Meeting DON NORMAN (eeep!) felt like meeting the very foundation of everything | do as a designer. The man who made us understand the value of human centric design before most people even knew what the term meant is still questioning, learning and inspiring, even at 88!
I keep thinking about the doorman fallacy Rory Sutherland keeps referring to.
A hotel can replace a doorman with an automatic door and call it efficiency.
On paper, it saves money.
But the balance sheet only sees one job: opening the door. It does not see everything else the doorman was doing.
He was security. He was status. He was recognition. He was the first human signal that this place is cared for. He noticed who came in. He made regular guests feel known. He made strangers feel watched. He made the hotel feel like a hotel.
This is the danger of cost cutting. It often removes value that was never measured.
Many businesses make this mistake. They define a human role too narrowly, automate the visible function, and then wonder why the experience feels worse.
A receptionist is not just answering calls. A call center agent is not just closing tickets. A postman is not just delivering letters.
Human beings carry invisible value.
They create trust, warmth, reassurance, and memory. These things are hard to quantify, so finance departments treat them as waste.
But customers don't behave like numbers inside an excel sheet.
They live with feelings and emotions that are hard to measure.
And sometimes the thing you remove to save cost was the thing that made people trust you.
Airbnb stuck their entire customer journey up on their office walls.
Drawn by a Pixar animator, pinned where everyone walks past them daily.
30 frames.
15 for hosts.
15 for guests.
They call it "Snow White."
Chesky stole the idea from a Walt Disney biography in 2011.
Every new product idea has to answer:
→ "Which frame does this serve?"
If it fits a frame, that determines the owner, who prioritises it against their KPIs.
If it doesn’t fit a frame, it doesn’t serve the customer, and doesn’t get shipped.
50 prompts from ex-Warner designer
I��ve curated my best design prompts for Nano Banana in this article
Inside you get:
- high end prompts
- easy navigation
- bonus 🎁
Save this article.
Come back for a specific prompt every time you need it
No need to “comment”
Just create.
AI-powered products brands are finally stealing from the physical world instead of sci-fi moodboards.
less glowing blue robots.
less star logos + slick gradients.
more stuff that already exists on your desk.
it feels like we’re past “AI as shiny glimpse of the future” and into “AI as a familiar, everyday object”.
(i do like the granola rebrand)
maybe creativity at its core is about connecting things that don’t obviously belong together. every time you see a kid explore the world with pure curiosity, questioning everything because they have no assumptions yet, you realise how easily some adults lose the ability to be creative because they get too busy to stay curious