Industrial design: Human-object interaction

1. Industrial design: Human-object interaction Week 5.1

2. Today’s Questions • Is the problematic behavioursstemming from poor designs? • Can the desired behaviours be helped through better designed products? (We leave designing of messages to Week 7.2.)

3. Confession • I have a problem with doors. • How many of you have seen a kid struggle to open an plane’s toilet door?

4. And I’m not the only one. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgstON22SbY

5. It turns out that there are many bad designs in the world • http://www.boredpanda.com/architecture-design-fails-accidents-waiting-to-happen/

6. Implications of bad designs • Emotional annoyance • Resistance to usage • Home accidents (I melted my pot) • Car accidents • Plane crashes Trivial (?) Disastrous!

7. Remember this logo?

8. Well, it’s not the only one out there

9. My first laptop • Had a really stupid design. Can you spot it?

10. But wait… • It’s easy to criticize bad designs, and laugh about them. • But that’s not the point of this class. • We want to know how design can influence behavioural change. • Hence we must first identify the behaviourto be changed.

11. Important! • We are concerned with “behavior” here, not affect or cognition. • We know poor lighting  depressed mood. The solution is therefore better lighting. But this has nothing to do with BEHAVIOURAL design.

12. How does design change behaviours? • Affect regulation: Promotes positive or alleviates negative affect • Cognitive reminders: Makes constructs more accessible (“priming”) • Affordances: Facilitates or discourages natural tendencies

13. Affect regulation

14. Increase positive affect • The piano stairs (Stockholm): https://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en-GB&v=2lXh2n0aPyw&gl=SG

15. Decrease negative affect • Ebola outbreak: Villagers were scared to go for free screening • They heard about horror stories, from those who returned from screening, how “strange men in white suits would take them away”.

17. Cognitive reminders (“Priming”)

18. Product positioning • Marketers pay a premium for products to be placed at eye level. Why? • “Eye level is buy level”

19. Checkout counters • You buy because it’s there.

20. Swing gates • Why do they only swing in one direction? • To keep you in till you walk the aisles

21. Road safety • Notice anything unusual?

22. Road safety Why does L work better than R?

23. Facilitating or inhibiting natural tendencies

24. Affordances • A relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. • The plate or button affords pushing, while the bar or handle affords pulling.

25. What determines affordances? • The qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting

26. Spatial mappings • Which stove top design is easier to operate? • When we say something “intuitive” to use, what we really mean is ease of processing

27. Spatial representations • Our sense of space is derived from a reference point, usually ourselves • Left, right, up, down only makes sense if there is a reference point • There is no left without right, no up without down.

28. The problem • Our reference point can change, depending on: • Who we are talking to • Our intentions

29. Affordances can be… Used Misused What are these used for? How would you redesign this to change littering behaviour?

30. Supermarket carts and baskets • Big carts = more purchases • You buy more because you can buy more, not because you really need the extra. • Don’t believe? Try making a shopping list, and compare with what you eventually buy. • Same with dinner plates (more about it on Week 10.2)

31. -36% crashes Road safety Why does it work?

32. Road safety • Note the diagonal speed breakers Why does it work?

33. What sort of natural behaviouris facilitated?

34. Crowd control This works This doesn’t work (Delhi) This didn’t work for many years (Singapore)

36. Ashoka has many ill-designed features • My bedroom • My bathroom • My kitchen • My shoe cabinet & fire safety • The ‘gym’ in the Faculty Residence • Men’s toilet in AC Block • Light switches in classrooms • The lattice structure • The stairwell at the Admin Block

37. Reminder: Your photo project • Some of these design features trigger (or sustain) undesirable behaviours. • We will discuss more in Week 8.2. • I will give you one example now.

38. What’s wrong with the stairwell? • Go take a look at the stairwell at the admin block. Observe how people move at different times of the day. • I will tell you why the design is illogical next class.

39. Office design You are in the creative industry. You want your co-workers to interact more, even if it has nothing to do with work. Where will you build your pantry?

40. You are allowed to dismantle some workspaces to accommodate your pantry.

41. Behavioural design • A good design leverages on human psychology. • The examples cited here target behavioural change at an individual level (irrespective of social norms). • We don’t yet know how would the principles interact with social norms?

42. Take home messages • What appears to be intractable “bad” behaviourscan sometimes be changed by simply re-designing existing products • Design problems can lead to behavioural problems. • So the solution is to design products that tap on how our brains are naturally ‘designed’