Cognitive biases, heuristics and decision-making in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingMuch human behaviour can be seen as decision-making, and so understanding and influencing those decision-making processes could be an important component in design for behaviour change. This paper examines the 'heuristics and biases' approach to modelling decision-making, and attempts to extract insights which are relevant to designers working to influence user behaviour for social or environmental benefit -- either by exploiting biases, or helping to counter those which lead to undesirable behaviour. Areas covered include a number of specific cognitive biases in detail, and the alternative perspective of Gigerenzer and others, who contend (following Herbert Simon) that many heuristics potentially leading to biases are actually ecologically rational, and part of humans' adaptive responses to situations. The design relevance of this is briefly considered, and implications for designers are summarised

Simon’s scissors and ecological psychology in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingThis paper introduces a series of working papers (Lockton 2011a,b and 2012a-f) providing a background literature review of different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour, informing the development of the Design with Intent toolkit (Lockton, Harrison and Stanton 2010a,b). In the first section of the paper, Herbert Simon's 'scissors' metaphor, and the relationship between context, cognition and behaviour are discussed, while the remaining sections introduce some ecological psychology perspectives relevant to design for behaviour change, including Barker's behaviour settings, ecological interface design and Gestalt psychology principles

Persuasive technology and digital design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Research NetworkThe convergence of the 'digital' and 'real' worlds has been rapid and transformative of everyday life, as well as design practice - to the extent that talking about 'digital design' and 'the digital context' seems anachronistic and redundant. Nevertheless, the arrival of digital technology, the Internet and social media has, from a design perspective, created a new field of a ffordances, constraints, information flows and possibilities. This paper reviews some of the ways in which digital architecture infl uences behaviour, and what the implications could be for designers seeking to infl uence behaviour for social and environmental bene fit. Topics covered include Persuasive Technology, gami fication, Lessig's 'Code is Law' perspective, digital rights management and Zittrain's concept of generativity

Social and interpersonal approaches to design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingThis paper reviews a diverse set of social and interpersonal infl uence approaches and techniques which could be relevant to designers seeking to infl uence behavior change for social and environmental bene fit. These include work on social proof (which already has some practical applications in household energy use reduction studies) and dramaturgical and contextual approaches to modelling interaction. Perspectives on interpersonal infl uence are also covered, such as techniques extracted from Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends and In fluence People', and a brief dive into the world of neuro-linguistic programming. In each case, implications for designers are highlighted and summarized at the end of the paper

Attitudes, meaning, emotion and motivation in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingThis paper discusses some distinct -- but related -- psychological concepts which are relevant to design for behaviour change, but of which some, at least, are not necessarily within the scope of 'conventional' interaction design. They may fall superfi cially along the cognitive blade of Simon's scissors (1990), dealing with users' thought processes rather than the contextual interaction environment itself, but the interaction of meaning and form demonstrated by product semantics (section 2.1) makes it clear that cognition depends on context: the scissors must work together. While design for emotion (Desmet and Hekkert, 2009) is enjoying increasing attention and practical application, including in behaviour change applications (e.g. Visser et al, 2011), influencing and supporting motivation through design is underexplored except by a few pioneers such as Bisset (2010), while the complexity of work on attitudes and persuasion has not necessarily lent itself to practical design applications to the extent that it might. Nevertheless, much public discourse on behaviour change persists with a preoccupation with measuring and 'changing' attitudes

Choice architecture and design with intent

Motivation – Choice architecture (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) is a phrase of the moment among politicians and economists seeking to influence public behaviour, but the relevance of the concept to designers has received little attention. This paper places choice architecture within the context of Design with Intent—design intended to influence user behaviour. Research approach – The concepts are introduced and choice architecture is deconstructed. Findings/Design – Affordances and Simon’s behavioural model (1955) help understand choice architecture in more detail. Research limitations/Implications – This is only a very brief, limited foray into what choice architecture is. Originality/Value – User behaviour can be a major determinant of product efficiency: user decisions can contribute significantly to environmental impacts. Understanding the reasons behind them, a range of design techniques can be identified to help users towards more efficient interactions. Take away message – The intended outcome is a useful design method for helping users use things more efficiently

Design for sustainable behaviour: Investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour

This research aims to develop a design tool for product and service innovation which influences users towards more sustainable behaviour, reducing resource use and leading to a lower carbon footprint for everyday activities. The paper briefly explains the reasoning behind the tool and its structure, and presents an example application to water conservation with concept ideas generated by design students

Modelling the User: How design for sustainable behaviour can reveal different stakeholder perspectives on human nature

Copyright @ 2010 TU DelftInfluencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers’ work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used—we have identified over 100 design patterns in our Design with Intent toolkit—each intended to work via a particular set of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about ‘what people are like’: how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. In this paper, we discuss three simple models of user behaviour—the Pinball, the Shortcut and the Thoughtful—which emerge from user experience designers’ statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. We characterise these models using systems terminology and examine the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour via a series of examples