User Psychology | Design with Intent

Persuasive 2009

11-03-2009

Design with Intent, DwI Method, Interaction design, PhD, Site Announcements, Speakers' Corner, Techniques of persuasion, US, User Psychology

UPDATED (7 April): Here’s an ‘author version preprint’ of the paper, Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method [PDF, 1.6MB]. At some point soon this version of the paper will downloadable from Brunel’s research archive, while the ‘proper’ version will be available in the ACM Digital Library. ACM requires me to state the following alongside the link to the preprint:

© ACM, 2009. This is the authors’ version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version will be published in Proceedings of Persuasive 2009: Fourth International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Claremont, CA, 26-29 April 2009, ACM Digital Library. ISBN 978-1-60558-376-1.

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Claremont Graduate University - photo by Katherine H on Flickr

I’m pleased to announce that a paper I submitted to Persuasive 2009, at the Claremont Colleges, California (26-29th April) has been accepted, so I’ll be presenting ‘Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method’ on Monday 27th April.

The paper builds on the ideas I presented at Persuasive 2008 (the paper), detailing the development of the ‘Design with Intent Method‘, a ‘suggestion tool’ for designers faced with briefs involving influencing user behaviour, and the results of a series of pilot studies to test the usability of the method.

At the time of submitting the paper (New Year’s Eve, 6pm!), the pilot studies were still going on (poor planning by me), so (as the reviewers noted!) the paper’s conclusions are fairly weak, and there are quite a few revisions I need to make before submitting the final version: the next couple of weeks are going to require some fairly intense work in that vein. But it’s great to have been accepted: Persuasive 2008 was fantastic, incredibly useful in terms of meeting people and getting feedback on the proposed research, and I’m hoping 2009 will be just as good. The big-name speakers include BJ Fogg, originator of the Persuasive Technology field, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (of ‘Flow‘ fame), and Brenda Laurel (author of Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, which I’ll admit I haven’t yet got round to reading, largely because of Nigel Cross’s review, but maybe I should find the time!). As always, though, it’s the chance to talk to and get to know other people working on similar problems, or offering a different point of view on the field, which is especially interesting.

The proceedings are going to be published by the ACM (last year’s were published by Springer), but I don’t have any more details at this stage. I’ll post a preprint version of the paper here once it’s ready, of course.

Many thanks to my co-authors: my supervisors Professor David Harrison (Brunel) and Professor Neville Stanton (Southampton) for their help, and Tim Holley whose insights into improving and using the method were extremely useful. Thanks too to all the other pilot study participants, and also to the Royal Academy of Engineering, who very kindly awarded an international travel grant to help me attend the conference. I am aware of the hypocrisy of flying halfway round the world to talk (in part) about influencing more environmentally friendly behaviour, and the cognitive dissonance is headache-inducing. Why there aren’t more live, online academic conferences, I don’t know.

Here are the abstract and ACM meta-stuff for the paper:

Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method
Dan Lockton¹, David Harrison¹, Tim Holley², Neville A. Stanton³
¹Cleaner Electronics Research Group, Brunel Design, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
²Product Design Programme, Brunel Design, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
³School of Civil Engineering & the Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT
Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is described in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior.

Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems – human factors, software psychology. H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI)]: User Interfaces – theory and methods, user-centered design.
General Terms
Design, Human Factors.
Keywords
Persuasive technology, behavior change, sustainability, energy, interaction design, design methods, innovation methods.

On other matters, I’m proud to say that Planetizen, the urban design and planning community and blog has named Design with Intent one of its Top 10 Websites for 2009 – a nice accolade given how broad the scope here is beyond urbanism and architecture! Some of the other websites recommended are well worth a deeper read – On the Commons, Digital Urban, Infranet Lab and Gapminder stood out for me.

Adding that Planetizen accolade to Six Revisions’ inclusion of the blog in its ’20 websites to help you master user interface design’, it’s clear that, if nothing else, the themes we cover here really do meander about over conventional disciplinary boundaries. It’s all about people interacting with designed systems, whether they’re concrete plazas, electric kettles or confirmation dialogues, and I’d like to think the similarities are worth investigating.

Photo of Claremont Graduate University by Katherine H on Flickr

Eight design patterns for errorproofing

By: Dan

27-02-2009

Choice Architecture, Defaults, Design, Design engineering, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Do artifacts have politics?, DwI Method, Engineering design, Forcing functions, Friction, Good design, Health and safety, Interaction design, Lock-in, Mistake-proofing, Poka-yoke, Product design, Usability, User Psychology

Go straight to the patterns

One view of influencing user behaviour – what I’ve called the ‘errorproofing lens’ – treats a user’s interaction with a system as a set of defined target behaviour routes which the designer wants the user to follow, with deviations from those routes being treated as ‘errors’. Design can help avoid the errors, either by making it easier for users to work without making errors, or by making the errors impossible in the first place (a defensive design approach).

That’s fairly obvious, and it’s a key part of interaction design, usability and human factors practice, much of its influence in the design profession coming from Don Norman’s seminal Design of Everyday Things. It’s often the view on influencing user behaviour found in health & safety-related design, medical device design and manufacturing engineering (as poka-yoke): where, as far as possible, one really doesn’t want errors to occur at all (Shingo’s zero defects). Learning through trial-and-error exploration of the interface might be great for, say, Kai’s Power Tools, but a bad idea for a dialysis machine or the control room of a nuclear power station.

It’s worth noting a (the?) key difference between an errorproofing approach and some other views of influencing user behaviour, such as Persuasive Technology: persuasion implies attitude change leading to the target behaviour, while errorproofing doesn’t care whether or not the user’s attitude changes, as long as the target behaviour is met. Attitude change might be an effect of the errorproofing, but it doesn’t have to be. If I find I can’t start a milling machine until the guard is in place, the target behaviour (I put the guard in place before pressing the switch) is achieved regardless of whether my attitude to safety changes. It might do, though: the act of realising that the guard needs to be in place, and why, may well cause safety to be on my mind consciously. Then again, it might do the opposite: e.g. the steering wheel spike argument. The distinction between whether the behaviour change is mindful or not is something I tried to capture with the behaviour change barometer.

Making it easier for users to avoid errors – whether through warnings, choice of defaults, confirmation dialogues and so on – is slightly ‘softer’ than actual forcing the user to conform, and does perhaps offer the chance to relay some information about the reasoning behind the measure. But the philosophy behind all of these is, inevitably “we know what’s best”: a dose of paternalism, the degree of constraint determining the ‘libertarian’ prefix. The fact that all of us can probably think of everyday examples where we constantly have to change a setting from its default, or a confirmation dialogue slows us down (process friction), suggests that simple errorproofing cannot stand in for an intelligent process of understanding the user.

On with the patterns, then: there’s nothing new here, but hopefully seeing the patterns side by side allows an interesting and useful comparison. Defaults and Interlock are the two best ‘inspirations’ I think, in terms of using these errorproofing patterns to innovate concepts for influencing user behaviour in other fields. There will be a lot more to say about each pattern (further classification, and what kinds of behaviour change each is especially applicable to) in the near future as I gradually progress with this project.

Defaults

“What happens if I leave the settings how they are?”

■ Choose ‘good’ default settings and options, since many users will stick with them, and only change them if they feel they really need to (see Rajiv Shah’s work, and Thaler & Sunstein)

■ How easy or hard it is to change settings, find other options, and undo mistakes also contributes to user behaviour here

Default print quality settings Donor card

Examples: With most printer installations, the default print quality is usually not ‘Draft’, even though this would save users time, ink and money.
In the UK, organ donation is ‘opt-in’: the default is that your organs will not be donated. In some countries, an ‘opt-out’ system is used, which can lead to higher rates of donation

Interlock

“That doesn’t work unless you do this first”

■ Design the system so users have to perform actions in a certain order, by preventing the next operation until the first is complete: a forcing function

■ Can be irritating or helpful depending on how much it interferes with normal user activity—e.g. seatbelt-ignition interlocks have historically been very unpopular with drivers

Interlock on microwave oven door Interlock on ATM - card returned before cash dispensed

Examples: Microwave ovens don’t work until the door is closed (for safety).
Most cash machines don’t dispense cash until you remove your card (so it’s less likely you forget it)

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Lock-in & Lock-out

■ Keep an operation going (lock-in) or prevent one being started (lock-out) – a forcing function

■ Can be helpful (e.g. for safety or improving productivity, such as preventing accidentally cancelling something) or irritating for users (e.g. diverting the user’s attention away from a task, such as unskippable DVD adverts before the movie)

Right-click disabled

Example: Some websites ‘disable’ right-clicking to try (misguidedly) to prevent visitors saving images.

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Extra step

■ Introduce an extra step, either as a confirmation (e.g. an “Are you sure?” dialogue) or a ‘speed-hump’ to slow a process down or prevent accidental errors – another forcing function. Most of the everyday poka-yokes (“useful landmines”) we looked at last year are examples of this pattern

■ Can be helpful, but if used excessively, users may learn “always click OK”

British Rail train door extra step

Example: Train door handles requiring passengers to lower the window

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Specialised affordances

■ Design elements so that they can only be used in particular contexts or arrangements

■ Format lock-in is a subset of this: making elements (parts, files, etc) intentionally incompatible with those from other manufacturers; rarely user-friendly design

Bevel corners on various media cards and disks

Example: The bevelled corner on SIM cards, memory cards and floppy disks ensures that they cannot be inserted the wrong way round

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Partial self-correction

■ Design systems which partially correct errors made by the user, or suggest a different action, but allow the user to undo or ignore the self-correction – e.g. Google’s “Did you mean…?” feature

■ An alternative to full, automatic self-correction (which does not actually influence the user’s behaviour)

Partial self-correction (with an undo) on eBay

Example: eBay self-corrects search terms identified as likely misspellings or typos, but allows users the option to ignore the correction

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Portions

■ Use the size of ‘portion’ to influence how much users consume: unit bias means that people will often perceive what they’re provided with as the ‘correct’ amount

■ Can also be used explicitly to control the amount users consume, by only releasing one portion at a time, e.g. with soap dispensers

Snack portion packs

Example: ‘Portion packs’ for snacks aim to provide customers with the ‘right’ amount of food to eat in one go

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Conditional warnings

■ Detect and provide warning feedback (audible, visual, tactile) if a condition occurs which the user would benefit from fixing (e.g. upgrading a web browser), or if the user has performed actions in a non-ideal order

■ Doesn’t force the user to take action before proceeding, so not as ‘strong’ an errorproofing method as an interlock.

Seatbelt warning light

Example: A seatbelt warning light does not force the user to buckle up, unlike a seatbelt-ignition interlock.

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Photos/screenshots by Dan Lockton except seatbelt warning image (composite of photos by Zoom Zoom and Reiver) and donor card photo by Adrienne Hart-Davis.

Designed environments as learning systems

By: Dan

11-02-2009

Architecture, Architecture & urbanism, Control, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Do artifacts have politics?, Environmental, Interaction design, Norms, Randian, Social engineering, Spatial, Urban, User Psychology

How much of designing an environment is consciously about influencing how people use it? And how much of that influence is down to users learning what the environment affords them, and acting accordingly?

The first question’s central what this blog’s been about over the last four years (with ‘products’, ‘systems’, ‘interfaces’ and so on variously standing in for ‘environment’), but many of the examples I’ve used, from anti-sit features to bathrooms and cafés designed to speed up user throughput, only reveal the architect’s (presumed) behaviour-influencing intent in hindsight, i.e. by reviewing them and trying to understand, if it isn’t obvious, what the motivation is behind a particular design feature. While there are examples where the intent is explicitly acknowledged, such as crime prevention through environmental design, and traffic management, it can still cause surprise when a behaviour-influencing agenda is revealed.

Investigating what environmental and ecological psychology have to say about this, a few months ago I came across The Organization of Spatial Stimuli, an article by Raymond G. Studer, published in 1970 [1] – it’s one of the few explicit calls for a theory of designing environments to influence user behaviour, and it raises some interesting issues:

“The nature of the environmental designer’s problem is this: A behavioral system has been specified (within the constraints imposed by the particular human participants and by the goals of the organization of which they are members.) The participants are not presently emitting the specified behaviors, otherwise there would be no problem. It is necessary that they do emit these behaviors if their individual and collective goals are to be realized. The problem then is to bring about the acquisition or modification of behaviors towards the specified states (without in any way jeopardizing their general well-being in the process). Such a change in state we call learning. Designed environments are basically learning systems, arranged to bring about and maintain specified behavioral topologies. Viewed as such, stimulus organization becomes a more clearly directed task. The question then becomes not how can stimuli be arranged to stimulate, but how can stimuli be arranged to bring about a requisite state of behavioral affairs.
…
[E]vents which have traditionally been regarded as the ends in the design process, e.g. pleasant, exciting, stimulating, comfortable, the participant’s likes and dislikes, should be reclassified. They are not ends at all, but valuable means which should be skilfully ordered to direct a more appropriate over-all behavioral texture. They are members of a class of (designed environmental) reinforcers. These aspects must be identified before behavioral effects of the designed environment can be fully understood.”

Now, I think it’s probably rare nowadays for architects or designers to talk of design features as ‘stimuli’, even if they are intended to influence behaviour. Operant conditioning and B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism are less fashionable than they once were. But the “designed environments are learning systems” point Studer makes can well be applied beyond simply ‘reinforcing’ particular behaviours.

Think how powerful social norms and even framing can be at influencing our behaviour in environments – the sober environment of a law court gives (most of) us a different range of perceived affordances to our own living room (social norms, mediated by architecture) – and that’s surely something we learn. Frank Lloyd Wright intentionally designed dark, narrow corridors leading to large, bright open rooms (e.g. in the Yamamura House) so that the contrast – and people’s experience – was heightened (framing, of a sort) – but this effect would probably be lessened by repeated exposure. It still influenced user behaviour though, even if only the first few times, but the memory of the effect that such a room had those first few times probably lasted a lifetime. Clearly, the process of forming a mental model about how to use a product, or how to behave in an environment, or how to behave socially, is about learning, and the design of the systems around us does educate us, in one way or another.

Stewart Brand’s classic How Buildings Learn (watch the series too) perhaps suggests (among other insights) an extension of the concept: if, when we learn what our environment affords us, this no longer suits our needs, the best architecture may be that which we can adapt, rather than being constrained by the behavioural assumptions designed into our environments by history.

I’m not an architect, though, or a planner, and – as I’ve mentioned a few times on the blog – it would be very interesting to know, from people who are: to what extent are notions of influencing behaviour taught as part of architectural training? This series of discussion board posts suggests that the issue is definitely there for architecture students, but is it framed as a conscious, positive process (e.g. “funnel pedestrians past the shops”), a reactionary one (e.g. “use pebbled paving to make it painful for hippies to congregate“), one of educating users through architectural features (as in Studer’s suggestion), or as something else entirely?

[1] Studer, R.G. ‘The Organization of Spatial Stimuli.’ In Pastalan, L.A. and Carson, D.H. (eds.), Spatial Behavior of Older People. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1970.

Dan Lockton

Angular measure

By: Dan

06-02-2009

Design, Design with Intent, Designers, Gadgets, Good design, Innovation, Interaction design, Product design, Sustainability, Usability, User Psychology

OXO Good Grips Mini Angled Measuring Jug

A few years ago I went to a talk at the RCA by Alex Lee, president of OXO International. Apart from a statistic about how many bagel-slicing finger-chopping accidents happen each year in New York city, what stuck in my mind were the angled measuring jugs he showed us, part of the well-known Good Grips range of inclusively designed kitchen utensils.

The clever angled measuring scale – easily visible from above, as the jug is filled – seems such an obvious idea. As the patents (US 6,263,732; US 6,543,284) put it:

The indicia on an upwardly directed surface of the at least one ramp allows a user to look downwardly into the measuring cup to visually detect the volume level of the contents in the measuring cup, thereby eliminating the need to look horizontally at the cup at eye level.

OXO Good Grips Mini Angled Measuring Jug

Now, this is an extremely simple way to improve the process of using a measuring cup / jug. It’s good if you find it hard to bend down to look at the side of the vessel. It’s helpful if you’re standing over it, pouring stuff into it. It reduces parallax error – so potentially improving accuracy – and it also, simply, makes it easier to be accurate.

In this sense, then, improved / easier-to-read scales can influence user behaviour. I guess that’s obvious: if it’s easy to use something in a particular way, it’s more likely that it will be used that way. It’s a persuasive interface, in an extremely simple form.

Kenwood JK450/455 kettle So, the question is, if I build an electric kettle with an angled scale like this, will it make it more likely that people use it more efficiently, i.e. fill it with the amount of water they need? If you’re standing with the kettle under the tap, putting water in, is this kind of angled scale going to make it easier to put the right amount in?

Kenwood sells a kettle which has angled scale markings, the JK450/455 (right), though they’re implemented differently to (and more cheaply than) the OXO method, simply being printed on the side of the kettle body. It’s still a clever idea. This review suggests an energy saving of around 10% compared with Kenwood’s claimed “up to 35%” but of course this saving very much depends on how inefficient the user was previously.

I think something along the lines of either the OXO or Kenwood designs (but not infringing the patents!) is worth an extended trial later this year – watch this space.

OXO Good Grips Mini Angled Measuring Jug
Thanks to Michael for the Buckfast.

Heating debate

By: Dan

01-02-2009

Architecture & urbanism, Black box, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designers, Environmental, Good design, Interaction design, Service design, Sustainability, Technology, Usability, User Psychology

Thermostat with friend Central heating systems have interfaces, and many of us interact with them every day, even if only by experiencing their effects.

But there’s a lot of room for improvement. They’re systems where (unlike, say, a car) we don’t generally get instantaneous feedback on the changes we make to settings or the interactions we have with the interface. It’s a slow feedback loop. We don’t necessarily have correct mental models of how they work, yet the systems cost us (a lot of) money. How effectively do we use them? Around 60% of UK domestic energy use goes on space heating, and 24% on water heating. (See this Building Research Establishment report [PDF] for more detailed breakdowns.) That 84% cost me and my girlfriend £430 last year. It’s worth thinking about from a financial point of view, regardless of the environmental aspects.

Frankie Roberto and colleagues at Rattle Research have carried out a brilliant exercise in exploratory design thinking about central heating*:

Heating systems are something we all interact with, especially in the depths of winter where we depend on them, and yet there seems to have been very little evolution in the design of their interfaces. What’s more, with an ever increasing focus on energy efficiency, both from an environmental and economic standpoint, there’s a need for heating systems and their interfaces to be smarter, more efficient and transparent.

Design Monday #1 – Central Heating (short version) from Rattle on Vimeo.

Read the full post.

The Rattle team think through existing systems and consider a number of possible revisions to improve the way that information is presented to users, and the level of control that it might be useful for users to have. This is a great piece of work, impressive and very thorough, and it’s interesting to see how their thinking evolved: I get the impression that (as service designers) they’re a lot more focused on users’ needs than the designers of many heating systems are. It’s also an exciting thing for a design company to be able to take time to address problems outside their immediate sphere, since they’re bringing a whole new level of domain expertise to it.

The ‘I’m working’ indicator is a really good idea – it reminds me of some higher-end car tyre air pumps at petrol stations where you can just set the pressure you want to achieve, and the pump cuts out (and alerts you) when it reaches it. But the idea of doing away with the ‘desired temperature’ setting and just having warmer/colder is also interesting – “forc[ing] people to always make decisions based upon how they’re feeling right now”.

Equally the ‘shift to service’ approach of having an API and making clever use of it has a big potential to help in energy saving (and cost saving for the user), especially if the usage data were (anonymised or otherwise) available for analysis. Just being able to tell users “it’s costing you £X more to heat your home than it does for a similar family in a similar house down the road – if you insulated better you could save £X every month” would be an interesting mechanism for persuasion. As with so many things, it relies on having that API or other interface available in the first place…

Folk theory of thermostats

The ‘folk theory of thermostats’ which Frankie mentions, popularised in Don Norman’s The Psychology / Design of Everday Things, has long intrigued me:

There are two commonly held folk theories about thermostats: the timer theory and the valve theory. The timer theory proposes that the thermostat simply controls the relative proportion of time that the device stays on. Set the thermostat midway, and the device is on about half the time; set it all the way up and the device is on all the time. Hence, to heat or cool something most quickly, set the thermostat so that the device is on all the time. The valve theory proposes that the thermostat controls how much heat (or cold) comes out of the device. Turn the thermostat all the way up, and you get the maximum heating or cooling. The correct story is that the thermostat is just an on-off switch. Setting the thermostat at one extreme cannot affect how long it takes to reach the desired temperature.

People’s mental models of heating systems are often stereotyped or played with (as we’ve discussed before here), but as Willett Kempton found out in a classic study, there are some nuanced versions of the theories, which, in practice, are perhaps not as silly as Norman suggests. People satisfice.

Say you come in from outdoors, and are cold. Because of the delay in your exposed skin warming up to room temperature, it surely does warm you more quickly if you stand near something that’s hotter than you actually want to be, e.g. a log fire / stove. So the heuristic of ‘turning up the heat to more than you need, in order to feel warmer more quickly’ is pretty understandable, especially when the temperature controlling the thermostat is the temperature of the thermocouple/probe/whatever and not actually the body temperature of the users themselves. (That would be a good innovation in itself, of course!) Am I wrong?

Given that a lot of people do try to control heating systems as if they worked on the valve model, would it be sensible to develop one which did? Do they already exist?

*Rattle’s second ‘Design Monday’ session, on ‘Lunch’, is also well worth a look.

Stuff that matters: Unpicking the pyramid

By: Dan

14-01-2009

Control, Democracy of innovation, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Do artifacts have politics?, Education, Entropy, Environmental, Essays, Freedom to tinker, Future, Good design, Independence, Innovation, Norms, Sustainability, Technology policy, Trimtab, User Psychology, Vague rhetoric, Your property

Most things are unnecessary. Most products, most consumption, most politics, most writing, most research, most jobs, most beliefs even, just aren’t useful, for some scope of ‘useful’.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but most of our civilisation seems to rely on the idea that “someone else will sort it out”, whether that’s providing us with food or energy or money or justice or a sense of pride or a world for our grandchildren to live in. We pay the politicians who are best at lying to us because we don’t want to have to think about problems. We bail out banks in one enormous spasm of cognitive dissonance. We pay ‘those scientists’ to solve things for us and them hate them when they tell us we need to change what we’re doing. We pay for new things because we can’t fix the old ones and then our children pay for the waste.

Economically, ecologically, ethically, we have mortgaged the planet. We’ve mortgaged our future in order to get what we have now, but the debt doesn’t die with us. On this model, the future is one vast pyramid scheme stretching out of sight. We’ve outsourced functions we don’t even realise we don’t need to people and organisations of whom we have no understanding. Worse, we’ve outsourced the functions we do need too, and we can’t tell the difference.

Maybe that’s just being human. But so is learning and tool-making. We must be able to do better than we are. John R. Ehrenfeld’s Sustainability by Design, which I’m reading at present, explores the idea that reducing unsustainability will not create sustainability, which ought to be pretty fundamental to how we think about these issues: going more slowly towards the cliff edge does not mean changing direction.

I’m especially inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s “Work on stuff that matters” advice. If we go back to the ‘most things are unnecessary’ idea, the plan must be to work on things that are really useful, that will really advance things. There is little excuse for not trying to do something useful. It sounds ruthless, and it does have the risk of immediately putting us on the defensive (“I am doing something that matters…”).

The idea I can’t get out of my head is that if we took more responsibility for things (i.e. progressively stopped outsourcing everything to others as in paragraphs 2 and 3 above, and actively learned how to do them ourselves), this would make a massive difference in the long run. We’d be independent from those future generations we’re currently recruiting into our pyramid scheme before they even know about it. We’d all of us be empowered to understand and participate and create and make and generate a world where we have perspicacity, where we can perceive the affordances that different options will give us in future and make useful decisions based on an appreciation of the longer term impacts.

An large part of it is being able to understand consequences and implications of our actions and how we are affected, and in turn affect, the situations we’re in – people around us, the environment, the wider world. Where does this water I’m wasting come from? Where does it go? How much does Google know about me? Why? How does a bank make its money? How can I influence a new law? What do all those civil servants do? How was my food produced? Why is public transport so expensive? Would I be able to survive if X or Y happened? Why not? What things that I do everyday are wasteful of my time and money? How much is the purchase of item Z going to cost me over the next year? What will happen when it breaks? Can I fix it? Why not? And so on.

You might think we need more transparency of the power structures and infrastructures around us – and we do – but I prefer to think of the solution as being tooling us up in parallel: we need to have the ability to understand what we can see inside, and focus on what’s actually useful/necessary and what isn’t. Our attention is valuable and we mustn’t waste it.

How can all that be taught?

I remember writing down as a teenager, in some lesson or other, “What we need is a school subject called How and why things are, and how they operate.” Now, that’s broad enough that probably all existing academic subjects would lay claim to part of it. So maybe I’m really calling for a higher overall standard of education.

But the devices and systems we encounter in everyday life, the structures around us, can also help, by being designed to show us (and each other) what they’re doing, whether that’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (or perhaps ‘useful’ or not), and what we can do to improve their performance. And by influencing the way we use them, whether nudging, persuading or preventing us getting it wrong in the first place, we can learn as we use. Everyday life can be a constructionist learning process.

This all feeds into the idea of ‘Design for Independence’:

Reducing society’s resource dependence
Reducing vulnerable users’ dependence on other people
Reducing users’ dependence on ‘experts’ to understand and modify the technology they own.

One day I’ll develop this further as an idea – it’s along the lines of Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller – but there’s a lot of other work to do first. I hope it’s stuff that matters.

Dan Lockton

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Persuasive 2009