Everyone wants you to change your habits

‘Design for Intent‘ is increasingly attracting attention. And it is coming out of the traditional context of Brand research & Communication. From new technology offerings to lifestyle products, everyone wants you to adapt yourself to their new proposed ‘way’ of doing things. Some of these are very forced and while the others are more subtle. In your everyday life there are so many things you do as a part of routine and interestingly these (often boring) routines or chores disappear from your consciousness as you include them in your sub-conscious patterns.

Designers like Naoto Fukasawa have taken the User Centered Design methods a step further. For him, the role of design is not just ease of use but ‘invisibility’. In other words, the design should fit so well with user needs and expectations that it “dissolves into behavior.” The user is unaware of the choices the designer has made for her. In fact, the user should be unaware of the existence of the designer at all.

In this video from the Department of Captology at Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab, there are powerful subliminal ways to modify the behavioral patterns by introducing carefully designed stimuli in your everyday consciousness.

‘In another rather interesting example, a Behavioral Architecture firm in Mumbai India, called ‘Final Mile’ have found tremendous success in modifying the negligent behavior of commuters illegally crossing over unguarded rail tracks resulting in alarming rise in fatal run-over deaths. They have installed interesting visual signs on the tracks and made an arrangement with the railways to change the sound of the train whistle to a distinct pattern. You can find a detailed account of the experiment featured on the Boston Globe.

Given the way these signals are used by the designers, exploiting how our neuro-cognitive system is wired, can be extremely powerful in modifying the behavior. And the impact can be dramatic and paced at will. With so much power over the collective minds, designers need to be extremely careful and responsible about what their intervention is going to result into. Hope the new edge designers are reading this bit…