The future of design

After two years of working with Don Norman on jnd.org I actually got the opportunity to meet him in person on Monday (6/11/06).

The double pleasure for me was that our meeting coincided with NNG User Experience 2006 Conference which meant I also got to attend a rather wonderful seminar on managing the user experience team delivered by Janice Rohn of the World Savings Bank and I had the great pleasure to meet, talk to and have lunch with Jakob Nielsen and most of the other speakers - not Scott McCloud unfortunately!

To top it all off Don delivered a truly passionate keynote speech on the future of design where he described his guidelines for future design:

• Task Centered not Human Centered
• Users? People not Users
• Personas for applications
• Separate design from study
• no more error messages
• Take the business point of view

and gave an outline of his forthcoming book "The future of everyday things" due out in 2007; which incidentally you can read the first chapter, Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens, at Don's website jnd.org. Don also described a future for User Experience professionals moving away from application design to integrated product design, as there is further convergence of computer systems and appliances into a fully connected environment. I personally can't wait for the toilet to analyse my stool and send a report off to the doctor perhaps by then the NHS Connecting for health project will actually be finished!

Oh and if you want to find out more, consider man+car, man+fridge as one entity - the horse metaphor is the new black!