Can Architecture Affect User Behavior? Dan Lockton's Design with Intent Toolkit

Dear reader, this entire blogpost from Dan Lockton’s research on how architecture influences people’s behavior is a must read. I want to post an excerpt from it - but i’m having a hard time even choosing which part!

The last work I have read that has made me this excited about architecture and social interaction is sociologist, William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, where he explains how people make use of plazas in NYC.

Every section is full of gems. I esp love the discussion of Flusty’s  (1997, p. 48) “five species” of interdictory, stealthy, slipper, prickly, and jittery spaces. And so cool to learn about Don Normans and Chris Myhill’s work on “desire paths”

So I’m going to highlight Lockton’s  “implications for Designers” section with the caveat that you are missing the richness and depth of these implications if you don’t click through and read it the entire post! Though be warned, the literature review is quite thorough and will send you on many internet wormholes - be ready to browse! And there’s an awesome works cited list at the end.

Implications for designers

▶ Designed environments influence people’s behaviour in a variety of ways, and some have been designed expressly with this intention, often for political or crime prevention reasons

▶ This can range from high-level visions of influencing wider social or community behaviours, to very specific techniques applied to influence particular behaviours in a particular context; the use of patterns facilitates re-use of techniques wherever a similar problem recurs

▶ Most patterns involve either the physical arrangement of building elements—positioning, angling, splitting up, hiding, etc—or a change in material properties, either to change people’s perceptions of what behaviour is possible or appropriate, perhaps by reinforcing or embodying social norms, or to force certain behaviour to occur or not occur

▶ There are also patterns around aspects of surveillance—designing layouts which facilitate or prevent visibility of activity between groups of people

▶ In practice, patterns may be applied in combination to create different kinds of space with different effects on behaviour

▶ There is potential for ‘paving the cowpaths’ strategically through design, identifying the paths of particular users—perhaps a group which is already performing the desired behaviour—and then, by formalising this, making it easier or more salient or in some way obviously normative, encourage other users to follow suit

▶ By affecting so completely the way in which people spend their lives, political or police attempts to control behaviour through the design of environments can be controversial

▶ Some concepts related to influencing behaviour in the built environment may be transposed to other designed systems and contexts

Thank you to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting & blogging about this!

culturalbytes:

Dan Lockton’s blog post announcing his PhD, ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change,” is super inspiring.

My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products,…