Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered

How human behavior brought our world to the brink, and how human behavior can save us.

The world is a mess. Our dire predicament, from collapsing social structures to the climate crisis, has been millennia in the making and can be traced back to the erroneous belief that the earth’s resources are infinite. The key to change, says Don Norman, is human behavior, covered in the book’s three major themes: meaning, sustainability, and humanity-centeredness. Emphasize quality of life, not monetary rewards; restructure how we live to better protect the environment; and focus on all of humanity. Design for a Better World presents an eye-opening diagnosis of where we’ve gone wrong and a clear prescription for making things better.

Norman proposes a new way of thinking, one that recognizes our place in a complex global system where even simple behaviors affect the entire world. He identifies the economic metrics that contribute to the harmful effects of commerce and manufacturing and proposes a recalibration of what we consider important in life. His experience as both a scientist and business executive gives him the perspective to show how to make these changes while maintaining a thriving economy. Let the change begin with this book before it’s too late.

PART I Artificial
1 Almost everything artificial has been designed
2 Our artificial way of life is unsustainable
3 Why History matters
4 Precise -but artificial- measurements
5 If technology got us into today’s situation, maybe technology can get us out
6 This book: Meaningful, sustainable, and humanity-centered

PART II Meaningful
7 The need for meaning
8 Measurement in the physical sciences
9 Measuring what is important to people
10 The Gross Domestic Product
11 How did the world get into today’s quandary
12 Human behavior and economics

PART III Sustainable. Reverse and repair the harm done to the ecosystems of the world.
14 How did the world get into today’s quandary?
15 Sustainability has multiple components and implications
16 Design Products, Sustainability, and the Circular Economy
17 The practical difficulties of Implementing Circular Design
18 Sustainable, robust, and resilient Systems
19 People’s understanding of systems
20 Working with complex sociotechnical systems
21 It’s not too late

PART IV Humanity Centered
22 Moving from humans to humanity
23 Democratizing design and development
24 People designing for themselves
25 DesignX: An approach to large, complex systems
26 Where incrementalism (muddling through) fails
27 Incremental modular design
28 When large, multidisciplinary projects are necessary
29 Dealing with scale
30 Design: Necessary but not sufficient

PART V Human Behavior
31 Why change is difficult
32 People will mobilize for a common goal
33 What must change
34 The dominance of technology
35 The future of technology

PART VI Action
36 What can be done?
37 What can we do?
38 The major points of this book

Acknowledgments
Notes