn't be automated.

Don Norman figured that out in 1988. We're still trying to catch up.