Education Quote by Donald Norman

A designer-scientist admitting to "mistakes" with a wink is either a confession or a trap. With Donald Norman, it reads like a provocation aimed at anyone who thinks errors are purely user failure. He helped popularize the idea that bad design manufactures "human error", then blames the human. So the line flips the script: if the system keeps tripping you, maybe it is not clumsiness; maybe it is instruction-by-bruise.

The phrasing matters. "AS for all those mistakes I make" borrows the tone of a weary public figure swatting away criticism, then pivots to the audacious "they are on purpose". That little twist is classic Norman: treat friction as data. In good design practice, you prototype, you test, you watch people stumble, and you learn where the interface lies. But Norman also knows the darker version: organizations ship confusing products and retroactively frame the confusion as character-building. The quote toys with that ambiguity, and that is the subtext. It dares the reader to ask who benefits from the lesson.

"To teach you how to deal with them" is the punchline and the critique. It is what every terrible manual implies: adapt to the product, not the other way around. Norman's larger body of work argues the opposite - that systems should teach by making the right action obvious, and make errors recoverable when they happen. Read in that context, the line lands as a sardonic indictment of design culture that romanticizes failure while quietly offloading responsibility onto users.