Science Quote by Donald Norman

A scientist swearing off clarity sounds like heresy, which is exactly why it lands. Donald Norman built a career arguing that good design makes the right action obvious; so when he says, "You won't catch me giving clear lectures", he’s not confessing incompetence. He’s taking a swing at the fantasy that learning is a clean download from expert to audience.

The phrasing does a lot of work. "You won't catch me" has the comic snap of a defiant vow, like he’s dodging a crime scene. It frames "clear lectures" as suspiciously easy, even dishonest. The subtext: clarity can be a performance that seduces students into mistaking recognition for understanding. A perfectly linear lecture can feel like mastery while leaving the mental model untouched.

Norman’s context matters. Coming out of cognitive science and human-centered design, he’s spent decades showing how people actually think: messy, cue-driven, prone to confident error. In that world, teaching isn’t about polishing explanations until they glide; it’s about engineering friction in the right places, forcing attention onto the parts that don’t fit. Confusion becomes a tool, not a failure mode.

There’s also a critique of academia’s incentives. Universities reward the charismatic clarity merchant: the lecturer who makes complexity look painless. Norman’s line punctures that prestige economy. He’s signaling that real learning often feels like not getting it, then getting it, and that any teacher promising otherwise is either selling comfort or skipping the hard parts.