Science & Tech Quote by Donald Norman

Science loves a clean number because a clean number looks like certainty. Norman, a cognitive scientist who helped define human-centered design, is poking at that comfort: the way measurement can quietly become a value system. The line isn’t anti-data; it’s anti-habit. It targets a familiar drift in labs, product teams, and policy work alike: if something doesn’t fit into an instrument, a survey scale, or a KPI dashboard, it starts to feel like an indulgence rather than evidence.

The subtext is a warning about institutional incentives. What gets funded, published, shipped, and promoted tends to be what can be quantified quickly and defended statistically. That pressures researchers to choose questions that behave nicely, not necessarily questions that matter most. In Norman’s world, those “messy” questions are often human ones: usability, frustration, trust, delight, shame, confusion, meaning. They’re real, but they’re slippery. If you reduce them to what’s easily countable, you risk designing to the proxy rather than the experience.

The intent, then, is methodological and moral. Methodological, because it challenges the mistaken leap from “hard to measure” to “not worth studying,” a move that confuses epistemic limits with ontological ones. Moral, because it implies consequences: when institutions treat the unmeasurable as uninteresting, they systematically neglect the very terrain where people live. Norman’s jab lands because it exposes a subtle arrogance dressed up as rigor: mistaking the flashlight’s beam for the whole room.