Product psychology to discourage anti-social behaviour
From McGazz (who also has some great music to listen to on his website):
“As I was getting myself a cup of tea in work this morning, I overheard a colleague talking about a problem at the tanning salon his wife runs. Each cubicle has a bin in it, and a regular customer has apparently taken to vomiting and urinating in it (the guy reckoned the tannee in question might be bulimic).
I suggested he get round the problem by using wire mesh bins. While he was chuffed with this idea, I’m slightly worried that I managed to devise an ‘architecture of control’ after only a few seconds thought. I must have authoritarian tendencies…”
This is a clever, non-invasive, psychological deterrent to the undesirable behaviour. I wouldn’t call it authoritarian: it’s guiding behaviour without outright control. This is good design.
The closest parallel example I can think of is the use of cone-shaped paper cups for water-coolers (see image below left): besides being simpler & cheaper to make than flat-bottomed cups, people (generally) have a much lower tendency to leave them lying around once they’re empty. The psychological resistance to leaving the cup on its side (since it can’t stand up on its own) on the table, in case that last drip of water leaks out, is – oddly perhaps – fairly high. Especially when in company, people just don’t do it, whereas they’ll happily leave empty coffee cups and screwed-up cake wrappers on the tables. (I spent a lot of time in the Judge Business School, in Cambridge, where the Common Room – below right – had a water cooler using cone cups. It was rare to find them left on the tables, but common to find other litter.)
How could this type of design thinking be used in more situations to guide people into better behaviour? Littering seems an obvious theme to target, but also perhaps energy waste? Can devices which show us our energy usage in real time, such as the Wattson, really change people’s behaviour, or is it better to embarrass them into change? Roadside CO2-readers which flash up to you (and other drivers) just how much damage you’re doing to the environment?
Cheers Dan. I was going to email you about this, but you beat me to it
Interesting point, but I can’t stand those little cone cups. They’re so awkward.
I know what you mean, Scott, but I guess they ‘work’(and are cheap). On the other hand, because they’re inherently unstable, they can’t be re-purposed as pen/paintbrush/screwdriver/etc holders as normal flat-bottomed cups can.
Though you could use the cone cups to trap pheasants (and probably chickens) as detailed in Roald Dahl’s Champion of the World!
[...] (It’s not clear whether there were individual meters so tenants could see each other’s consumption – that kind of “control by embarrassment“, or social pressure, may be effective in this free-rider or unequal contribution situation.) [...]
[...] As with cone cups and wire-mesh bins, the success of the design in reducing the ‘undesirable’ behaviour must be down to people’s (conscious or otherwise) antipathy to an immediate ‘messy’ consequence of their actions. If you throw a cigarette butt on the ground straight-off, you can immediately forget about it. If you put it on top of a flat-topped bin, you can also immediately forget about it. But putting it on a sloping bin top and seeing it (or imagining it) falling off onto the ground somehow draws attention to your actions, just as leaving a paper cone cup with some liquid spilling out onto the table is rarely done, but leaving a conventional flat-bottomed paper cup is very common. [...]