Hi all,

I fail to understand how emotion and other fundamental human traits, aren't recognized as critical, first and foremost, in every discipline.

We build solutions, whether they are online, material products, services, for other people. How can we design, regardless of your title or approach, unless we understand the essence of what makes us human?

We aren't machines; yet many continue to design and build, (less so today than in the past five years) like developers write code. If x=1 then do this. If x=2 then do this.

Human beings are far more complex and unpredictable. (Prior to my career in Information Architecture, I was a Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapist working with people with acquired brain injuries, helping people learn to walk and speak again.) We are social animals; we need to connect with other people in real and meaningful ways.

As Robert points out...

"...it is interesting to find designers who are very comfortable, in fact insistent, on this holistic approach and yet spooked by the idea that we are in the 'behavior business..."

(A great resource on this notion is "A Whole New Mind - Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future" by Daniel H. Pink.)

I've never understood, or cared, about the "defining the damn thing" arguments b/c ultimately the only ones who care about this discussion are those within the profession.

In fact, I would argue that if we spent less time arguing over who has the better approach, and spent more time learning from one another about how we tackle projects, we'd advance the conversation in every discipline, making all stronger as a result.

In short, all IT / design problems, fundamentally, are people problems. Learn to communicate and understand the people for whom you are designing, and those with whom you are working; and the rest will evolve through the sharing of experiences and knowledge to create great design/products/services.

My two cents...
Jeff

Numbers-based people (read: most clients) love to see inputs that are plugged into a system in order to produce profitable outputs. The problem you describe is the same problem applied cultural anthropologists have: your process isn't based on math like engineering or physics. Some in anthropology think along the same lines as yourself, and champion a more robust, explicit procedure/model for their work. Other's think (and I agree) that human behavior is so complex that any model is guaranteed to be incomplete. However, once a model (incomplete or no) exists people become comfortable with the results, even though the model that produced them might be faulty.

I am an engineer myself so my only familiarity with interaction design is with the designers at the firm I work for, however it does seem that there is enormous overlap between IXD and cultural anthropology

It strikes me that this issue may be at the core of why we don't always get the respect we feel like we deserve in the business community. It is confusing to them: here we are pushing the value of ethno, design research, and consumer insights, and yet we don't really have a solid behavioral model to plug our insights into. Maybe we would spend less time trying to explain the business value of what we do if we made this model a much more explicit part of our approach and took some more responsibility for the ways in which we do (and don't) influence behavior?

Hello,
I didn't think you stated the behavior issue strong enough. I even felt half way through Sunday that I was sitting in more conversations about art then I was about interaction design. I realized at that time that maybe I picked the wrong presentations. However, I had the feeling that this year was leaning heaviliy toward the artist, architect, and anthropologist.

There were talks trying to distinguish interaction design from HCI and UI design as if they were doing something else. I was educated as an Industrial Engineer and Human Factors and Ergonomics Engineer. I have spent 14 years doing interaction design for highly complex systems and cannot imagine how you can design without understanding human behavior and human abilities (both cognition and biomechanics). If I do not incorporate this in the designs I have a less than optimal solution.

Thank you for the reference to the slides and the fabulous examples of influencing behavior through design. Maybe I can follow you next time and present on facilitating cognition through design. Then they won't just mutter about behavior as a medium - they will complain that the concerns of people are taking over the interaction design conference ... lol

mTp

Came by to say you had a great talk, I loved your images and references... and the great way it was all integrated with your talk.

I totally agree that what we do is about people behavior, but for many of us it is also about technology, technology that should serve or work for people. At Frog you may be doing a wider variety of products, some are not technology related, but for me, working in a software company and many like me who came to the conference, our work is a lot about technology. The goal, as I see it is behavior, selecting the road there requires understanding technology.
I wander though where do you stand regarding the notion of "making" that also came up at the conference. For me to understand people and behavior is crucial for our profession while making (and technology) are tools or means to achieve the "best we can" solution...

As a designer based in Vancouver I am disappointed that I somehow missed IxDA and your talk. Your comments on designing behavior have struck a cord. I can understand how the notion of designing behavior will throw many off - set them to seeing warning blinkers. I wonder, however, if perhaps this notion would be better understood if you used as the starting point the objects/systems themselves and not the designer. Peter Paul Verbeek's recent work looks beyond the idea of technology's role as one to serve and work for us and proposes to define the ethics of objects themselves. If objects/ technology is understood to be embodied with ethics, if we understand that the user and the designer have reciprocal relationships with the things used and designed perhaps the notion that a god stance is associated with "designing behavior" can be left behind.

Robert, wish I could have been there to hear you speak.

I, too, am surprised that many designers are resistant to the idea of "designing for behaviors." Yet, having attended last year's Ixda conference, it seems expected. At the end of last year's conference, there was a big hoorah, when someone stated that we're finally coming together at a conference where we don't have to talk about definitions, especially explaining to others what it is that we do. The audience went wild. More so than the content of the conference, the novelty lied in the coming together of like-minded people.

Yet I was a bit disappointed. If it were an engineering conference, I might have understood the big hoorah. But design is perplexing and wonderful in that there is no set subject matter and definition. Hence, to your point, the medium of behavior could be applied to anything. I found this article particularly interesting (you may already be familiar with it). It's an article from the NYTimes that came out a while ago. In the spirit of Project M, a group of people wanted to address the problems of sanitation in Africa - how people don't feel the need to wash their hands after using the bathroom. They looked to marketing techniques derived from research done at places like Proctor & Gamble. It is a story of modifying consumer behavior habits, which we are capable of doing (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/business/13...).

I think what's missing from the conversations among designers is the very thing that Helene Day Fraser points out. We're at the point where we have the capability to suggest and possibly shape behaviors. But the art of argument (what shapes products) does not always include a discussion on the principles (ethics) that gives the arguments guidance. At best, I feel discussions on ethics are very shallow. If we truly are the gatekeepers of shaping behavior, should we not also be concerned with having the proper/right set of values to guide our power to create?

I think it would also do our interaction community some good to also go back and reflex on what technology means - in it's original definition, it has a much richer meaning than the contemporary understanding of the term.

I totally agree that what we do is about people behavior, but what's the difference between what we do and behavioral engineering or applied behavior analysis?

Interaction design should be conceived as a sub-discipline of behavioral psychology?