Designing for Human Behaviour.
Part 6
Designing for Human Behaviour: Unveiling Predictable Irrationality and Bridging the Gap Between Expected and Actual Behaviour.
The primary challenge with designing those incredible spaces that people will be drawn to, love, and enjoy is ensuring the right blend of volumes, textures, natural light, artificial light, furniture, etc., that will attract people to the space and allow them to function naturally and comfortably.
The primary obstacle, however, to achieving these exact measurable patterns of design is often the cognitive bias that exists with both client and designer, called “the curse of knowledge,” i.e., the difficulty in thinking about a problem from the perspective of actual behaviour versus expected behaviour, as real behaviour is often completely irrational.
We assume that people make rational decisions, but behavioural science shows us that this is far from the truth. How people think they will behave, or even say they will behave, and how they actually behave within certain environments or conditions are often severely misaligned. Our evolutionary hardwiring, i.e., the way we process information, is full of biases and miscalculations, leading to errors in our thought processes and irrational decisions, which, in turn, lead to irrational behaviours.
The result of this misalignment is that it leads us to design solutions that may seem completely correct on paper but are completely incorrect for the specific human behaviours in specific environments. As mentioned in a prior newsletter, the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, a Behavioural Psychologist, explains in depth why people behave so irrationally, but also that this measure of behaviour is not random but in fact repetitive and predictable.
To design a successful human experience, we thus often have to design imperfect spaces for perfect human engagement.
Patterns of Behaviour
As specialist hospitality designers, we are less interested in why people do what they do and more interested simply in what they do repeatedly. We have established through observations over many years, specifically within our narrow field of hospitality design, that the actions and attitudes of people within specific environments often correlate to certain exact patterns that can be measured and documented for a repetitive pattern or set of design solutions. Apart from the evolutionary hardwiring mentioned earlier, these patterns are also partly informed by culture, ergonomics, economy, and the herd effect, i.e., what others are doing within the same environment.
Designing for human behaviour can thus at least partly bridge the gap between actions, i.e., "what we think people will do and what they actually do" (or prefer to do), and the time needed to get to those correct answers for the most optimal design solution—"a gap that is at the core of every design problem."
Apart from the obvious health benefits of designing for human behavioural patterns, this approach is also fundamentally important for the success of any commercial enterprise.
Credits:
Kelly, L. What is Behavioural Design? March 2021.
Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational. 2008
Evolutionary Hardwiring.
More in the next Article.
We apply predictive human behavioural knowledge to design and curate
highly successful social spaces within the built environment.
Follow us on: LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube
© 2022 COOOP ™. All rights reserved.
Comments