Abstract
The convergence of four industries -- Communication, Computers, Education, and Entertainment -- promises major changes in society. Humans change slowly. Technology changes rapidly, following a most un-biological form of evolution. The rapid changes in technology clash with human culture, society, government and law. The new technologies are digital, which tends to make them require precision and accuracy, and to be "brittle": easily disrupted in the presence of noise or error. Human beings are analog, which tends to make people imprecise and approximate, and to be "compliant": tolerant of huge disruptions. These mismatches between technology and people can lead to extreme difficulties, or they can be exploited to enhance the power of human-technical systems. Current trends are toward the former: my goal is to move us to the latter.

Biography
Donald A. Norman is Vice President and head of the Apple Research Laboratories at Apple Computer and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert on the human-side of technology, including the interaction of technology and society.

At Apple Computer, Norman is helping shape the technologies of the future, ones that will move us to the next generation of people-centered products. "In this new age of portable, powerful, fully-communicating tools," says Norman, "it is ever more important to develop a humane technology, one that takes into account the needs and capabilities of people."

Prof. Norman has published extensively in journals and books, and is the author or co-author of twelve books, with translations into twelve languages. His most recent books are "The Design of Everyday Things," "Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles" and "Things That Make Us Smart," all three are collected on a Voyager CD-ROM - "Defending human attributes in the age of the machine" - complete with video talks,demonstrations, collected papers, and even examination questions.

Norman received a B.S. degree from MIT and a MS degree from the University of Pennsylvania, both in Electrical Engineering. His doctorate, from the University of Pennsylvania, is in Psychology. In 1995, he received an honorary degree from the University of Padua (Italy). He has been a faculty member at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego where he served as chair of the Psychology Department and helped establish the Department of Cognitive Science, becoming its first chair. He was one of the founders of the Cognitive Science.