Though as well as an example of the ’shortcut user’, it could also suggest a ‘thoughtful user’. I have in mind someone who is aware of the rational arguments (in the this instance, everyone benefits if we all keep off the grass). But implicity poses a thoughtful counter argument. (‘Why don’t urban designers lay paths where people actually want to go?)

What interests me most in this posting is the potential for practical application to real world problems. And not just by policy makers and administrators, but ordinary ‘users’. Can it offer tools which help us make evidence-based judgements about which practical options are available? And then assist us to reach consensus?

great, now every time someone says he’s into “design with intent” or “persuasive design”, my mind cannot help but play the ole’ Elton John tape (“He’s a pin-/ ball/ wizard/ …”). Also, this is probably the official first case of benign misinterpretation/misattribution . When I was comparing human behaviour to a game of “Marble Madness”, I was decidedly *not* drawing an analogy between behaviour and pinball (or billard, for that matter). The point here is that in Marble Madness, you have some “inner” control about the direction and force of the ball’s movement (think a pinball that “decides” to countersteer a push into one direction). So like Lewin’s formula (Behaviour is the function of a subject and its environment), its the interplay of outer and inner forces from which the final perceivable course of action emerges.

That being said, your three types seem less like three different – well, scientific paradigms? conceptual metaphors? – than a sort of three-step upward curve of more and more inner processing of outer forces. Or is it three different levels at which you might reach a person, or three different kinds of states in which we all find ourselves, or three different kinds of behaviour (one group of very automatized ones, one with low and one with high cognitive involvement) and the trick is to find out which state the user is in right now, or which kind of behaviour you’re likely addressing?

If your goal is really to describe a certain kind of scientific paradigms of human behaviour, I think there are four or so in 20th/post 20th century science: Behaviorism, with a markedly mechanistic view of human behaviour (closest to your “pinball”), next up the “cognitive revolution” sporting a “computational theory of the mind”, conceiving of us all as disembodied, heartless Mr. Spocks (this is CogSci up to the mid-1990s at least, all of traditional economics, and most of 20th century macro sociology), nat the same time, a strong qualitative undercurrent that talks of meaning, interpretation, experience, action, intentions, and finally the current new wave of CogSci that blend the two and make everything much more messy and complex, introducing emotion, the body, social interaction etc. into the rational model. My 2c.