It’s now 1988. And Donald Norman comes back with a new book. Let’s be honest, this guy is a bit of a hero figure for me, so I’m completely biased when I add his work here and mention him more than Plato. But hey! He sounds like a great, smart guy (even if I never met him). Okay, back to the part about history.

So, it’s 1988 and Donald publishes a book titled “The Design of Everyday Things”. As the folks from Wikipedia say, this book shows “how design serves as the communication between object and user, and how to optimize that conduit of communication in order to make the experience of using the object pleasurable”. If you ask me, the book is definitely a great read for any designer out there, and I think it had a huge impact on our practice.

Just for the fun of it, I will mention here the term Norman Doors. In his book, Donald was a bit furious about all these doors that we fail to use properly.

His rage became so popular that the term Norman Doors is now used in the design world. There is even a fun blog who lists some of these doors “whose design tells the person to do the opposite of what they’re actually supposed to do”. Check it out; it will definitely be a fun way to enjoy a break from this booklet.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.