What’s design psychology?
Parties are awkward for me—not because I slurp my wine or pepper people with a projectile of vol-au-vent crumbs when I speak—but they’re awkward at the moment when someone asks “what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a designer” is perfectly acceptable, but misleading as I don’t design leaflets, logos or websites – so the follow-up question of “what sort of thing do you design?” makes the conversation unravel.
“Psychologist” would also be passable, but I don’t work in a hospital or deal with people on a one-to-one basis. This answer also, more often than not, elicits the response of people thinking I’m a little weird or that I can read their mind (I can’t).
So the only response I have left is “I’m a design psychologist” – much more accurate but you can imagine the blank faces and shuffling of feet in the opposite direction.
Outside of dinner parties the profession of introducing the science of human behaviour into the field of design is nothing new. The advertising industry long ago embraced the power of influencing us through psychological or behaviourist techniques. Indeed John B Watson (who I consider to be the father of modern psychology) entered into a very successful advertising career after having to leave academic life after sex scandals at his college (I bet that’s got you heading off to Wikipedia). In contrast, graphic design has never really felt comfortable with the methods of psychological science, possibly due to the bad feeling that the advertising industry seems to have created.
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it. – Stephen Leacock (1869 – 1944)
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. – Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879 – 1962), “Discovery”, 1964
During the 1960s, even advertising was backing away from behaviourist techniques – worried about the bad publicity surrounding brain washing, human conditioning and mind control. Stories were abound about underhand techniques to trick people into buying products. The greatest of these purported that a marketing executive superimposed subliminal messages onto a film in a small cinema in New Jersey. The messages told unsuspecting moviegoers to “Eat popcorn” and “Drink more Coke” and led to a rise in sales of around 68%. However, later the perpetrator admitted that he had fabricated the whole story as a marketing stunt (don’t worry, every bit of scientific research carried out on subliminal persuasion has shown that it simply doesn’t work).
The result of this bad feeling against using psychology meant that the design world of the 70s and 80s fundamentally ignored how we act as humans and moved into a phase of creating beauty without effectiveness. Recently, this has been changing and people are now accepting again that better communication happens when you have an insight into human behaviour – and that the insights which can really make a difference to a project’s outcome are often lost by leaping to the design stage too early.
In recent years, new terms such as ‘design thinking’ and ‘behavioural economics’ have entered into corporate lingo, showing how organisations are again recognising the value of understanding human behaviour. This time around the reasoning is more grown-up, not aiming for persuasion of the masses (to buy Coke), but thinking about how people really make decisions and using this as a better lens for creating design that helps people achieve their goals.
We are myopic, sometimes irrational and have all these quirks in our behaviour. — Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioural Economics at Duke University.
No focus group would suggest that speed signs showing a smiley face or sad face would be more effective than any other type of speeding intervention; no boardroom would assume that showing people’s energy use to each other helps lower electricity usage; and no economic workgroup knows why people fail to join pension plans when it will make them better off. Using behavioural research coming out from some of the world’s greatest universities and applying this to the real world means we will design better product and services – and this is design psychology.
Of course, at a dinner party people have normally wondered off by the time I’ve rambled on for this long. Now where are those vol-au-vents.