Design made you do it.

"Changing people’s behaviour through design has never been easy—consumer
behaviour maybe, but not necessarily people’s day to day life. In some
respects it’s like trying to convert someone to a different religion or
turn a beef eater into a vegetarian. If people don’t want to do it,
they’re not going to do it." – Michael Surtees

I don't have much time during the day to read design blogs, but I do keep Twitter running on my desktop. Which is where I noticed the link for this post, by my friend in New York, Michael Surtees. He writes copiously about design here.

He was writing in response to a video posted by some students at Stanford's d-school (one of the schools I'm considering in the event I pursue a Ph.D. someday) who were explaining a design experiment they'd tried in an attempt to get people to change their driving habits. The details about that experiment and its outcome aren't the point of this post. My attention was drawn to the quote above.

I completely disagree with this statement. Well, okay. Not completely, but conditionally.

Tell this to the Roman engineers who gave us indoor plumbing. Tell this to Henry Ford and his factory hands working on the first Model T Ford. Tell this to Thomas Edison after he invented the lightbulb or Alexandar Graham Bell upon the birth of his brainchild, the telephone. Tell this to the inventors of television or the microwave. Tell this to those early PARC researchers who gave us the personal computer. Tell this to Jonathon Ive and the team that designed the iPod and the iPhone. I could go on and on and on, but you get the picture, yes? Design has changed our day-to-day lives on multiple occasions.

Depending on the examples you give, changing a person's behavior can be really, really easy. And simple. Say, for example, you're a traffic engineer and you want people to stop going down a one-way street. What do you do? You design a physical barrier and voilà, people stop driving down that street. Or, say you want to prevent tables at an outdoor café from getting stolen: you design them to be bolted to the ground. On a more day-to-day level, say you want a woman to stop forgetting her birth control. You design a device like the IUD that – through design – eliminates the affordance for error. In Asia, the integration of chips into cell phones has changed people's behavior in a very fundamental way: they no longer have to carry any form of money.

To claim that changing our day-to-day lives via design isn't easy is simply not true (no offense, Michael. I'm using this response as an opportunity for design writing practice 🙂 I would agree that the design is not often easy, but once the thing is designed and if it's designed well, getting people to change their behavior is not hard. Behavior adoption is a by-product of good design.

My husband, however, argues that yes, I've given a lot of good examples of designs that were successful in easily changing human behavior. But what of the multitudes of those that weren't? Why weren't they? And is there a common thread to their failure?

I will assert that designs that can be readily modified by the addition or subtraction of physical affordances and the use of good product semantics are the ones most likely to easily change human behavior on a day-to-day basis. It's when you get into systems or communication design that the task does, indeed, become difficult.