There are lots of models of human behaviour, and as the design of systems becomes increasingly focused on people, modelling behaviour has become more important for designers. As Jon Froehlich, Leah Findlater and James Landay note, “even if it is not explicitly recognised, designers [necessarily] approach a problem with some model of human behaviour”, and, of course, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. One of the points of the DwI toolkit (post-rationalised) was to try to give designers a few different models of human behaviour relevant to different situations, via pattern-like examples.

I’m not going to get into what models are ‘best’ / right / most predictive for designers’ use here. There are people doing that more clearly than I can; also, there’s more to say than I have time to do at present. What I am going to talk about is an approach which has emerged out of some of the ethnographic work I’ve been doing for the Empower project, working on CarbonCulture with More Associates, where asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways with technology (in particular around energy-using systems) led to answers which were resolvable into something like rules: I’m talking about behavioural heuristics.

Behavioural heuristics

The term has some currency in game theory, other economic decision-making and even in games design, but all I really mean here is rules (of thumb) that people might follow when interacting with a system – things like:

▶ If someone I respect read this article, I should read it too

▶ If this email claiming to be from my bank uses language which makes me suspicious, I should ignore it

▶ If I’ve read something that makes me look intelligent, I should tell others

▶ If that Go Compare advert comes on, I should press ‘mute’

▶ If the base of my coffee cup might be wet, I should put it on something rather than directly on the polished wooden table

▶ If, when asked which of two cities has a bigger population, I have only heard of one of them, I should choose that one

▶ If my friend posts that she has a new job, I should congratulate her

▶ If there’s a puddle in front of me, I should walk round it

▶ If there’s a puddle in front of me, I should jump in it

▶ If I’m short of time, I should choose the brand name I recognise

▶ If I have some rubbish, and there’s a recycling bin nearby, I should recycle it

▶ If I have some rubbish, and there isn’t a recycling bin nearby, I should put it in a normal bin

▶ If that bench is wet or dirty, I should sit somewhere else

▶ If lots of my friends are using this app, I should try it too

▶ If there are lots of pairs of seats empty on the train, I should sit in one of them rather than sitting next to someone already occupying one of a pair

▶ If I can’t see the USB logo on the top of this connector, I should turn it over before trying to plug it in

▶ If I can’t get the USB cable to plug in properly, I should force it

▶ If seats are positioned round a table, I should sit at the table

▶ If I’m trying to lose weight, I should try to choose food with less fat in it

▶ If this envelope has HM Revenue & Customs on the back, I should open it

▶ If this envelope is from BT and printed on shiny paper, I should shred it immediately without bothering to open it

▶ If this website asks me to fill in a survey, I should click cancel immediately

▶ That urinal spacing thing. You know what I mean.

These are a mixture of instinctive or automatic reactions (a kind of ifttt for people) and those with more deliberative processes behind them: the elephant and rider or Systems 1 and 2 or whatever you like. Some are more abstract than others; most involve some degree of prior learning, whether purely through conditioning or a conscious decision, but in practice can be applied quickly and without too much in-context deliberation (hence at least some are ‘fast and frugal’, in Dan Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer’s terms). Some heuristics could lead to cognitive biases (or vice versa); some involve following plans, some are more like situated actions. And of course not all of them are true for everyone, and they would differ in different situations even for the same people, depending on a whole range of factors.

Truth tables for people

Regardless of the backstory, though, each of these rules or heuristics potentially has effects in practice in terms of the actual behaviour that occurs. They are almost like atomic black boxes of action, transducers* which when connected together in specific configurations result in ‘behaviour’.

We might construct ‘behavioural personas’ which put together compatible (whatever that means) heuristics into persona-like fictional users, described in terms of the rules they follow when interacting with things, and both (admittedly crudely) simulate** their behaviour in a situation, and, maybe more importantly, design systems which take account of the heuristics that users are employing.

If we know that our fictive user is following a “If someone I respect read this article, I should read it too” heuristic, then designing a system to show users that people they respect (however that’s determined) read or recommended an article ought to be a fairly obvious way to influence the fictive user to read the article. If we know that he or she also follows related heuristics in other parts of life, e.g. the “If I’ve read something that makes me look intelligent, I should tell others” rule, then this action could also be incorporated into the process.

There are two main objections to this. One: it’s obvious, and we do it anyway; and two: treating people like electronic components is horrible / grotesquely reductive / etc. I don’t disagree with either, but am nevertheless interested in exploring the possibilities of using this kind of modelling, simple and lacking in nuance as it is, to provide a way of navigating and exploring the many different ways that design can influence behaviour. If we could do contextual user research with this kind of heuristic as a unit of analysis, uncovering how many users in our situation are likely to be following different heuristics, we could design systems which are not just segmented but tailored much more directly to the things which ‘matter’ to people in terms of how they behave.

Trying it out: thank you, Dublin guinea-pigs

At Interaction 12 last week in Dublin, 41 wonderful people from organisations including Adaptive Path, Google and Chalmers University took part in a workshop exploring the idea of these heuristics and how they might be used in design for behaviour change.

What we did first was a kind of rapid functional decomposition (in the Christopher Alexander sense) on a few examples where systems have been designed expressly to try to influence user behaviour in multiple ways.

The example I worked through first though was a simple decomposition of Amazon’s ‘social proof’ recommendation system: the point was to try to think through some of the ‘assumptions’ about behaviour that can be read into the design, and using a kind of laddering / Five Whys process, end up with statements of possible heuristics.

So with the Amazon example here, what are the assumptions? Basically, what assumptions are present, that if true would explain how the system ‘works’ at influencing users’ behaviour? What I have glibly classified as simply social proof contains a number of assumptions, including things like:

▶ People will do what they see other people doing

▶ People want to learn more about a subject

▶ People will buy multiple books at the same time

And many others, probably. But let’s look in more detail at ‘People will do what they see other people doing’: Why? Why will people do what they see other people doing? If we break this down, asking ‘Why?’ a couple of times, we get to tease out some slightly different possible factors.

After a couple of iterations it’s possible to see some actual heuristics emerge:

Of course there are many possible heuristics here, but for the five uncovered, it’s not too difficult to think of design patterns or techniques which are directly relevant:

There’s nothing there that isn’t obvious, but I suppose my point is that each heuristic implies a specific design feature, and the process of unpicking what the actual decision-points might involve gives us a much more targeted set of design possibilities than simply saying ‘put some social proof there’. Depending on the heuristics uncovered, it might be that simple majority preference (the Whiskas ad), irritating pseudo-authority-based messaging (Klout), friend-based recommendation (Facebook apps), peer voting (Reddit) or even celebrity/expert endorsement (John Stalker and Drummer endorsing awnings) could match individual users’ heuristics better.

Sometimes a service will use more than one, to try to satisfy multiple heuristics, or perhaps because the designers are not sure which heuristics are really important to the user (e.g. the This Is My Jam example below). In some ways, this process is approaching the kind of ‘persuasion profiling’ being pioneered by Maurits Kaptein, Dean Eckles and Arjan Haring’s Persuasion API, although from a different direction.

In the workshop, groups did a similar decomposition on three examples: Codecademy, Opower and Foodprints, part of More Associates’ CarbonCulture platform – the introductory material is reproduced below. [PDF of this material]

For each of these, groups extracted a handful of statements of possible heuristics – for example, for Opower, these included:

▶ If my neighbour can do it, I can do it

▶ If life’s a competition, I want to win it

▶ If I set myself goals, I want to meet them

▶ I don’t want to be the ‘weak link’, so I should do it

▶ I want to be ‘normal’, so I should do it

▶ [If I do it] I will be better than other people

▶ If I get apprecation from others, I will continue to do it

▶ If it stops me being the ‘bad guy’, I will do it

▶ If it stops me feeling guilty, I will do it

▶ [If I do it] I will improve myself

▶ If I don’t do it, I won’t fit in

▶ If I save money, I’ll have it for other things

▶ [If I do it] I will be a ‘good’ person

▶ [If I don't do it] bad things will happen

We went on to swap some of the heuristics among groups, and build them up into relatively plausible (if completely fake) personas, ranging from a “goth who doesn’t want to do what others do”, to Fido, a guide dog intent on helping his partially-sighted owner Bob (as SVA’s Lizzy Showman mentions here).

In turn, the groups then used the DwI cards as inspiration to generate some possible concepts in response to a brief about keeping that person (or dog) engaged and motivated as part of a behaviour change programme at work, around behaviours such as exercise, giving better feedback and so on. Finally, groups acted these out (photo below shows Fido and Bob!).

Where does all this fit into a design process?

What was the point of all this? The aim, really, is ultimately to provide a way of helping designers choose the most appropriate methods for influencing user behaviour in particular contexts, for particular people. This is what much design for behaviour change research is evolving towards, from Stanford’s Behaviour Wizard to Johannes Zachrisson’s development of a framework.

I would envisage that with user research framed and phrased in the right way, observation, interviews and actual behavioural data, it would be possible to extract heuristics in a form which are useful for selecting design patterns to apply. While in the workshop we ‘decomposed’ existing systems without doing any real user research, doing this alongside would enable the heuristics extracted to be compared and discrepancies investigated and resolved. The redesigned system could thus match much better the heuristics being followed by users, or, if necessary, help to shift those heuristics to more appropriate ones.

Ultimately, each design pattern in some future version of the DwI toolkit will be matched to relevant heuristics, so that there’s at least a more reasoned (if not proven) process for doing design for behaviour change, using heuristics as a kind of common currency between user behaviour and design patterns: user research → extracting heuristics → matching heuristics to design patterns → redesigning system by applying patterns → testing → back to the start if needed

In the meantime, my next step with this is to do some more extraction of heuristics from actual behavioural data for some particular parts of CarbonCulture, and (as my job requires) put this process into a more formal write-up for an academic journal. I will try to make some properly theoretical bridges with the heuristics work of Gerd Gigerenzer, Dan Goldstein and (as always) Herbert Simon. But if you have any thoughts, suggestions, objections or otherwise, please do get in touch.

Thanks to everyone who came to the workshop, and thanks too to the Interaction 12 organisers for an impressively organised conference.

* In reality, the rules have to be able to degrade if the conditions are not met: people are maybe following nested IF…THEN…ELSE loops rather than individual IF…THEN rules. Or perhaps more likely (this thought occurred while talking to Sebastian Deterding on a bus from Dun Laoghaire last week) a kind of CASE statement – which would take us into pattern recognition and recognition-primed decision models…
**Matt Jones suggests I should read Manuel deLanda’s Philosophy and Simulation, which fills me with both excitement and fear…

Image sources: ‘If…’ movie poster; Whiskas ad; Nationwide awnings

Continuing the meta-auto-behaviour-change effort started here, I’m publishing a few extracts from my PhD thesis as I write it up (mostly from the literature review, and before any rigorous editing) as blog posts over the next few months. The idea of how architecture can be used to influence behaviour was central to this blog when it started, and so it’s pleasing to revisit it, even if makes me realise how little I still know.

“There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”
Winston Churchill, addressing the English Architectural Association, 1924

In designing and constructing environments in which people live and work, architects and planners are necessarily involved in influencing human behaviour. While Sommer (1969, p.3) asserted that the architect “in his training and practice, learns to look at buildings without people in them,” it is clear that from, for example, Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), through Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and La Ville radieuse, to the Smithsons’ ‘Streets in the sky’, there has been a long-standing thread of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live. Whether the explicit intention to influence behaviour drives the design process—architectural determinism (Broady, 1966: see future blog post ‘POSIWID and determinism’)—or whether the behaviour consequences of design decisions are only revealed and considered as part of a post-occupancy evaluation (e.g. Zeisel, 2006) or by social scientists or psychologists studying the impact of a development, there are links between the design of the built environment and our behaviour, both individually and socially.

Where there is an explicit intention to influence behaviour, the intended behaviours could relate (for example) to directing people for strategic reasons, or providing a particular ‘experience’, or for health and safety reasons, but they are often focused on influencing social interaction. Hillier et al (1987, p.233) find that “spatial layout in itself generates a field of probabilistic encounter, with structural properties that vary with the syntax of the layout.” Ittelson et al (1974, p.358) suggest that “All buildings imply at least some form of social activity stemming from both their intended function and the random encounters they may generate. The arrangement of partitions, rooms, doors, windows, and hallways serves to encourage or hinder communication and, to this extent, affects social interaction. This can occur at any number of levels and the designer is clearly in control to the degree that he plans the contact points and lanes of access where people come together. He might also, although with perhaps less assurance, decide on the desirability of such contact.”

“Designers often aspire to do more than simply create buildings that are new, functional and attractive—they promise that a new environment will change behaviours and attitudes” (Marmot, 2002, p.252). Where architects expressly announce their intentions and ability to influence behaviour, such as in Danish firm 3XN’s exhibition and book Mind Your Behaviour (3XN, 2010), the behaviours intended and techniques used can range from broad, high-level aspirational strategies such as communal areas “creating the potential for involvement, interaction and knowledge sharing” in a workplace (3XN, 2010) to specific tactics, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s occasional use of “very confining corridors” for people to walk along “so that when they entered an open space the openness and light would enhance their experience” (Ittelson et al, 1974, p.346). An appreciation of both broad strategies and specific tactics is valuable: from the perspective of a designer whose agency may only extend to redesign of certain elements of a space, product or interface, it is the specific tactical techniques which are likely to be the most immediately applicable, but the broader guiding strategies can help set the vision in the first place. For example, the ‘conditions for city diversity’ outlined by Jacobs (1961)—broad strategies for understanding aspects of urban behaviour—have influenced generations of urbanists.

Following the influence of Christopher Alexander (Alexander et al, 1975, 1977; Alexander, 1979), such strategies and tactics may be expressed architecturally in terms of patterns, which describe “a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice” (Alexander et al, 1977). The concept of patterns, and Alexander et al’s A Pattern Language (1977) will be examined in detail in a future thesis extract, for their form, philosophy and impact, but, as an example, it is worth drawing out a few of the patterns which actually address directly influencing behaviour architecturally (Table 1). Among others, Frederick (2007) and Day (2002) both also outline a range of architectural patterns, some with similarities to Alexander et al’s, including some specifically relating to influencing behaviour.

Two examples of pattern 53? Chepstow, Monmouthshire (restored 1524) and Philips High Tech Campus, Eindhoven (c.2000)

Table 1. Summaries of a few of Alexander et al’s patterns (1977) which specifically address influencing behaviour, simplified into ‘ends’ and ‘means’.

Layout of physical elements

Practically, most architectural patterns for influencing behaviour involve, in one way or another, the physical arrangement of building elements—inside or outside—or a change in material properties. In each case, there is the possibility of changing people’s perceptions of what behaviour is possible or appropriate, and the possibility of actually forcing some behaviour to occur or not occur (see future article ‘Affordances, constraints and choice architecture’). These are not independent alternatives: the perception that some behaviour is possible or impossible can be a result of learning ‘the hard way’ in the past.

Barrier on the London Underground (Baker Street, from memory), preventing people running down stairs directly onto the track. Most stairs don’t open straight onto the platform like this.

The physical arrangement of elements can be broken down into different aspects of positioning and layout—putting elements in particular places to encourage or discourage people’s interaction with them, putting them in people’s way to prevent access to somewhere, putting them either side of people to channel or direct them in a particular way (e.g. staggered pedestrian crossings which aim to direct pedestrians to face oncoming traffic; Department for Transport, 1995), hiding them to remove the perception that they are there, splitting elements up or combining them so that they can be used by different numbers of people at once, or angling them so that some actions are easier than others (termed slanty design by Beale (2007), both physically and in metaphorical application in interfaces). Urbanists such as Whyte (1980) have catalogued, in colourful, intricate detail the effects that the layouts and features of built environments have on people’s behaviour—why some areas become popular, others not so, with whom, and why, with recommendations for how to improve things, in contrast to work such as Goffman (1963) which focuses on the social contexts of public behaviour in urban environments.

The layouts of shops, hotels, casinos and theme parks, especially larger developments where there is scope to plan more ambitiously, can also make use of multiple aspects of positioning and layout to influence and control shoppers’ paths—Stenebo (2010) discusses IKEA’s carefully planned (and continually refined) “fairyland of adventures” which routes visitors through the store; Shearing and Stenning (1984) examine how Disney World embeds “[c]ontrol strategies in both environmental features and structural relations,” many to do with positioning of physical features; while Underhill (1999, 2004), formerly one of Whyte’s students, describes how his company, Envirosell, uses observation approach to understand and redesign shopping behaviour across a wide range of store types and shopping malls themselves, much of which comes down to intelligently repositioning elements such as mirrors, basket stacks, signage and seating. Poundstone (2010) cites a study by Sorensen Associates which used active RFID tags fitted to shopping trolleys to determine that US shoppers taking an anticlockwise route around supermarkets spend on average $2.00 more per trip; the suggestion is that stores with the entrance on the right will be more likely to prompt this anticlockwise movement.

Changes in material properties can involve drawing attention to particular behaviour (e.g. rumble strips on a road to encourage drivers to slow down: Harvey, 1992), or making it more or less comfortable to do an activity (e.g., as Katyal (2002, p.1043) notes, “fast food restaurants use hard chairs that quickly grow uncomfortable so that customers rapidly turn over”). The application of some of these physical positioning and layout and material property ideas to a particular social issue is described in the blog post ‘Towards a Design with Intent method v.0.1′ from 2008.

Often combining positioning and material properties, the effect of different seating types and layouts on behaviour comprises a significant area of study in itself, with, for example, work by Steinzor (1950), Hearn (1957), Sommer (1969) and Koneya (1976) helping to establish patterns of likely interaction between people occurring with arrangements of chairs around tables, and overall room layouts in classrooms and mental hospitals. Sommer’s design intervention in the dayroom of an elderly ladies’ ward at a state hospital in Canada—by reducing the number of couches around the walls and adding tables and chairs in the centre of the room, with flowers and magazines—led to major increases in the amount of conversation and interaction between residents.

Osmond (1959) introduced the terms sociofugal and sociopetal to describe spaces which drive people apart and together, respectively; Sommer (1969, 1974) notes that airports are often among the most sociofugal spaces, largely because of the fixed, single-direction seating and “sterile” decor: “Many other buildings… such as mental hospitals and jails, also discourage contact between people, but none does this as effectively as the airport… In practice the long corridors and the cold, bare waiting areas of the typical airport are more sociofugal than the isolation wing of the state penitentiary.” (Sommer, 1974: p.72). Hall’s concept of proxemics (e.g. Hall, 1966) provides a treatment of personal space, its effects on behaviour, and its significance in different physical spaces as well as in different cultures. The different ‘distance zones’ identified by Hall—intimate, personal, social and public—have implications for the design process: “If one looks at human beings in the way that the early slave traders did, conceiving of their space requirements simply in terms of the limits of the body, one pays very little attention to the effects of crowding. If, however, one sees man surrounded by a series of invisible bubbles which have measurable dimensions, architecture can be seen in a new light. It is then possible to conceive that people can be cramped by the spaces in which they have to live and work. They may find themselves forced into behavior, relationships or emotional outlets that are overly stressful” (Hall, 1966, p.129).

Emergence, desire lines and predicting behaviour

“All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong”.
Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, 1994, p. 178.

“I built skyscrapers for people to live in there and now they messed them up—disgusting”.
Ernő Goldfinger, commenting on tabloid reports of violent crime in the Trellick Tower, above (quoted in Open University, 2001)

In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand (1994) contrasts ‘Low Road’ architecture designed to permit adaptation by users, with visionary ‘High Road’ architectural plans which seek to define at the design stage the future behaviour and lifestyles of buildings’ users. High Road plans often ‘fail’ in this sense, unable to anticipate future needs or usage patterns (as Ittelson et al (1974, p. 357) put it, “we are all living in the relics of the past”), while Low Road architecture can cope with changing requirements, appropriation (Salovaara, 2008) and emergent behaviour. The stereotype of architect as a ‘High Road’ planner—perhaps living in the penthouse at the top of the tower block he has designed—resonates in both fact (e.g. Ernő Goldfinger’s comment quoted above) and fiction (e.g. Anthony Royal in J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975).*

The parallels of the the High/Low Road approaches with the design and use of other systems—in particular software, but perhaps also economic and political systems in general—are evident throughout Brand’s book, although never explicitly stated as such; there are also parallels in planning at a level above that of buildings themselves, such as the clash in New York (Flint, 2009) between the bottom-up approach to urbanism favoured by Jacobs (1961) and the top-down approach of Robert Moses. While it will unfortunately not be considered in detail in this thesis, the emerging power of ubiquitous computing, when integrated intelligently into physical space—”city as operating system” (Gittins, 2007)—could permit a kind of Low Road ‘read/write urbanism’ (Greenfield & Shepard, 2007) in which the ‘city users’ themselves are able to augment and alter the meanings, affordances and even fabrics of their surroundings.

A desire path or cowpath is forming across this grass area in the John Crank memorial garden, Brunel University…

One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) also discuss Chicago transportation engineers’ use of ‘desire lines’ to describe maps of straight-line origin-to-destination journeys across the city, in the process revealing assumptions about the public’s ‘desire’ to undertake these journeys. In either sense, desire lines (along with use-marks (Burns, 2007)) could perhaps, using economic terminology, be seen as a form of revealed user preference (Beshears et al, 2008) or at least revealed choice, with a substantial normative quality.

As such, there is potential for observing the formation of desire lines and then ‘codifying’ them in order to provide paths that users actually need, rather than what is assumed they will need. As Myhill (2004) puts it, “[a]n optimal way to design pathways in accordance with natural human behaviour, is to not design them at all. Simply plant grass seed and let the erosion inform you about where the paths need to be. Stories abound of university campuses being constructed without any pathways to them.” Myhill goes on to suggest that companies which apply this idea in the design of goods and services, designing systems to permit desire lines to emerge and then paying attention to them, will succeed in a process of ‘Normanian Natural Selection’ (after Don Norman’s work).

…whereas this one has been ‘paved’ after pedestrians wore a definite path.

In human-computer interaction, this principle has become known as ‘Pave the cowpaths’—“look where the paths are already being formed by behavior and then formalize them, rather than creating some kind of idealized path structure that ignores history and tradition and human nature and geometry and ergonomics and common sense” (Crumlish & Malone, 2009, p.17). Particularly with websites, analytics software can take the place of the worn grass, and in the process reveal extra data such as demographic information about users, and more about their actual desires or intention in engaging in the process (e.g. Google is a “database of intentions”, according to Battelle (2003)). This allows clustering of behaviour paths and even investigation of users’ mental models of site structure. The counter-argument is that blindly paving cowpaths can enshrine inefficient behaviours in the longer-term, locking users and organisations into particular ways of doing things which were never optimal in the first place (Arace, 2006)—form freezing function, to paraphrase Stewart Brand (1994, p.157).

From the point of view of influencing behaviour rather than simply reflecting it, the principle of paving the cowpaths could be applied strategically: identify the desire lines and paths of particular users—perhaps a group which is already performing the desired behaviour—and then, by formalising this, making it easier or more salient or in some way obviously normative, encourage other users to follow suit.

*It is worth differentiating, though, between a visionary approach which considers human behaviour and sets out to change it, and the approach attributed to some other treatments of the ‘visionary architect’ personality, in which human behaviour is simply ignored or relegated as being secondary to the vision of the building itself. In fiction, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark (in The Fountainhead, 1943) is perhaps an archetype; Sommer’s architect who “learns to look at buildings without people in them” quoted above is perhaps based on real instances of this approach.

The ticket hall of Stratford City railway station, London, with Westfield logo and the Olympic Athletes’ Village under construction in the background, March 2010

The politics of architecture, power and control

“I was aware that I could be watched from above…and that it was possible to go much higher—to become one of the watchers—but I didn’t see how it could be done. The architecture embodied a political message: There are people higher than you, and they can watch you, follow you—and, theoretically, you can join them, become one of them. Unfortunately you don’t know how.”
Geoff Manaugh, The BLDG BLOG Book (2009, p.17)

Architecture can serve as a regulatory force (Shah and Kesan, 2007) and has been used to influence and control public behaviour through embodying power in a number of ways. Direct use of architecture to change the economic or demographic make-up of areas ranges from policies of shopping centres and Business Improvement Districts to shift the social class of visitors to an area* (Minton, 2009), to Depression-era Tennessee Valley Authority’s mandate to revitalise impoverished areas through massive development programmes (Culvahouse, 2007), to government-driven use of settlements to occupy or colonise territories. In this latter context, Segal and Weizman (2003, p. 19), referring to Israel, comment that “[i]n an environment where architecture and planning are systematically instrumentalized… planning decisions do not often follow criteria of economic sustainability, ecology or efficiency of services, but are rather employed to serve strategic and political agendas”.

Vale (2008) discusses Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 layout of Washington, DC, often seen as physically reifying the ‘separation of powers’ principle contained in the US Constitution, by separating the buildings housing the branches of government, although Vale notes that L’Enfant does not explicitly mention this as his intention. Along perhaps similar lines, Stewart Brand (1994, p.3) mentions Churchill’s 1943 request that “the bomb-damaged Parliament be rebuilt exactly as it was before… It was to the good, he insisted, that the [House of Commons] Chamber was too small to seat all the members (so great occasions were standing-room occasions), and that its shape forced members to sit on either one side or the other, unambiguously of one party or the other.” Indeed, Churchill’s ‘crossing the floor’ in 1904 (and again in the 1920s) perhaps relied on the physical layout of the chamber for its impact. Ittelson et al (1974, p.139) also note that “[t]he eight months of deliberations in 1969, preceding the Paris Peace Talks, were largely centered on the issue of the shape of the table to be used in the negotiations.”

Internal building layouts are analysed for their ‘power’ implications by Dovey (2008), who uses a system of ‘space syntax analysis’ developed by Hillier and Hanson (1984) to examine diverse buildings such as Albert Speer’s Berlin Chancellery, the Forbidden City of Beijing, and the Metro Centre shopping mall in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. One recurring pattern in political buildings is the intentional use of something similar to what Alexander et al (1977, p.610), in a different context, call ‘intimacy of gradient’—a “diplomatic promenade” (Dovey, 2008, p. 65) selectively revealing a sequence of anterooms to visitors, their permitted progress through the structure (the deepest level being the president or monarch’s private study) calculated both to reflect their status and instil the requisite level of awe. Nicoletta (2003) looks at the use of architecture to exert social control in Shaker dwelling houses, e.g. the use of separate entrances and staircases for men and women, and the lack of routes through the house which did not result in observation by other members of the family.

City layouts have been used strategically to try to prevent disorder and make it easier to put down. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s “militaristically planned Paris” (Hatherley, 2008, p. 11), remodelled for Louis Napoléon (later Napoléon III) after 1848, had “[t]he true goal of…secur[ing] the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time… Widening the streets is designed to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the barracks and the workers’ districts.” (Benjamin, 1935/1999, p. 12). The Haussmann project also involved “the planning of straight avenues as a method of crowd control (artillery could fire down them at barricaded masses)” (Rykwert, 2000, p.91). Scott (1998, p.59) likens the “logic behind the reconstruction of Paris” to the process of transforming old-growth forests into “scientific forests designed for unitary fiscal management”—part of which involves, as Scott emphasies throughout his book Seeing Like a State, the idea of making a space (and the people in it) legible to whoever is in power by removing or simplifying inconsistencies, anomalies and local practices to ‘tame’ potentially dangerous ceintures sauvages. Legibility affords measurement and standardisation, and these (from Domesday Book to the standardisation of surnames, to biometric IDs) afford modelling, regulation and control. Drawing on Hacking (1990), Scott (1998, p.92) suggests that it is “but a small step from a simplified description of society to a design and manipulation of society, with improvement in mind. If one could reshape nature to design a more suitable forest, why not reshape society to create a more suitable population?”

Returning to the specifics of architectural schemes, New York ‘master builder’ Robert Moses’ low parkway bridges on Long Island are often mentioned in a similar vein to Haussmann’s Paris (Caro, 1975; Winner, 1986). These had the effect of preventing buses (and by implication poorer people, often minorities) using the parkways to visit the Jones Beach State Park—another of Moses’ projects. However, Joerges (1999) questions details of the intentionality involved, suggesting that the story as presented by Winner is more of a parable (Gillespie, 2007, p. 72) about the embodiment of politics in artefacts—an exhortation to recognise that “specific features in the design or arrangement of a device or system could provide a convenient means of establishing patterns of power and authority in a given setting,” (Winner, 1986)—than a real example of architecture being used intentionally to discriminate against certain groups (see also the forthcoming blog post ‘POSIWID and determinism’). Nevertheless, Flint (2009, p.44) suggests in his book on Jane Jacobs’ battles with Moses over New York planning, that, at least in his earlier years, “Moses strove to model himself after Baron Haussmann”.

*Minton (2009, p.45) interviews a Business Improvement District manager in the UK who tells her explicitly that “High margins come with ABC1s, low margins with C2DEs. My job is to create an environment which will bring in more ABC1s.”

‘Pig ear’ skate stoppers near City Hall, London

Disciplinary architecture and design against crime

“Where the homeless are ejected from business and retail areas by such measures as curved bus benches, window-ledge spikes and doorway sprinkler systems, so skaters encounter rough-textured surfaces, spikes and bumps added to handrails, blocks of concrete placed at the foot of banks, chains across ditches and steps, and new, unridable surfaces such as gravel and sand.”
Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (2001, p.254)

Perhaps difficult to extract from the political dimension of architecture is the notion of disciplinary architecture, covering everything from designed measures such as anti-homeless park benches to prison design, via Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1787) and Foucault’s ‘technologies of punishment’ (1977). Howell (2001) notes that this is often framed as ‘defending’ the general public against ‘undesirable’ behaviour by other members of the public—in this particular case again, measures to make skateboarding more difficult. Similar measures may be installed by members of the public to defend their own properties: Flusty (1997, p. 48) classifies “five species” of “interdictory spaces—spaces designed to intercept and repel or filter would-be users”, many of which occur frequently in residential contexts as well as public spaces: stealthy space—areas which have been deliberately concealed from general view; slippery space—spaces with no apparent means of approach; crusty space—space that cannot be accessed because of obstructions; prickly space—space which cannot be occupied comfortably due to measures inhibiting walking, sitting or standing; and jittery space—space which is constantly under surveillance (or threatened surveillance). Some of the ways of achieving these species of space will be familiar from other examples discussed in this thesis, particularly prickly space.

Prikka strips, a popular brand of add-on DIY plastic spikes for your wall.

‘Design against crime’ has recently received significant attention in the UK via initiatives such as the Design Against Crime Research Centre at Central Saint Martins (e.g. Ekblom, 1997; Gamman & Pascoe, 2004; Gamman & Thorpe, 2007) whose work has addressed some high-profile areas such as bicycle theft and bag theft in restaurants and bars (AHRC, 2008) through innovative product design interventions taking account of the environmental contexts in which crimes occur. While the focus may be on ‘better’ products (as was a much earlier programme by the Design Council focusing on design against vandalism (Sykes, 1979)), the parallel field of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) has developed from the early 1970s to date, focusing on redesigning architectural elements to discourage particular behaviours. In the UK, compliance with an Association of Chief Police Officers’ CPTED initiative, ‘Secured by Design’—run by ACPO Crime Prevention Initiatives Ltd—has, according to Minton (2009, p.71), become a condition of planning permission for some large residential developments, leading to the situation where new estates are required to be “surrounded by walls with sharp steel pins or broken glass on top of them, CCTV and only one gate into the estate.”

Crowe (2000) provides a practical guide to implementing CPTED with diagrams and ‘design directives’ for a wide variety of spaces, including schools and student residences. Poyner (1983), in a guide which is effectively A Pattern Language for CPTED, outlines 31 patterns addressing different types of crime in different settings—for example, “4.7 Access to rear of house: There should be no open access from the front to the rear of a house. Access might be restricted to full-height locked gates,” addresses burglary and break-ins. Many of Poyner’s patterns make use of the principle of natural surveillance, described in Oscar Newman’s influential book Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City* (1972). Natural surveillance implies designing spaces to afford “surveillance opportunities for residents and their agents” (Newman, 1972, p. 78)—effectively, designing environments so that building users are able to observe others’ activities when outside the home, and feel observed themselves (a concept which, applied in the wider context of digital communications and social media, might be termed peerveillance**). There should be parallels with Jacobs’ (1961) concept of ‘eyes on the street’—although as Minton (2009) points out, implementing natural surveillance via enclosed, gated communities where strangers will necessarily stand out means that the residents can become isolated, targets even for burglars who know that it is unlikely there will be any passers-by (or even passing police) to see their activities.

Katyal (2002) provides a comprehensive academic review of ‘Architecture as Crime Control’, addressed to a legal and social policy-maker audience, but also interesting because of a follow-up article taking the same approach to examine digital architecture (see future article). One point to which Katyal repeatedly returns is the concept of architectural solutions as entities which subtly reinforce or embody social norms (desirable ones, from the point of view of law enforcement) rather than necessarily enforce them: “Even the best social codes are quite useless if it is impossible to observe whether people comply with them. Architecture, by facilitating interaction and monitoring by members of a community, permits social norms to have greater impact. In this way, the power of architecture to influence social norms can even eclipse that of law, for law faces obvious difficulties when it attempts to regulate social interaction directly” (Katyal, 2002, p. 1075).

*‘Defensible space’ covers “restructur[ing] the physical layout of communities to allow residents to control the areas around their homes.” (Newman, 1996)
**The author used ‘Peerveillance’ for a pattern based on this concept in DwI v.1.0, at the time (March 2010) finding only one previous use of the term, on Twitter, by Alex Halavais. As of May 2011, the tweet is no longer findable via either Twitter or Google searches.

Implications for designers

▶ Designed environments influence people’s behaviour in a variety of ways, and some have been designed expressly with this intention, often for political or crime prevention reasons

▶ This can range from high-level visions of influencing wider social or community behaviours, to very specific techniques applied to influence particular behaviours in a particular context; the use of patterns facilitates re-use of techniques wherever a similar problem recurs

▶ Most patterns involve either the physical arrangement of building elements—positioning, angling, splitting up, hiding, etc—or a change in material properties, either to change people’s perceptions of what behaviour is possible or appropriate, perhaps by reinforcing or embodying social norms, or to force certain behaviour to occur or not occur

▶ There are also patterns around aspects of surveillance—designing layouts which facilitate or prevent visibility of activity between groups of people

▶ In practice, patterns may be applied in combination to create different kinds of space with different effects on behaviour

▶ There is potential for ‘paving the cowpaths’ strategically through design, identifying the paths of particular users—perhaps a group which is already performing the desired behaviour—and then, by formalising this, making it easier or more salient or in some way obviously normative, encourage other users to follow suit

▶ By affecting so completely the way in which people spend their lives, political or police attempts to control behaviour through the design of environments can be controversial

▶ Some concepts related to influencing behaviour in the built environment may be transposed to other designed systems and contexts

References

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Reminiscent of a scene from Ballard’s Super-Cannes, the Philips High Tech Campus also includes this lake and boardwalk, perhaps affording breakout meetings and secret discussions away from the earshot of office colleagues, although in full view of the surrounding buildings.

A couple of weeks ago, at dConstruct 2011 in Brighton, 15 brave participants took part in my full-day workshop ‘Influencing behaviour: people, products, services and systems’, with which I was very kindly assisted by Sadhna Jain from Central Saint Martins. As a reference for the people who took part, for me, and for anyone else who might be intrigued, I thought I would write up what we did. The conference itself was extremely interesting, as usual, with a few talks which provoked more discussion than others, as much about presentation style as content, I think (others have covered the conference better than I can). And, of course, I met (and re-connected with) some brilliant people.

I’ve run quite a few workshops in both corporate and educational settings using the Design with Intent cards or worksheets (now also available as a free iPad app from James Christie) but this workshop aimed to look more broadly at how designers can understand and influence people’s behaviour. This is also the first ‘public’ workshop that I’ve done under the Requisite Variety name, which doesn’t mean much different in practice, but is something of a milestone for me as a freelancer.

In the previous post I outlined what I had planned, and while in the event the programme deviated somewhat from this, I think overall it was reasonably successful. Rather than using a case study (I feel uneasy, when people are paying to come to a workshop, to ask them effectively to do work for someone else) we ran through a series of exercises intended to explore different aspects of how design and people’s behaviour relate to each other, and perhaps uncover some insights which would make it easier to incorporate a consideration of this into a design process.

Heuristics and decision-making exercise

After a brief introduction to how design has been and is being used to influence people’s behaviour, we ran through a few questions together intended to explore the idea of heuristics and biases in decision-making. Some questions addressed ‘classic’ behavioural economics issues such as sunk costs, loss aversion and recency/primacy effects—which can all affect users’ interaction with a system. Drawing on the project around energy use in which I’m currently involved with More Associates, we also looked at some heuristics issues relating to users’ interaction with systems across physical/digital interfaces, such as whether the salience of ‘visible’ things such as lighting leads people to overestimate how much energy they use compared with ‘invisible’ systems such as heating and air-conditioning. We briefly looked at anchoring effects and how menu designers use them, and discussed the potential upside of certain heuristics in certain circumstances, such as Gerd Gigerenzer’s ‘fast and frugal’ heuristic [PDF], and how thinking along these lines might result in more intuitive interfaces.

The main insights from this first session were:

• people use heuristics—sets of simple decision-making rules—to work out what to do in different situations, including using products and services

• they’re often relatively sensible and efficient, based on experience and pattern recognition, but can sometimes lead to biases and poor decisions

• so, understanding the heuristics your users use in making decisions about how to interact with your system is important, especially if you’re seeking to influence their behaviour in some way

Black boxes and mental models

Each group received a ‘black box’, an unknown electronic device with an unlabelled interface of buttons, ‘volume’ controls and LEDs. The boxes were children’s lunchboxes from Poundland. Internally—and thus secretly—each box also contained a wireless transmitter, receiver, sound chip and speaker (basically, a wireless doorbell), and in one box, an additional combined buzzer and klaxon. The aim was to work out what was going on—what did the controls do?—and record your group’s model of how the system worked in some form that could explain it to a new user who hadn’t been able to experiment with the device.

Because of the hidden functionality, the boxes’ operation was more complex than might initially have been apparent, and as it was realised that the boxes ‘interacted’ with each other, by setting off sounds in response to particular button-presses, the models generated by groups became more complex. Each group used slightly different methods to investigate and illustrate the system model—an exhaustive kind of state transition table/truth table, a user manual-style annotated diagram of the device, and a diagram focusing on each button or control in turn and elaborating its function. The investigation methods themselves differed slightly, with unexpected behaviour or coincidences (one group’s box setting off the doorbell in another, but coinciding with a button being pressed or a volume control being turned) leading to some rapidly escalating complex models.

The intended outcomes from this session were:

• trying to understand a new or unknown device essentially involves a user applying a number of heuristics to arrive at a mental model which seems OK, or satisfices

• representing and understanding models of system behaviour is difficult if you haven’t done it before, and there’s no universally agreed way of how best to do it to make sense to users

• models of complex systems may need to take into account the behaviour (or effects on) other actors, systems or contexts: very little in the world works entirely in isolation, and a systems approach to understanding technology needs to recognise the effects it has on society, and society on it

These three photos above by Sadhna Jain

Rules of interaction

Inspired by ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing and Eric Berne’s Games People Play, this exercise involved, in pairs, each person playing the role of either ‘device’ or ‘user’. Facing each other via a ‘screen’ made out of card, and each having a bowl of mixed sweets and toffees, each person picked up a (randomly drawn) set of rules for how to interact with the other—both an objective and a strategy for how to achieve it. The device’s objectives all involved ‘behaviour change’ in some way. The full list of objectives and strategies was as follows:

Device: Objectives
• Try to get all of a particular kind of sweet from the user—for example, all of the shiny-wrappered toffees.
• Try to get the user to eat as many sweets as possible—they can be yours or his/hers.
• Try to get the user not to eat any sweets at all.
• Try to get the user to get up and give his or her sweets to another user somewhere else in the room.

Device: Strategies
• Ignore the user’s understanding or attempts to engage with the situation. Don’t answer any questions, ignore everything the user says, and just keep demanding what you want to try to achieve your objective
• Ask questions to try to understand the user’s perspective, and try to come to an agreement which brings you both closer to your objectives.
• Try to trick the user somehow, e.g. by lying about what you’re trying to achieve
• Try to persuade the user to comply with your objective, by using reasoned, polite arguments to show that you are right.
• Assume the user just wants everything done as quickly and easily as possible, and emphasise that it’s easy to achieve that by doing what you say.
• Assume the user is very greedy, and will readily give up some sweets in return for ones he/she perceives as better. Make them seem desirable.

User: Objectives
• You want to keep as many as possible of your sweets, while acquiring the ones the device has got.
• You don’t want any of your sweets, but you do want the ones the device has got.
• You only want certain types of sweet (e.g. you want only ones with shiny wrappers).
• You want to find out more about the pros and cons of eating sweets, and you expect the device to tell you.

User: Strategies
• You just want things to be as easy as possible. Accept suggestions from the device as long as they’re reasonable.
• Ask lots of questions of the device. You want to understand and find out more about the options available to you, whatever they might be.
• Be open to trading / swapping sweets with the device, but don’t let it get the better of you.
• The device is your servant. Treat it accordingly.

The combination of objectives and strategies was intended to embody ‘assumptions’ about how the other (user or device) would act—in each case, to some extent a mental model of the system and the behaviour of its components. A device which, for example, assumes that “the user just wants everything done as quickly and easily as possible” is embodying a certain ‘designer’s model’ of how the user thinks and will behave.

When the interaction was ‘run’, some pairs quickly arrived at a negotiated result where both were happy, in the sense of their objectives and strategies being mutually compatible, while others reached a kind of stalemate. In at least one case, the device ‘won’ in persuading a user to give up her sweets against her own objectives. In practice, some pairs told each other what their objectives and strategies were, while others kept this secret; some possible lied about their objectives, consistent with the strategies given. Sometimes one person told the other his or her objectives, but the other ignored this (as per the strategy given). Some of the combinations were expected to lead to a degree of recursive second-guessing (the user assuming that the device is assuming that the user is assuming…) or knots, using R.D. Laing’s terminology, although it seems that the workshop participants were too sensible to let this happen!

The intended insights from this exercise were:

• when designers are trying to influence users’ behaviour, they do so with some model embodying assumptions about how users will behave and react to the way the product or service behaves (this is something we explored briefly in a workshop at UX London in 2010, which led to this paper and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Design Research)

• a product or service influencing a user’s behaviour can work best when the objectives of each side and the designer’s and user’s model of the system are compatible

• so, it is important to:
    • try to understand the models that users have of your system
    • design using strategies that match them

Exploring the environment

In the afternoon, we first went on a quick exploratory tour of streets around the workshop venue in the centre of Brighton, looking at some examples of designed situations or ‘interventions’ which aim to influence public behaviour in some way. (My direct inspiration here was Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim’s excellent Systems/Layers Walkshop concept.) The main examples we examined and discussed were the (remains of the) Tidy Street energy graph, a CCTV camera on a tall pole with anti-climb spikes in the heart of one of the most ‘liberal’ towns in the UK, a ‘Scores on the Doors’ food hygiene rating scheme using stickers on the doors of restaurants and cafes, the conflicts between pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in shopping streets which may appear pedestrianised but aren’t (neatly illustrated by an irate driver shouting at us), and a touchscreen cider advertisement at a bus stop, which invites the public to rearrange ‘fridge magnet’ words to create a limited set of mostly positive messages about the cider which are then apparently submitted to the brand’s Facebook page.

In each case, the aim was to look at the situation from both the designers’ and the users’ points of view: what assumptions do the designers appear to have made about how the public will understand or interact with the product/service/thing? What behaviours are they trying to influence? What is the result? Who are the stakeholders in each situation? Are the designers aiming to target everyone, or only particular groups? (e.g., by asking an older lady waiting at the bus stop about the interactive touchscreen advert, we found that she had no idea that it was anything more than a static ad.) From a design perspective, what kind of research would need to be done to make the interventions more effective? We also considered briefly whether some of the techniques used might translate into other contexts—e.g., could the Tidy Street idea be applied to other statistics or figures in public space? (Marking crime hotspots was suggested.) Which sorts of physical interventions might translate easily into a digital context, and vice-versa?

Tools and processes exercise

Returning to the workshop venue, we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the processes that each participant uses to research, design and evaluate whatever it is that he or she does, and through discussion together, identify how explicit consideration of user behaviour, mental models and heuristics might be incorporated if influencing behaviour is to be part of the designer’s brief. What tools do people use to incorporate insights from user research into the design process? What assumptions are made about how users think, and how are these assumptions tested? The thinking here was that not only did we have a room full of very experienced people working in a range of digital and other design disciplines, but that they all used slightly different processes, and some cross-pollination between that expertise might be valuable for everyone involved.

In particular, the issue of how the use of personas relates to understanding (and influencing) user behaviour arose from the discussion, since a number of participants’ processes make use of them: some of the main points raised were:

• How much determinism is inherent in rigid use of personas, designing with particular assumptions in mind about how people behave? Is there retrofitting of finished product behaviour to particular persona assumptions?

• The depth or superficiality of personas: do they include any real consideration of behaviour? Has any attempt been made to include a representation of users’ mental models as part of the persona? How might this be done?

• How fixed are personas? How often are they revised? Is there a feedback loop as part of your design process? Could you plan it to incorporate them? Can gathering behavioural data be designed into the product?

• How are edge cases / troublemakers / extreme users included in your personas?

• What about emergent or unexpected behaviours? Can the personas cope with these? How do you even find out what behaviours are emerging?

• Do your personas incorporate a treatment of the history and future relationship of the individual with the product / service / brand? What might this involve if you took changes in behaviour into account?

There were some great anecdotes about personas which I’d probably better not share as they’ll incriminate the participants, but the point to which much of this discussion seemed to be converging was essentially, what might a behavioural persona look like? Could personas even be defined in terms of mental models (“this is how a user with this mental model might behave”)?

Some other points raised in the discussion included:

• How might cultural probes and story construction be used to explore behavioural factors?

• Are different approaches to behaviour used at different levels of the design process? Are assumptions made at once stage which have to be ignored at another?

• Could there be a kind of cross-disciplinary checklist of heuristics or behavioural considerations to address at different stages?

• How much can the designers question the assumptions about users made by a client?

• Is bringing in external specialists such as ethnographers the best way to investigate user behaviour or could the ability be developed by the design team?

• In some cases, designers know exactly who their users are (e.g. for developing products used internally within a company). Could this be extended to consumer products?

• Is it possible for designers to experience products from a user’s point of view? How could you facilitate this?

In summary, then, the last session tried to look at how a treatment of behaviour, the factors affecting it, and how to influence it, might be built into the design processes that organisations currently use. While the Design with Intent toolkit and other great resources such as the Behavior Wizard, Mental Notes or Brains, Behavior and Design seem to have proved useful to many designers facing ‘behavioural’ briefs, I’m under no illusions that they offer a complete process. They don’t: they need proper research with users, to understand the contexts of behaviour and the ways that decisions are made, before trying to influence that behaviour through design. As the ‘Rules of interaction’ exercise demonstrated very simply, when the designer’s and user’s strategies and objectives aren’t aligned, behaviour is unlikely to change in the way the designer intends.

More photos on Flickr.

Thanks to Andy Budd and Kate Bulpitt at Clearleft for inviting me and organising things so well respectively, and to Sadhna Jain for helping out. Do have a look at some of her recent student projects. And thanks too to the participants for being so enthusiastic about what , on the face of it, might have seemed a rag-bag collection of exercises!

Photo by Sadhna Jain

I’m running a workshop on Wednesday 31st August at dConstruct 2011 in Brighton, and I thought it would be worthwhile explaining in a bit more detail what it’s about, and what we’ll be doing.

Here’s the summary from the dConstruct website:

 

Whether we choose to do it or not, what we design is going to affect how users behave, so we might as well think about it, and—if we can—actually get good at it. Bridging the gap between physical and digital product design, a systems approach can help us understand how people interact with the different touchpoints they experience, how mental models and cognitive biases and heuristics influence the way people make decisions about what to do, and hence how we might apply that knowledge (for good).

In this full-day practical workshop, we’ll try a novel approach to design and behaviour, using ourselves as both designers and cybernetic guinea pigs in exploring and developing a combination of physical and digital experiences. You’ll learn how to improve your own decision-making and understanding of how your behaviour is influenced by the systems around you, as well as ways to influence others’ behaviour, through a new approach to designing at the intersection of people, products, services and systems.
 

So what will the day actually involve? (You’re entitled to ask: the above is admittedly vague.) I’ve run quite a lot of workshops in the last couple of years, mainly using the Design with Intent toolkit in one form or another to help groups generate concepts for specific behaviour change contexts, but this one is slightly different, taking advantage of a full day to explore more areas of how design and behaviour interact, in a way which I hope complements dConstruct’s overall theme this year of “bridging the gap between physical and digital product design” usefully and interestingly. Also, the concept of ‘design for behaviour change’ is probably no longer new and exciting (at least to the dConstruct audience) in quite the way it might have been a few years ago: a more nuanced, developed, thoughtful exploration is needed. We’ll be using some of the Design with Intent cards throughout the workshop, but they’re not the main focus.

My plan is for the workshop to have four stages (3 shorter ones in the morning, 1 longer one for the afternoon):

1) Exploring cognitive biases, heuristics and bounded rationality in a design context

Through a short group exercise, we’ll investigate our own decision-making and thought processes—biases and heuristics which might mislead us, but which can also help us, in the context of using products and services (and how we assume users may use them). This section attempts to translate ideas which may be familiar from behavioural economics—Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler, Sunstein, Ariely and others—into technology applications, but also includes the work of people such as Gigerenzer and Goldstein, taking a different perspective on the idea of ‘bounded rationality’ and what it might mean when understanding how people really interact with products and services.

2) Black boxes, cybernetics and users’ mental models of systems

I’m not going to give too many details of this stage, since it’ll spoil the surprise. But (in groups) we’ll be trying to work out what’s going on with a set of unknown products—how they work, and how our behaviour (as users) affects what happens as part of a wider system. There will be breadboards, and LEDs, and cardboard boxes (probably not black), and maybe unexpected things. And Post-It notes, I expect.

3) Designers’ mental models of people’s behaviour

Again, I don’t want to give away too much here, but imagine a cross between a Wizard of Oz experiment, metagames, and some of the ideas discussed here. Basically, in pairs we’ll be playing users and products/services intended to influence behaviour, following our own strategies and seeing what happens. The outcomes of this will be compared (in structure if not in content) to some of R D Laing’s Knots, not to complicate them further(!) but to link them back to the systems/cybernetics perspective which emerged from 2).

4) Prototyping tools for understanding users and influencing behaviour

In the afternoon, the aim is—building on the insights from the morning—to create and develop tools for uncovering and understanding how users think and behave (and match these to design strategies), in a system context. We will have a ‘behaviour’ scenario to investigate, and the scope to examine it from different perspectives. Hopefully this will take in the existing knowledge and expertise some participants will have on user research methods, and build on this with some more explicitly behaviour-related insights. The result will be a set of methods and approaches which ought to be useful and applicable outside the workshop wherever understanding and influencing user behaviour, as part of a system, is needed, and which participants have played a part in creating. These will be documented so you’ll have something after the event as a reference.

If all that sounds like the sort of thing you’d find useful and interesting, there are still (at time of writing) a few workshop tickets available, which also get you into the conference. The workshop takes place at Clearleft’s offices at 28 Kensington Street, Brighton. Any questions / suggestions / ideas please do comment below.

Thanks to Clearleft for organising the conference—it’s been great the last couple of years, and I feel privileged to be part of it this year.

PS: Brighton Dome are right to ask you not to sit on the radiators, really. They’re old, and beautiful.

In a meta-auto-behaviour-change effort both to keep me motivated during a very protracted PhD write-up and demonstrate that the end is in sight, I’m going to be publishing a few extracts from my thesis (mostly from the literature review, and before any rigorous editing) as blog posts over the next few weeks. It would be nice to think they might also be interesting brief articles in their own right, but the style is not necessarily blog-like, and some of the graphics and tables are ugly.

“It is now clear that we must take into account what the environment does to an organism not only before but after it responds. Behaviour is shaped and maintained by its consequences… It is true that man’s genetic endowment can be changed only very slowly, but changes in the environment of the individual have quick and dramatic effects.”
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971, p.24

Behaviourism as a psychological approach is based on empirical observation of human (and animal) behaviour—stimuli in the environment, and the behavioural responses which follow—and attempts in turn to apply stimuli to provoke desired responses. John B. Watson (1913, p.158), in laying out the behaviourist viewpoint, reacted against the then-current focus by Freud and others on unobservable concepts such as the processes of the mind: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it… [has as its] theoretical goal…the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness”.

Classical and operant conditioning

In an engineering sense, Watson’s behaviourism perhaps treats animals and humans as black boxes* (Sparks, 1982), whose truth tables can be elicited by comparing inputs (stimuli) and outputs (responses), without any attempt to model the internal logic of the system—an approach which Chomsky (1971) criticises. As Koestler (1967, p.19) put it—also heavily criticising the behaviourist view—“[s]ince all mental events are private events which cannot be observed by others, and which can only be made public through statements based on introspection, they had to be excluded from the domain of science.” However, learning (via conditioning) is inherent to behaviourism—both Watson’s and the later perspective of Skinner—which means that the black box is somewhat more complex than a component with fixed behaviour. Classical or respondent conditioning, of the kind explored with dogs by Pavlov (1927)—and often applied in behaviour change methods such as aversion therapy (as for example, the ‘Ludovico technique’ in Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962))—repeatedly pairs two stimuli so that the reflex behaviour provoked by one also becomes provoked by the other.

Operant conditioning, as developed by B.F. Skinner (1953) via famous experiments with pigeons, rats and other animals, is essentially about consequences: it involves reinforcing (or punishing) certain behaviours (the operant) so that the animal (or person) becomes conditioned to behave in a particular way:

“When a bit of behaviour is followed by a certain kind of consequence, it is more likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer. Food, for example, is a reinforcer to a hungry organism; anything the organism does that is followed by the receipt of food is more likely to be done again whenever the organism is hungry. Some stimuli are called negative reinforcers: any response which reduces the intensity of such a stimulus—or ends it—is more likely to be emitted when the stimulus recurs. Thus, if a person escapes from a hot sun when he moves under cover, he is more likely to move under cover when the sun is again hot.” (Skinner, 1971, p.31-32)

It is important to note here that in Skinner’s terms, positive and negative reinforcement do not imply ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and negative reinforcement is a different concept to punishment. Positive reinforcement is giving a reward in return for particular behaviour; negative reinforcement is removing something unpleasant in return for particular behaviour. These are subtly different. Pryor (2002) gives the example of a car seatbelt warning buzzer as negative reinforcement—a device designed to be irritating or unpleasant enough to cause the user to take action to avoid it. We might consider that a recorded voice saying “Thank you” after the seatbelt is fastened could be a positive reinforcement alternative. Positive and negative punishment are essentially the inverse of each of these—a fine for not wearing a seatbelt while driving is a form of positive punishment, and taking away someone’s driving licence would be a form of negative punishment. Clicker training with animals such as dolphins and dogs (e.g. Pryor, 2002) arguably combines features of classical and operant conditioning, using an audible clicking device to help ‘mark’ particular behaviours immediately they occur, which can then be positively reinforced with treats—or the click itself can act as a reinforcer.

A major factor in operant conditioning is the schedule of reinforcement that occurs: variable schedules of reinforcement, where a reward occurs on an unpredictable schedule—either ratio (amount of behaviour required) or interval (time required)—can be particularly effective; as Skinner (1971, p. 39) notes, variable ratio scheduling is “at the heart of all gambling systems”. Pryor (2002, p. 22) comments that “[p]eople like to play slot machines precisely because there’s no predicting whether nothing will come out, or a little money, or a lot of money, or which time the reinforcer will come (it might be the very first time).” This principle is inherent in all games of chance—Schell (2008, p.153) recognises it as something a designer can work with explicitly: “a good game designer must become the master of chance and probability, sculpting it to his will, to create an experience that is always full of challenging decisions and interesting surprises.”

*A ‘black box’ approach to modelling human, animal and other system behaviour has also been discussed extensively within cybernetics, e.g. by Ashby (1956) and Bateson (1969).

Social traps

“Like their physical analogs, social traps are baited. The baits are the positive rewards which, through the mechanisms of learning, direct behavior along lines that seem right every step of the way but nevertheless end up at the wrong place. Complex patterns of reinforcement, motivation, and the structure of social situations can draw people into unpreferred modes of behavior, subjecting them to consequences that are not comprehended until it is too late to avoid them.”
Cross and Guyer, Social Traps, 1980, p.16-17

Platt (1973) and Cross and Guyer (1980) discuss ‘social traps’, situations in which there is both reinforcement which encourages a behaviour, but also a punishment or unpleasant consequences of some kind, affecting either the person involved or someone else, at some later point or in some other way. “The behavior that receives the green light becomes supplanted by or is accompanied by an unavoidable punishment…[C]igarette smoking provides a simple example: the gratification associated with smoking encourages future behavior of the same kind, while the painful illness associated with that same behavior does not occur until a point very distant in the future; and when, finally, the illness does occur, no behavioral adjustments exist that are sufficient to avoid it” (p.11-12). There are perhaps parallels with Bateson’s concept of the double bind (Bateson et al, 1956), in which a person is subject to conflicting ‘injunctions’ (reinforcers or punishments) about what ‘right’ behaviour is, with the result that whatever he or she does, will be wrong (and perhaps punished) according to one of the injunctions.

Countertraps—what Platt (1973) suggests might be called ‘social fences’—also exist, where people avoid a behaviour because of (fear of) punishment or undesirable consequences, even though the behaviour would have been desirable. Often the reinforcer is a short-term, local gain, whereas the punishment is a longer-term effect, perhaps affecting a wider group or area: Platt cites Hardin’s tragedy of the commons (1968) as a well-known example of social trap with worldwide social and environmental consequences. Costanza (1987) examines how different kinds of social traps are responsible for a range of environmental problems.

Cross and Guyer’s (1980) taxonomy of social traps is potentially interesting for two reasons from a design perspective, since (in common with some of the cognitive biases and heuristics to be discussed in a later post), design could seek to help users avoid such traps, by redesigning situations to avoid them (hence influencing behaviour), or in some way exploit the effects to influence behaviour, if they are useful in some other way. In Cross and Guyer’s taxonomy, there are five classes of trap (including countertraps), together with a ‘hybrid’ category for traps comprising more than one of the others: time-delay traps, where the time lag between a behaviour and a reinforcer is too high for it to be effective, e.g. “the high school dropout who, avoiding the present pain and unpleasantness of school, finds himself later lacking the education which could have prepared him for a more rewarding job” (p.21); ignorance traps, in which people fail to make use of generally available knowledge when making a decision, but simply rely on immediate reinforcers or superstitions; sliding reinforcer traps, “patterns of behavior [which] continue long after the circumstances under which that behavior was appropriate have ceased to be relevant, producing negative consequences that would have been avoided easily had the behavior stopped earlier… The trap occurs because the rewards establish a habit which persists in the succeeding period” (p.25); externality traps, where “the reinforcements that are relevant to the first individual may not coincide with the returns received by the second… If Peter spends five minutes in a cafeteria line choosing his dessert, he does not suffer for it, but all the people waiting behind him certainly do” (p. 28); and collective traps, which involve tragedy-of-the-commons-type externality traps, involving reinforcers or consequences for multiple participants based on behaviour by one or more.

Cross and Guyer (1980, p.35) suggest ‘ways out’ of the traps, including their ‘conversion’ into trade-offs, “presenting the individual with a set of reinforcers that occur in close proximity to the behavior in question and which closely match the actual reward and punishment patterns that underly [sic.] the situation. The trap then becomes a simple choice situation in which rational and learned behavior are coincident. In some cases—particularly those of time-delay traps—this might be accomplished simply by altering the timing of reinforcers somehow bringing the punishment or proxy for the punishment into closer proximity with its causative behavior.” This could well be the principle behind a design approach to removing social traps, although it relies on being able to determine the structure of reinforcers and punishments which are affecting current behaviour, and somehow redesigning them accordingly.

Means and ends

Studer (1970, p.114-6) discussed applying operant conditioning principles to the design of environments (such as buildings), by treating them as “learning systems arranged to bring about and maintain specified behavioral topographies…What operant findings suggest, among other things, is that events which have traditionally been regarded as the ends in the design process, e.g., pleasant, exciting, comfortable, the participant’s likes and dislikes, should be reclassified. They are not ends at all, but valuable means, which should be skillfully ordered to direct a more appropriate over-all behavioral texture.”

Reconsidering means and ends in this way may provide a useful alternative perspective on design for behaviour change. What may be an end from the user’s perspective (some kind of reward for turning off unnecessary equipment, perhaps) effectively becomes the means by which the designer’s end (the user turns off unnecessary equipment) might be influenced. The designer’s intended end is the user’s means for achieving the user’s intended end (Figure 1). If the end the user desires can be aligned with the means available to the designer, then the behaviour is reinforced. The mapping between ends and means (in both directions) may not seem to be one-to-one on first inspection. For example, the user’s end probably reflects an underlying need—not examined further in a behaviourist context—and likewise with the designer’s end. ‘Receiving feedback on my energy use in the office’—a favourite designer’s means for influencing reduced energy use—is probably rarely expressed as a desired end from a user’s point of view, but if successful at reinforcing conservation behaviour, it presumably fulfils some underlying psychological needs.

Figure 1. The designer’s end and user’s means may be seen as reflections of each other, and likewise with the designer’s means and user’s end. Based on ideas from Studer (1970).

As an informal warm-up exercise in a workshop run at the Persuasive 2010 conference in Copenhagen, the author asked participants (designers and others involved with planning persuasive technology interventions) to map some intended ends relating to socially beneficial behaviour change, and some of the means they could think of to achieve them (Figure 2), using the labels ‘People will do this…’ and ‘…if our design does this’ for ends and means respectively.

Viewing the designer’s means from the user’s point of view, as an end, sometimes involves the end being avoiding something rather than receiving something—i.e. negative reinforcement. It is debatable whether this has much value beyond being simply a warm-up exercise, but it does encourage designers to think about trying to align the ends desired by the user with the means available to the designer. Weinschenk (2011, p.120), in appealing to (mainly web) designers to consider operant conditioning as a strategy for influencing behaviour, asks, “Hungry rats want food pellets. What does your particular audience really want?”

Figure 2. Some means-end pairings suggested by workshop participants in Copenhagen.

Impact of behaviourism

Despite many of behaviourism’s principles having been adopted in other fields—not just animal training but therapeutic applications (e.g. with autism), athletic training, programmed learning via ‘teaching machines’ (e.g. Kay et al, 1968), to the emerging self-help industry (Rutherford, 2009)—it was largely supplanted in the mainstream of academic psychology by the ‘cognitive revolution’ (e.g. Crowther-Heyck, 2005), re-emphasising cognition as something to be understood as a determinant of behaviour. Pask (1969, p.21) refers to “the arid conflict between behaviourism and mentalism,” while Ericsson and Simon (1985, p.1) suggest that “[a]fter a long period of time during which stimulus-response relations were at the focus of attention, research in psychology is now seeking to understand in detail the mechanisms and internal structure of cognitive processes that produce these relations.” Images of Skinner-like scientist figures peering at rats pressing levers to obtain food, with the implication that this was what was proposed for humanity, to some extent cast a shadow of ‘the psychologist as manipulator’ over subsequent work on behaviour change—as Pryor (2002, p. xiii) notes, “to people schooled in the humanistic tradition, the manipulation of human behavior by some sort of conscious technique seems incorrigibly wicked.” Winter and Koger (2004, p.116) suggest that “[s]inister motives are attributed to those who would implement behavioral technology, and Skinner himself has been badly misrepresented and misunderstood as a cold, cruel scientist”.

Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), which proposed a new society—“the design of a culture” based on a scientifically refined “technology of behaviour” reinforcing only behaviours which were beneficial to humanity, many of which were essentially about ensuring environmental sustainability—was widely read as promoting a totalitarian future. Chomsky (1971) suggested that “there is nothing in Skinner’s approach that is incompatible with a police state in which rigid laws are enforced by people who are themselves subject to them and the threat of dire punishment hangs over all,” and this view persists, although Skinner eschews the use of punishment in favour of reinforcement. Slater (2004, p. 28) argues that “Skinner is asking society to fashion cues that are likely to draw on our best selves, as opposed to cues that clearly confound us, cues such as those that exist in prisons, in places of poverty. In other words, stop punishing. Stop humiliating. Who could argue with that?”

In a later work, Skinner (1986) offers an explicit ‘design for sustainable behaviour’ view of the possibilities of intelligent use of operant conditioning:

“[W]e have the science needed to design a world…in which people treated each other well, not because of sanctions imposed by governments or religions but because of immediate, face-to-face consequences. It would be a world in which people produced the goods they needed, not because of contingencies arranged by a business or industry but simply because they were “goods” and hence directly reinforcing. It would be a beautiful and interesting world because making it so would be reinforced by beautiful and interesting things… It would be a world in which the social and commercial practices that promote unnecessary consumption and pollution had been abolished… A designed way of life would be liked by those who lived it (or the design would be faulty).” (Skinner, 1986, p. 11-12)

Rutherford (2009, p.102) notes that Skinner himself designed and “constructed a variety of gadgets and devices that allowed him to control his environment, and thus his behavior. For example for many years Skinner rose early to write, often going directly from his bed to his desk. He would then switch on his desk lamp, which was connected to a timer. When his writing time was up, the timer would switch off his desk lamp, signaling the end of the writing period… For Skinner, setting up environmental contingencies for personal self-management was a natural outcome of behavior analysis.”

Regardless of the position of behaviourism in current academic psychological discourse, there are certainly elements which are relevant to design for behaviour change; indeed, the principles of reinforcement can be seen at work underneath many designed interventions even if they are not explicitly recognised as such. As Skinner (1971) argued (see quote opening this section), the environment shapes our behaviour both before and after we take actions, antecedent and consequence (even the absence of a perceived consequence is a consequence, in this sense). This is an important point, since much work in behaviour change focuses on one or the other. A system designed to suggest or cue particular behaviours, and then reward or acknowledge them, covers both intervention points, particularly given the fact that much interaction with products and systems is part of a regular schedule, and users do learn how to operate things through an ongoing cycle of reinforcement: behaviour change does not necessarily happen in a single step. The concept of variable or unpredictable reinforcement has potential design application in situations where a reward cannot be given every time, and also (as noted by Schell (2008)) in the design of games and game-like features in other interactions. The idea of shaping behaviour towards an intended state through progressive rewards for improvements in behaviour rather than every time has relevance in changing habits, which can be important in (for example) establishing exercise and healthier eating routines.

Winter and Koger (2004, p.118) propose what a behaviourist approach to a sustainable society might involve in relation to influencing more environmentally friendly transport choices, which suggests a mixture of different kinds of reinforcement designed into the system: “All the cues encouraging driving alone would be gone. Nobody would be climbing into a car alone, cars would be expensive to operate and roads would be less convenient. People would live within walking or biking distance to their workplace, commute in groups, or use public transportation… Schools and shops would be arranged close by, allowing people to complete errands without the use of a car… We wouldn’t try to change out of moral responsibility or pro-environment attitudes. We would emit environmentally appropriate behaviors because the environment had been designed to support them.”

Implications for designers

▶ Behaviourism is no longer mainstream psychology, but some of the principles could have potential application in design for behaviour change

▶ There is a recognition that the environment shapes our behaviour both before and after we take actions—a useful insight for designing interventions

▶ There is also a recognition that behaviour change does not necessarily happen in a single step, but as part of an ongoing cycle of shaping

▶ Where cognition cannot be understood or examined, modelling users in terms of stimuli and responses may still offer valuable insights

▶ Positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment can all be implemented via designed features, and often underlie designed interventions without being explicitly named as such

▶ Schedules of reinforcement can be varied (e.g. made unpredictable) to drive continued behaviour

▶ Design could either exploit or help people avoid ‘social traps’ where both reinforcement and punishment exist, or reinforcement is currently misaligned with the behaviour, converting them into ‘trade-offs’ which more closely match the intended behavioural choices

▶ Considering means and ends may provide a useful perspective on design for behaviour change. The end from the user’s perspective effectively becomes the means by which the designer’s end might be influenced

References

Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London
Bateson, G., Jackson, D.D., Haley, J. and Weakland, J.H. (1956) Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia. Behavioral Science I(4)
Bateson, G. (1969) Metalogue: What Is an Instinct? In Bateson, G. (1969) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Burgess, A. (1962) A Clockwork Orange. Heinemann, London
Chomsky, N. (1971) The Case Against B.F. Skinner. The New York Review of Books, 30 Dec 1971
Costanza, R. (1987) Social traps and environmental policy. Bioscience 37(6)
Cross, J.G. and Guyer, M.J. (1980) Social Traps. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Crowther-Heyck, H. (2005) Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America. Johns Hopkins University Press
Ericsson, K.A. and Simon, H.A. (1985) Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data. MIT Press
Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162.
Kay, H., Dodd, B. and Sime, M.E. (1968) Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction. Penguin
Koestler, A. (1967) The Ghost in the Machine.
Pask (1969) The meaning of cybernetics in the behavioural sciences (The cybernetics of behaviour and cognition; extending the meaning of “goal”). In Rose, J. (ed.) (1969) Progress of Cybernetics, Volume 1. Gordon and Breach
Pavlov, I. (1927) Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. Translated by Anrep, G.V. Oxford University Press
Platt, J. (1973) Social Traps. American Psychologist, 28
Pryor, K. (2002) Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training. Interpet
Rutherford, A. (2009) Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s. University of Toronto Press
Schell, J. (2008) The Art of Game Design. Morgan Kaufmann
Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior. The Free Press, New York.
Skinner, B.F. (1971) Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
Skinner, B.F. (1986) Why we are not acting to save the world. In Skinner, B.F. Upon further reflection. Prentice-Hall
Slater, L. (2004) Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychology Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Bloomsbury
Sparks, J. (1982) The Discovery of Animal Behaviour. Collins.
Studer, R.G. (1970) The Organization of Spatial Stimuli. In Pastalan, L.A. and Carson, D.H. (eds.), Spatial Behavior of Older People. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Watson, J.B. (1913) Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20
Weinschenk, S (2011) 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. New Riders
Winter D. du N. and Koger, S.M. (2004) The Psychology of Environmental Problems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

B.F. Skinner photo from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhskin.html
Banksy Rat photo from DG Jones on Flickr, licensed under CC-BY-NC

So, if you’ve downloaded the cards, or used a printed version, and you have a spare few minutes, it would be very much appreciated if you could have a go at this survey – it’s anonymous (if you like), all the questions are optional, and the whole thing should be quick to do.

Your answers will help improve future versions, as well as helping to tie up my PhD thesis. I’m aware there are lots of ways the cards could be improved and made more useful (and usable). There are some quite exciting ideas that have been suggested, which I hope to be able to explore in the future.

Depending on how many responses there are, there’ll be a few prizes for respondents drawn at random who’ve given their email address – most probably, some excellent books on design, user experience and behaviour.

Thanks for your time!

A note on surveys
Surveys are both interesting and frustrating. In design – and probably in many more social-sciencey areas of academia in general – surveys of different kinds have become very common as a way of collecting insights and generating results (which can allow the demonstration of statistical analysis skills). I appreciate how valuable they can be. But as someone who fills in a lot of surveys and questionnaires that get sent to me, I know that as often executed, they really are a pretty imperfect way of capturing what people really think. (Quite apart from all the dark pattern-y ways they can be designed to influence the way people respond, which are of course worthy of study in themselves…)

The survey here is nothing special, but I’ve tried to minimise the elements that frustrate me: Likert scales for things that are difficult to assign a rating to; multiple pages so I can’t see how much left there is to fill in; required questions or forced choices which force me into having an opinion about things I haven’t thought enough about; and lack of an opportunity for me to explain more about bits that mean a lot to me. If you’re interested, the questions are based on a kind of combination of Fred Reichheld‘s work and parts of the Kirkpatrick model.

The bit of work I’m doing at present involves investigating building users’ mental models of heating systems, which has some history in cognitive science and interaction design, as has been discussed here on the blog a few years ago. As I explored in my talk at Design for Persuasion in Ghent back in September, I’ve come to believe that better understanding people’s mental models of systems with which they interact – and then deciding whether it’s more appropriate to work with them, try to change them, or downright ignore them – is an important component of design for behaviour change. We need to understand the environmental (and mental) contexts in which people make decisions (or not) about what to do, and use that understanding appropriately. It seems clear that designers do have different models of ‘what users are like’ and ‘how users think’ – we explored some of this in a couple of workshops at UX London back in May, resulting in this paper [PDF] presented at ERSCP-EMSU in Delft in October. We need to bridge the gap between designers’ models of the user, and users’ models of the system. Which is pretty much what Don Norman was saying 25 years ago, of course, but often seems to be left out of current discourse on behaviour change. I have a suspicion that if we get this right, the whole attitude-behaviour morass becomes possible to understand through a kind of cybernetics / systems theory approach.

I haven’t finished the PhD thesis yet. It was clearly a mistake from a sanity perspective to start working on EMPOWER before finishing the thesis write-up, but it was just the way the funding worked. But it does mean I’ll be able to include results of a survey of DwI 1.0 users in the thesis – more on which I’ll hopefully announce very soon.

On the subject of the DwI cards, as of this evening there have been around 130,000 downloads of the PDF that I can track, since it went online in April (together with an unknown number from people who’ve mirrored it elsewhere). I’ve also sold (or given away) 164 physical packs of cards to some very wonderful people. Zero profit, but it’s a great feeling to know that those cards are on the shelf (or even being used!) in places all over the world. And it isn’t just design consultancies and universities – in a current bit of freelance consultancy working with some clever people, a subset of the DwI patterns/gambits, with some additions, are being applied in the context of helping a local authority develop a ‘behaviour change’ capability.

When the PhD’s done, I will certainly be writing about the experience. But I’m not going to do it yet.

The blog will return in a new and better form once this massive burden is out of the way. And I’ll be doing some other things: amid all this research and writing, I realise how much I actually miss making things. 2011 needs to have some of that.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped this year, from those who’ve blogged or tweeted about or downloaded or indeed bought the DwI cards, to everyone who’s helped me progress my work via conferences and workshops and seminars and recommendations, to those who’ve helped me negotiate the endless paperwork that come with university-industry collaborations, to my PhD supervisors David and Neville, to people who’ve just come and said hello in real life after following the blog or seeing the cards online. And to family, and friends, and most of all, Harriet, for putting up with me. This phase won’t be forever.

Good luck, everyone, for 2011.

*I believe they’re sorting this website out sometime very soon. As diplomatically as I can put it, I would not have applied as an undergrad back in 1999 if Brunel Design’s website looked like this. We had something much better, thanks to Len Breen.

It’s been a long time coming, but a year after v.0.9, the new Design with Intent toolkit, DwI v.1.0, is ready. Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.

The cards (Download them here)
The intention is that the cards are useful at the idea generation stage of the design process, helping designers, clients and – perhaps most importantly – potential users themselves explore behaviour change concepts from a number of disciplines, and think about how they might relate to the problem at hand. Judging by the impact of earlier iterations, the cards could also be useful in stakeholder workshops, and design / technology / computer science education.

Each gambit is phrased as a question, as used in Nedra Weinreich’s worksheet based on DwI v.0.9, in the hope that the cards can actively provoke innovative behaviour change design ideas, while the new accompanying Design with Intent wiki can, in time, act as a kind of ‘further reading’ resource.

You can download the card deck, either the whole thing (ISBN 978-0-9565421-1-3) or individual sections, free of charge, but bear in mind this initial version is still something of a draft (with some typos and a few ugly alignment errors) and there are a few extra introductory cards which will be added over the next couple of weeks. So do come back and get the updated version when it’s available.

Printed card decks (ISBN 978-0-9565421-0-6) will be available for mail order very soon, too: these will be sold at a price which just covers my costs. If you’re going to UX London or Persuasive 2010 I hope to have some packs with me, so do let me know if you’d like me to reserve one for you. This isn’t a commercial venture: it’s part of my PhD and the more people who use the cards, the better (from my point of view). I will try to produce some alternative formats such as posters and worksheets, too, since I know cards aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

UPDATE: Printed packs now available to order

The wiki
The wiki is inspired partly by Crumlish & Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces, a great book (and a neat companion to Jenifer Tidwell’s incredible Designing Interfaces, also from O’Reilly) with a companion wiki which acts as an evolving, referenceable container for new examples, tips on implementation, data on effectiveness, and so on, as they come to light, as well as new patterns, new ways of grouping them and new uses for this kind of approach.

At present, the wiki is pretty basic and while I get to grips with the nuances of Mediawiki (and, of course, writing up my PhD thesis!) it’s not open for general editing, but it will be in due course. I hope over time it will prove to be a valuable resource for people working in design for behaviour change, design for sustainable behaviour, persuasive technology, behavioural economics and other related areas. There are also a number of linked pages which I haven’t written yet, but by putting them in as red links, they’re a constant reminder for me to do them!

Your feedback
Your comments are incredibly important to this project. I’ll be putting a survey online very soon, but in the meantime, if you have any reactions, please do get in touch (dan@danlockton.co.uk). I’m aware that I haven’t yet replied to everyone who took part in the earlier survey, for which I apologise.

UPDATE: 5-minute survey now online

The blog
In the light of the new wiki, and coming towards the end of my PhD, the blog will change a bit during the summer – nothing will be lost, but I intend to incorporate a lot of the examples into the wiki, preserving people’s comments. The various domain names and redirects need a bit of htaccess fun to sort out too! For the moment, though, it’ll stay as chaotic as it is.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped with the development of Design with Intent so far: I hope the wait for these cards has been worth it!

These aren’t original, by any means. People such as Amy Jo Kim (see her great presentation ‘Putting the fun in functional’), Sebastian Deterding, Francisco Inchauste, Jeremy Keith, Geke Ludden, and of course Ian Bogost have done work which explores this area from lots of different angles, and it also draws on decades of research in social psychology. Russell Davies’ Playful (which I really should have gone to!) looks like it was very pertinent here too. (Note, this lens doesn’t cover Game Theory-like patterns, some of which are indeed relevant to influencing user behaviour, but which I’ve chosen to group under a new ‘Machiavellian Lens’)

My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’* that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour (along with the other Design with Intent techniques). So these are (at least at present) presented simply as provocations: a “What if…?” question plus an example. The intention is that the card deck version will simply have what you see here, while the online version will have much more detail, references, links and reader/user-contributed examples and comments.

Challenges & targets

What happens if you set people a challenge, or give them a target to reach through what they’re doing?

« Whoever laid out this coffee tub as a target for throwing coins knew a lot about influencing people to donate generously and enjoy it

Unpredictable reinforcement

What happens if you give rewards or feedback on an unpredictable schedule, so users keep playing or interacting?

Arcade games such as this coin pusher usually employ a strong element of unpredictable reinforcement, to keep users playing/paying »

Scores

Can you give users feedback on their actions as a score or rating allowing comparison to a reference point?

« The ‘Brain Age’ score given by Dr Kawashima’s games for Nintendo gives users a clear incentive to keep using the software

Levels

Can you split your system up into achievable levels which help users feel like they’re making progress?

Easy-to-reach levels lower the barriers to participation and encourage continued engagement for games such as FarmVille »

Rewards

Can you encourage users to take up or continue a behaviour by rewarding it, through the design of the system?

« Kai’s Power Tools (pioneering visual effects software) revealed ‘bonus functions’ to reward users who developed their skill level

Playfulness

Can you design something which ‘plays’ with its users, provoking curiosity or making interactions into a game?

Spiral wishing wells turn giving money to charity into something actively fun for donors, and provoke curiosity of passers-by »

Storytelling

Can you tell a story via your design, which interests users and keeps them engaged?

« Dyson uses narrative booklets drawing customers (and potential customers) into the story behind the company and its technology

Leave gaps to fill

Can you leave deliberate gaps (in a design, message, etc) which users will want to fill, becoming engaged in the process?

Deliberate use of red links on Wikipedia, signifying articles which should be written, “encourage[s] new contributors in useful directions” »

Role-playing

What happens if your system gives users particular roles to play, or makes them feel like they’re playing a role?

« Tim Holley’s Tio encourages children to become ‘energy champions’ for their household, influencing parental behaviour

Collections

What happens if you encourage users to collect a set of things (friends, activities, places, objects, etc) through using your system?

UbiFit Garden encourages users to maintain a regular variety of exercise activities, in order to ‘collect’ different types of flower »

Make it a meme

What happens if you plan your design to be something people want to spread, and make it easy for them to do so?

« ShareThis and similar quick-access social sharing services can mean rapid ‘viral’ or ‘meme’ status for interesting or amusing stories

The text and examples aren’t quite fixed yet, so any comments and feedback on the above are very welcome.

Spiral wishing well photograph courtesy of Steve Divnick – see this video if you don’t believe the power of the well; UbiFit Garden images from DUB at University of Washington; ShareThis Chicken Poncho screenshot from this listing on Regretsy; Tio image from Tim Holley.

*I’ve decided to start using Bryan Lawson’s ‘gambit’ terminology [PDF], if only to recognise that at least at present, DwI is not really a proper pattern language, as Sally Fincher comments here.

There have also been a few other projects with which I’ve made an effort to get involved, mainly to secure my own future and enable expansion of research in this field once the PhD studentship runs out! I’m pleased to say that things seem to be progressing OK on that front, with some very exciting projects lined up, working with some very interesting people indeed.

In parallel, DwI toolkit v.0.95, which I think I will henceforth name Design with Intent 1.0 (shows a bit more confidence!) is nearing a stage where I’m happy to release it. More on that very soon.

As Richard Hamming said, “You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this.”

But as as a bumper end-of-2009 post, here’s a roundup of some really interesting examples, ideas, projects, and other tit-bits. If yours isn’t here, I further apologise: it may resurface at some point soon.

Transparent toilet in Lausanne

George Preston sent me a link to this video of a very interesting public toilet in Lausanne, Switzerland. As George puts it:

There’s a central quite modern district [in Lausanne] called Flon, and the toilets have an intriguing way of grabbing your attention/dissuading vandals….the walls are made of glass. But when you pay and enter, a current running to an LC layer in the glass is cut off, rendering it opaque. For people not familiar with them, they are baffling!

The tell-tale pill bottle

Ralph Borland – responsible for the impressive Suited for Subversion – and who must be just about finished with his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin – sends me this story about tuberculosis pill bottles equipped with a SIM card, which can text a patient, his or her carer, or indeed the health authorities if the pills aren’t taken, “achiev[ing] a 94% compliance rate for a TB trial in South Africa”. The SIMpill Medication Adherence Solution is a clever product, a neat technology intervention in patient compliance, an area designers are increasingly being asked to address.

From the SIMpill website:

The SIMpill® Medication Adherence Solution offers detailed compliance data and corresponding statistics, and the patient or pre-approved healthcare professionals or analyst, can gain access to real-time information regarding medication use and compliance through a private secure account on the SIMpill® website. Via the web account the healthcare providers can monitor the medication use of their patients in real-time, and can decide on type of intervention to meet the patient’s ongoing adherence schedule.

As Ralph points out, though:

Put that together with the fact that you can be imprisoned in SA if you have a drug-resistant TB strain and you have something more like a coercive technology than persuasive, interfacing directly with authority structures etc. Thought it’s an interesting cross-over of developing world design and persuasive design…

Narrower supermarket aisles

Brian Cugelman of AlterSpark sent me the following rather coercive idea he overheard, along the lines of Monkeon‘s Leonard Ball bench:

On BBC radio some caller made a proposal relevant to your research. To cope with the UK’s obesity epidemic, with 25% of the population considered obese, a caller proposed making grocery stores aisles very narrow so people of average weight could shop and obese people would not fit.

Punishing users for Alt-tabbing away

From a comment on Jeff Atwood’s 2007 ‘Please don’t steal my focus’ post (which I found again when searching for how to stop an application stealing focus):

One of the old MMOs I used to play (Rubies of Eventide) would log you out of the game if you alt tabbed, supposedly to prevent cheating. This was back in the days when web browsers on windows would steal focus back any time a script on the page reloaded.
I died so many times to those damn page reloads.

Mike on December 5, 2007 4:08 AM

Obstacles speed up exiting crowds

Tjebbe van Eemeren of the University of Twente – a student of Peter-Paul Verbeek of What Things Do fame – sends me a link to this story about the use of obstacles to speed up the passage of crowds:

Even when exits are wide open, people seem to jam up in front of it. Then they tried something goofy. They put something in the way of the people trying to get out. Not so big that it blocked the way, but big enough that people had to detour around it. And it had to be in just the right place. Guess what? Everybody got out faster.

The actual research isn’t referenced in the story, but this article goes into a lot more detail. There’s a preprint of the paper by Daichi Yanagaisawa et al here. There’s also discussion of the story and the phenomenon on Derren Brown’s blog.

Opower

Robert Cialdini gets name-checked quite a lot on this blog, and rightly so: his work on persuasion and the psychology of influencing behaviour across many different domains underpins many of the design patterns and explains many of the examples we’ve looked at (particularly what I characterised as the ‘cognitive lens’ of design with intent). He’s something of a model for how to be a respected academic researcher at the forefront of his field (who actually tries things out rather than simply theorising), a consultant in high demand from industry, and also a bestselling popular author.

Cialdini is now Chief Scientist of Opower, an energy monitoring and smart metering startup which started life as Positive Energy (thanks to Mike Stenhouse for sending me details earlier in the year) and has already had significant success partnering with utility companies in the US to give customers better feedback – using personalised messages based on social proof and norms to suggest actions for householders to take to reduce their consumption:

Step 1: Customer reads report: “You used 72 percent more than your efficient neighbors.”
Step 2: Customer reads targeted tip: “Most people in your area keep their AC at 78 degrees”
Step 3: Customer turns down thermostat and takes other energy-saving actions.

I think it’s worth keeping an eye on Opower‘s development: they’re taking a different, but complementary approach to other innovators such as Onzo in the UK, and seem to be putting into practice (on a huge scale) some of the ideas that projects such as CHARM are also investigating. As I’ve talked about before, there’s a lot of opportunity for design to influence behaviour in this area, and help users as well as reducing environmental impact.

Any suggestions, or photos / screenshots would be very much appreciated, whether they’re your own projects, things you’ve come across elsewhere, or just ideas that occur to you. If you’re happy for me to use them in the toolkit (cards & wiki)* then of course you’ll get a credit and if your photo’s used, I’ll send you a pack of the cards when they’re done.

Remember, for each of these patterns, the idea is that it can be used intentionally to influence user behaviour, via the design of an interface, product, service, environment, or other kind of system.

Similarity

Can you make elements look similar so users perceive them to share characteristics, or that they should be used together?

This – a Gestalt principle applied with the intent of influencing behaviour – seems like it should be an easy pattern to find examples for, but I’m struggling. The basic idea is that a design intentionally has some elements which look alike, or similar, or to be in a group, so that a user perceives them to share some properties or characteristics (and so acts accordingly – perhaps using two controls together).

In its most trivial sense, this is present everywhere in interaction and web design – the design of menus, groupings of controls, and so on, to suggest that those particular functions are related – but I’m finding it difficult to think of examples where there is a more explicit behaviour-influencing intent behind it. There are instances such as Adobe’s ‘Send to FedEx Kinko’s’ button (below left), styled and positioned in the toolbar as if it were a normal button, but actually propelling the user into a business transaction when pressed – or even the use of text ads and sponsored links in search engine results (below right), styled closely to resemble the main content, in the hope that users will perceive them to be of the same value, and hence click on them – but can anyone think of a more interesting example? Preferably one designed to help users rather than trick us into clicking on things we don’t necessarily want to?

Mimicry & mirroring

Can your system mirror or mimic a user’s behaviour in some way, to increase the engagement a user feels?

Mirroring body language or speech patterns is often promoted as a technique for establishing rapport in pop-psychology advice, but are there examples where a similar idea has been (or could be) used in design to achieve a similar effect – engaging a user so he or she follows the advice or directions given, or responds more ‘in person’ towards the system (in a computers-as-social-actors context)? (Something like ELIZA (nice online version here) might count if it were specifically intended to influence a user’s behaviour (e.g., as a ‘therapist’), but mirroring / mimicry doesn’t seem to be the main mechanism there.)

Partial completion

Can you show that the first stage of a process has been completed already, to give users confidence to do the rest?

What I’m thinking of here are things like partly pre-filled application forms, which reduce the amount of effort a user needs to put in to proceed with applying for whatever it is (and, at least with credit card applications, must be a significant vector for fraud), but also exams or learning materials where there’s enough of a worked example actually to give users confidence (building perceived self-efficacy) that they can complete the rest successfully.

And, by extension, an interface of some kind which demonstrates this sort of technique in action would be a great example to include in the toolkit, but I can’t think of one. Can you?

Role-playing

What happens to user behaviour if your design gives users particular roles to play, or makes them feel that they’re someone else?

This is a pattern I noted down during Sebastian Deterding‘s talk at DiGRA 2009, in which he discussed applying some of Erving Goffman‘s work to game design. It seems intuitively effective as a way of influencing behaviour – e.g. a dad telling his young son “I’m appointing you the man of the house while I’m away” (to suggest that he should be well-behaved and look after his mum) or a police officer visiting a school and giving some children little police badges so they hopefully ‘take on’ whatever characteristics are associated with the role (taken to the extreme, perhaps, this sort of pattern can lead to the results found in the Stanford Prison Experiment).

But are there examples where this pattern has been used in the design of something – where users are given or assigned (or choose) a kind of role, which then (due to commitment & consistency biases) they stick to, and behave accordingly? Perhaps applying the role-playing aspects of games to a real-life interface or product or campaign? Tim Holley’s Tio project has the express aim of turning children into ‘energy champions’ for their families, so this may well be the example I use, but is there anything else that does this more explicitly?

Storytelling

Can you tell a story via your design, which interests users and keeps them engaged?

Storytelling is clearly a significant technique for drawing users into an experience, and that engagement necessarily leads to different behaviour. Richard Sedley has talked about this in the context of persuasion for digital effectiveness (and if you haven’t seen this video, it really is worth setting aside 5 minutes), and some of Eugene Schwartz’s classic Breakthrough Advertising copywriting principles and examples are in this kind of area too, but I’m struggling a bit with ‘design’ examples which would quickly and clearly demonstrate the idea in the toolkit.

Are there websites which present the user experience as a kind of story? (I’m sure there must be.) Or, maybe better, environments (theme parks? museums?) which take the visitor through a series of sections or exhibits in a story-like way, with some kind of intent behind the design?

James Dyson’s original ‘The Story of Dyson’ mini-booklets, which were attached like tags to the vacuum cleaners on display in showrooms, and explained the background to the invention (and the inventor) and the 5,127 prototypes, etc, and thus made the potential purchaser feel like he or she was becoming part of that story seem like they might be a good example, but I don’t have one of them to photograph and I can’t find a picture online.

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions or photos are very much appreciated – over to you!

(The above patterns are explicitly interaction design-related, while there are a few more new ‘strategic’ behavioural patterns which I’ll discuss in another post.)

*To be Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licensed, except for any images which are separately licensed already

It’s 8 months since the Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9 went online and I’ve had incredibly useful feedback from a whole range of people who’ve tried it out on different kinds of briefs and problems. As mentioned a couple of months ago, the toolkit poster PDF (which has 12 ‘headline’ design patterns, compared with the 47 in total online) reached a very high number of downloads from Brunel’s research archive website (before the admins removed the statistics package!), which is immensely pleasing and kind of humbling. If you downloaded it and found it useful (or not useful), please do get in touch and tell me why.

Latterly, a few people have been trying out an IDEO Method Card-style card deck version of the toolkit (as pictured here), including all the patterns, colour-coded by lens, with a simplified bit of text about each one. I haven’t made these available publicly mainly because the quality isn’t great (most of the images are only 72dpi, coming from the website, and poorly cropped for the card format), and I’ve been trying a couple of variations of text, card size, etc. Initially I put these together primarily for quick card-sorting exercises as part of the workshop trials I’ve been running, but they ended up more popular than the poster format. Thanks to brainstorming sessions at IDEO London and the RSA, exercises with Brunel’s MSc Integrated Product Design and BSc / BA Design students (as part of the Sustainable Design and Environmentally Sensitive Design modules), and a trial as part of Design for Conversion kindly organised by Arjan Haring, I now have a better idea of what would make the cards more useful. In parallel, I’ve also been trying to ‘patternize’ some additional design techniques which have been used to influence behaviour, to increase the scope of the toolkit.

The DwI cards in use at Design for Conversion – photos by haijeson on Flickr (1, 2)

Inspired partly by Crumlish & Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces which is a great book (a neat companion to Jenifer Tidwell’s incredible Designing Interfaces, also from O’Reilly) with a companion wiki, I’ve decided to go down the route of producing v.0.95 of the toolkit as a Creative Commons-licensed set of 100 downloadable cards, with a printed version available to buy, and an accompanying wiki with a page on each pattern, serving as an evolving, referenceable container for new examples, tips on implementation, data on effectiveness, and so on, as they come to light, as well as new patterns, new ways of grouping them and new uses for this kind of approach.

The cards will be relatively simple, with each pattern posed as a question, as used in Nedra Weinreich’s DwI-based worksheet. The intention is that the cards can actively provoke innovative behaviour change design ideas, with a single (hopefully photogenic) example on each, while the wiki can act as a kind of ‘further reading’ resource. A future version (v.1.0?) of the cards will include this extra information on the back of each card (and then binding the cards together would pretty much produce a book), but at this stage – if I’m ever going to get this PhD finished in time – the extra info will be added to the wiki over time rather than being on the v.0.95 cards themselves, to reduce the time pressure on getting it all done.

As v.0.95 more than doubles the number of patterns in v.0.9 – a mixture of splitting up existing patterns into more finely-grained variants, and adding ideas which people have suggested or pointed out since I put v.0.9 together – there are quite a few where I don’t (yet) have a very good example or image. As such, there are opportunities for anyone with good photos or suggestions for examples to have an input and be involved – as the next post will explain in more detail.

A version of the card deck I (rather laboriously!) spray-mounted onto Post-It backing, so the cards could be used to annotate sketches or ideas recorded during a brainstorming session.

This is an exciting initiative which aims to bring together (in a 5-day ‘sandpit’) people from different disciplines and different sectors to address the problems of influencing user behaviour to improve the energy efficiency of offices and other non-domestic buildings, and generate commercially viable collaborative solutions to develop, some of which will then be part-funded by the TSB. Fionnuala’s blog, People in Buildings has some great posts and discussions exploring aspects of how human factors and technology together might be used to help people use energy more effectively. If you or your organisation are interested in these kinds of issues – and using design to address them – it’d be well worth getting an application in over the next few days.

[It's] a kind of conspiracy bias, ascribing to design intent that which is perhaps more likely to be due to situational factors (a kind of fundamental attribution error for design), or inferring the intention behind a design by looking at its results.

Nevertheless, it’s not unexciting. Noticing things I’d never have noticed before I started doing this research – often details or tricks that have been pointed out by commenters here on the blog – can give you a feeling of deeper connection to the design of the products and systems and environments around us. Things are designed to influence how people use them, what people do and don’t do, whether we are conscious of it or not. So here are some observations – none of them terribly amazing! – from a recent day in London with a camera and my long-suffering girlfriend. There are hundreds more I could have included – everything from elements of the websites we looked at before travelling, to the layout of stations and streets and buildings and tables and chairs and the wording and order of menus and adverts and just about everything that’s been designed to elicit some kind of behavioural response. But we just don’t notice most of this: it’s only occasionally that things attract our attention, which is what happened with the following examples.

The ‘Open Door’ buttons on First Great Western’s Class 165/166 trains (going into Paddington) are much larger than the ‘Close Door’ buttons (which rarely need to be pressed anyway, since the doors are closed automatically before the train departs). I’m assuming they’re intentionally more prominent because it’s the button that people need to see and press in a hurry if they need to get off and the vestibule(?) area’s crowded (and it often is on this service), and larger for a kind of Fitts’ Law reason: reducing the time taken to ‘acquire the target’. It’s also large enough to be able to elbow it or press it with a shoulder if you’re carrying things in both hands.

The escalators at Canary Wharf underground station, as at many others, have raised obstructions (often masquerading as “Stand on the right” signs) every couple of feet to prevent people sliding down the panelling between the handrails. When I looked at this before – the slightly more extreme spikes at Highbury & Islington station – there were some great comments including a story about what can happen when they obstructions aren’t present (or rather when just one is – a large sign at the bottom). It did occur to me that the kind used at Canary Wharf would actually work quite well as hand-holds for climbing up, should you want to.

All over the UK, but particularly in urban areas with complex traffic movements, one-way systems or lots of visitors, such as here outside the DLR station at Canary Wharf, some pedestrian crossings are marked with “Look Right”, “Look Left” or “Look Both Ways” on the road, to suggest to pedestrians (at just the right moment) which way they should look to watch out for oncoming traffic. Richard Thaler has mentioned this as a ‘nudge’ example before. It doesn’t always get implemented correctly; there are also other design tricks for influencing pedestrians to face the right way at crossings.

I might be going beyond my expertise here, but it seems like it’s actually relatively unusual in much of Europe (perhaps because of the Vienna Convention) to have instructional ‘injunctive’ text on traffic signage (including markings), compared with some other parts of the world. For example, in the UK, since the 1960s at least we very rarely have signs such as “Wrong Way, Go Back” – there would more likely be a “No Entry” sign, with no text. If you’re interested in British road signage, this is one of the best articles on the subject.

Here’s a ‘kissing gate’ at Mudchute Park presumably intended to prevent bicycles (though I would have thought a bike could fit through the gate next to it). As we’ve seen before, trying to stop cyclists using awkward gates doesn’t always work. Given the location of this gate, it may also help prevent any animals which have escaped from the the farm from running out onto the road.

Also at Mudchute, these allotments have anti-climb paint applied to the fence – a slippery paint that stays ‘wet’ (here’s a nice publicity photo). I’ll be honest, I’ve often wondered how much effect this stuff really has against someone equipped with, say, rough-textured gloves who could, at least on a fence like the one in the picture, probably get his/her hand all the way round both the horizontal and vertical parts of the fence. Or just a loop of rope, or a hook, along with black clothes (to hide the paint that comes off) or disposable overalls plus some kind of disposable blanket or rug to cover the spikes and flatten the barbed wire would seem to be all you need. I’m not condoning this, of course – as an allotmenteer myself, I appreciate that they can well be an attractive target.

As an alternative to anti-climb paint, spikes, etc, these roller bars seem quite interesting.

The yard of the Mudchute Kitchen, part of the farm, has these friendly rubbish bins – a great example of affective engagement, particularly somewhere where there are going to be lots of young children visiting on school trips or with families. The open beaks are an invitation, a perceived affordance that they should be ‘fed’. Whether it’s a good idea to ‘teach’ children to feed litter to birds is another matter…

 
 
 
 
 
Unlike the ‘Open Door’ button above – which doesn’t matter if it’s accidentally pressed since it only operates when the train is stationary and alongside the platform – passenger emergency alarms such as this type on the Docklands Light Railway need to be prominent and visible, yet protected against accidental operation due to, for example, someone leaning on the button when the train is crowded. So, not only recessing it, but mounting it at the top of the recess, where even an inadvertent poke from an umbrella or elbow is less likely to make contact, is a clever errorproofing solution.

The shopping mall at Canary Wharf features ‘Norman doors‘ that despite having prominent, elegant, no doubt expensive stainless steel handles, must actually be pushed open, hence the necessity of the ‘Push’ labels. Other than being able to pull the doors closed if necessary, or simply because it’s cheaper to make doors with the same fittings on both sides so they can be hinged either way, I’m not sure why this particular category of false affordance is so common. Making the handles flatter on the ‘push’ side would preserve a similar style visually but signal that they need to be pushed without needing to resort to a sign.

Couple of other observations: the comprehensive row of prohibition signs on the doors almost forms a design element itself, echoing the pattern of squares further down. You’re not allowed to do much other than spend money in this particular mall. Also, printing the word STYLE on posters in reflective foil does, unfortunately, mean that from some angles, the L and E will disappear.

Getting some money out: we’re so used to ATMs returning the card before dispensing the cash that we often don’t even think about this interlock forcing function. In fact it may even momentarily surprise us when ticket machines (for example) don’t work like this.

But ATMs didn’t always operate like this either, and when the cash was returned first, the card was often forgotten. So the order was changed – as Phillip Chung & Michael Byrne put it “to place the hanging postcompletion action ‘on the critical path’ to reduce or eliminate [its] omission” – although this card-then-cash format is by no means universal.

I looked at some possible alternative solutions for the problem in this paper for Applied Ergonomics (e-mail me if you’d like a copy), as a kind of test / demonstration of the Design with Intent toolkit.

(The above is actually a photo of a different machine to the one I used on this particular day, since there was a queue of people behind me)

These friendly anti-sit spikes (including a slightly crooked one on the left) outside the headquarters of London Councils in Southwark just scream “We love the public!”. I guess the alcove could provide a useful hiding place for someone to jump out on passers-by or something.

Further along the South Bank, this branch of Eat reminded me that B J Fogg used a photo of the Eat sign in his talk at Design for Persuasion, as an example of what he calls hot triggers: cues or calls to action which actually prompt a behaviour, assuming that the motivation and ability are there already. Someone walking along, hungry (motivated), with enough money to buy food (ability) needs a trigger, and a sign pretty much instructing one to eat is a particularly clear one. We didn’t eat there, of course – there are better places – but it’s an interesting tactic.

Finally, as we were about to drive home from the station, I thought about the reverse gear ‘gate’ – a kind of lock-out – which prevents the driver changing accidentally directly from a forward gear into reverse (though it’s usually possible the other way round). Depending on the gearbox, you generally need to lift the gearstick over the ‘gate’ or press a button while moving the stick, or in the case of my Reliant Scimitar (which has a 1980s Ford Sierra gearbox), press the gearstick itself downwards.

 
What do you see everyday that makes you think “they designed it like that so that people would do this”?

“Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.”

Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969 (p.129 of 1981 MIT press 2nd edition)

“[W]e need to make vast changes in human behaviour, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology, no matter how hard we try… What we need is a technology of behaviour.”

B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971 (p.10 of 1973 Pelican edition)

 
 

“People may dislike the idea of ‘designing’ social systems. Designing social systems may seem mechanistic or authoritarian. However, all social systems have been designed… People have designed the systems within which they live. The shortcomings of those systems result from defective design, just as the shortcomings of a power plant result from erroneous design.”

Jay W. Forrester, ‘Designing the Future’, talk at University of Seville on December 15th 1998 (p.6 of this PDF)

Emphases in the above are mine. Arguably, in the Forrester quote, we have not consciously/intelligently enough designed the systems in which we live (hence the shortcomings), which I think is partly the point he’s making based on the rest of the talk.

I still think my favourite ‘Design with Intent’-related quote is this one from Buckminster Fuller. It has an attractive blend of humility and confidence, seeing people not as the problem but as part of the solution.

Image sources: Herbert Simon; B.F. Skinner; Jay Forrester.

But if we’re honest, it’s only in aggregate that behaviour change is going to have any real effect on the world outside the specifics of individual interactions. I think most people involved with design for behaviour change appreciate that it’s going to be mass behaviour change that makes the difference to humanity’s health, environment, happiness and effectiveness in the long run, whether via mass interpersonal persuasion or some other method.

This is where the opportunity for the most ambitious, most audacious plans becomes apparent, and few are more ambitious than Peace Dot, a new initiative from Stanford’s Peace Innovation Team, led by BJ Fogg and bringing together companies and organisations as diverse as the Dalai Lama Foundation, Facebook, CouchSurfing and Sourceforge.

The overall vision behind Stanford’s Peace Innovation work is clear – world peace could be possible in 30 years if we use innovation methods and new technology in the right way. The actual execution is something which will necessarily evolve and change as new technologies afford new possibilities and potential for connection and mass behavioural influence, and the Peace Dot project – while only a small part of this – is a great way to start and demonstrate what’s possible right now.

Initially at least, the focus is on getting a range of companies and organisations to demonstrate (via a special peace.xxxxx.nnn subdomain on their websites) how what they do is bringing people together, from different cultures, different countries, different religions, different political backgrounds etc, and encouraging understanding, cooperation and respect: a specific lens for considering corporate social responsibility in terms of contribution to peace. The ‘Peace Dot’ initiative becomes something like a hashtag for organising and making available current and past data clearly, with a certain degree of social proof to it: making it clear that stereotypes such as “X type of people don’t get on with Y type of people” are not necessarily true.

So Facebook is showing figures, updated daily (e.g. above & right) of new connections between people from different groups (as Dean Eckles points out in a comment on the Guardian’s article about the initiative, the graphs show new connections per day, rather than the cumulative total of connections, so the relative ‘flatline’ of Muslim-Jewish connections is actually showing steady progress); CouchSurfing (below right) is highlighting how it helps initiate cultural exchanges, forming international friendships; while even relatively smaller organisations such as Kara Chanasyk’s White Lotus Design are able to demonstrate how what they do helps bring people together.

As the Peace Dot network develops – with the idea spread via Twitter, Facebook, Google Groups and so on – and more organisations get involved, I’m sure the strategies will develop too, with increasingly innovative persuasive approaches to influencing peace and cooperation. Even encouraging more people to believe that peace is possible, and believing that others believe that too, and that technology is able to help with this, is a significant development. It’s a very worthwhile project to keep an eye on, and it almost inevitably provokes us to consider the extent to which each of us has the potential to be involved, with this kind of initiative or with one of the many thousands of others that might arise: by definition, world peace needs all of us.

For this edition, it centres on using mobile technology, including speakers from Nokia, Symbian and Sagem and a multidisciplinary team-based challenge based on a real persuasive design problem – as Arjan puts it, “Design for Conversion is not for the faint at heart as there is no escaping the interactive nature of the format.” (I understand a card-deck version of the Design with Intent toolkit, not yet released, will be involved in the team challenges – it’s great to be able to help out like this, and have a different kind of audience try it out). Some of the testimonials from speakers at previous editions, such as Eric Schaffer, Andrew Chak and BJ Fogg are especially complimentary about how refreshing the interactive format is.

All in all, Design for Conversion seems like a colourful, exciting, friendly and relatively intimate (150 people) event, and until 11th November there is a discounted early-bird registration fee. Thanks to Arjan for letting me know about this, and I hope it all works out well.

Next year’s edition, taking place in New York, also sounds interesting, with Dan Goldstein among the speakers.

The Fun Theory (Rolighetsteorin), a competition / campaign / initiative from Volkswagen Sweden – created by DDB Stockholm – has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks from both design-related people and other commentators with an interest in influencing behaviour: it presents a series of clever ‘design interventions’ aimed at influencing behaviour through making things “fun to do” – taking the stairs instead of the escalator, recycling glass via a bottle bank and using a litter bin. The stairs are turned into a giant piano keyboard, with audio accompaniment; the bottle bank is turned into an arcade game, with sound effects and scores prominently displayed; and the litter bin has a “deep pit” effect created through sound effects played as items are dropped into it. It’s exciting to see that exploring design for behaviour change is being so enthusiastically pursued and explored, especially by ad agencies, since – if we’re honest – advertisers have long been the most successful at influencing human behaviour effectively (in the contexts intended). There’s an awful lot designers can learn from this, but I digress…

As a provocation and inspiration to enter the competition, these are great projects. The competition itself is interesting because it encourages entrants to “find [their] own evidence for the theory that fun is best way to change behaviour for the better”, suggesting that entries with some kind of demonstrated / tested element are preferred over purely conceptual submissions (however clever they might be) which have often been a hallmark of creative design competitions in the past. While the examples created and tested for the campaign are by no means “controlled experiments” (e.g. the stats in the videos about the extra amount of rubbish or glass deposited give little context about the background levels of waste deposition in that area, whether people have gone out of their way to use the ‘special’ bins, and so on), they do demonstrate very well the (perhaps obvious) effect that making something fun, or engaging, is a way to get people interested in using it.

Triggers

Going a bit deeper, though, into what “the theory of fun” might really mean, it’s clear there are a few different effects going on here. To use concepts from B J Fogg’s Behaviour Model, assuming the ability to use the stairs, bottle bank or bin is already there, the remaining factors are motivation and triggers. Motivation is, on some level, presumably also present in each case, in the sense that someone carrying bottles to be recycled already wants to get rid of them, someone standing at the bottom of the stairs or escalator wants to get to the top, and someone with a piece of litter in her hand wants to discard it somehow (even if that’s just on the ground).

(But note that if, for example, people start picking up litter from elsewhere in order to use the bin because they’re excited by it, or if – as in the video – kids run up and down the stairs to enjoy the effect, this is something slightly different: the motivation has changed from “I’m motivated to get rid of the litter in my hand” to “I’m motivated to keep playing with this thing.” While no doubt useful results, these are slightly different target behaviours to the ones expressed at the start of the videos. “Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do?” is not quite the same as “Can we get people so interested in running up and down the stairs that they want to do it repeatedly?”)

So the triggers are what the interventions are really about redesigning: adding some feature or cue which causes people who already have the ability and the motivation to choose this particular way of getting out of the railway station to the street above, or disposing of litter, or recycling glass. All three examples deliberately, prominently, attract the interest of passers-by (“World’s deepest bin” graphics, otherwise incongruous black steps, illuminated 7-segment displays above the bottle bank) quite apart from the effect of seeing lots of other people gathered around, or using something in an unusual way.

And once they’ve triggered someone to get involved, to use them, there are different elements that come into play in each example. For example, the bottle bank – by using a game metaphor – effectively challenges the user into continuing (perhaps even entering a flow state, though this is surely more likely with the stairs) and gives feedback on how well you’re doing as well as a kind of reward. The reward element is present in all three examples, in fact.

Perhaps the most relevant pattern in all these examples, and the “fun theory” concept itself, is that of emotional or affective engagement. The user experience of each is designed to evoke an emotional response, to motivate engagement through enjoyment or delight – and this is an area of design where a lot of great (and commercially applicable) research work has been done, by people such as Pieter Desmet (whose doctoral dissertation is a model for this kind of design research), Pat Jordan, Marco van Hout, Trevor van Gorp, Don Norman and MIT’s Affective Computing group. Taking a slightly different slant, David Gargiulo’s work on creating drama through interaction design (found via Harry Brignull‘s Twitter) is also pertinent here, as is Daniel Pink’s collection of ‘emotionally intelligent signage’ (thanks to Larry Cheng for bringing this to my attention).

What sort of behaviour change, though?

I suppose the biggest and most obvious criticism of projects such as the Rolighetsteorin examples is that they are merely one-time gimmicks, that a novelty effect is the most (maybe only) significant thing at work here. It’s not possible to say whether this is true or not without carrying out a longitudinal study of the members of the public involved over a period of time, or of the actual installations themselves. Does having fun using the stairs once (when they’re a giant piano) translate into taking the (boring) normal stairs in preference to an escalator on other occasions? (i.e. does it lead to attitude or preference change?) Or does the effect go away when the fun stairs do?

It may be, of course, that interventions with explicitly pro-social rhetoric embedded in them (such as the bottle bank) have an effect which bleeds over into other areas of people’s lives: do they think more about the environment, or being less wasteful, in other contexts? Have attitudes been changed beyond simply the specific context of recycling glass bottles using this particular bottle bank?

How others have done it

This campaign isn’t the first to have tried to address these problems through design, of course. Without researching too thoroughly, a few pieces of work spring to mind, and I’m sure there are many more. Stephen Intille, Ron MacNeil, Jason Nawyn and Jacob Hyman in MIT’s House_n group have done work using a sign with the ‘just-in-time‘ message “Your heart needs exercise – here’s your chance” (shown above) positioned over the stairs in a subway, flashing in people’s line-of-sight as they approach the decision point (between taking stairs or escalator) linked to a system which can record the effects in terms of people actually making one choice or the other, and hence compare the effect the intervention actually has. As cited in this paper [PDF], previous research by K D Brownell, A J Stunkard, and J M Albaum, using the same message, in a similar situation, but statically displayed for three weeks before being removed, demonstrated that some effect remains on people’s choice of the stairs for the next couple of months. (That is, the effect didn’t go away immediately when the sign did – though we can’t say whether that’s necessarily applicable to the piano stairs too.)

Last year I mentioned Finland’s “Kiitos, Tack, Thank you” bins, and in the comments (which are well worth reading), Kaleberg mentioned Parisian litter bins with SVP (s’il vous plaît) on them; most notable here is the work of Yvonne de Kort, Teddy McCalley and Cees Midden at Eindhoven on ‘persuasive trash cans‘ [PDF], looking at the effects of different kinds of norms on littering behaviour, expressed through the design or messages used on litter bins (shown to the left here).

Work on the design of recycling bins is, I think, worthy of a post of its own, since it starts to touch more on perceived affordances (the shape of different kinds of slots, and so on) so I’ll get round to that at some point.

Many thanks to everyone who sent me the Fun Theory links, including Kimberley Crofts, Brian Cugelman and Dan Jenkins (apologies if I’ve missed anyone out).