This is sort of a continuation of the previous post about designing to change behavior. I am not really arguing one side or the other here, rather I am searching for some insights about design. To that end I have chosen a few books to dive into this summer, among them the book Freakonomics. One of the main themes of the book is about how we are creatures of incentive. Most people think only of business and marketing when they hear the word incentive, but Freakonomics speaks more about psychological and social motivations.
I tend to think of incentives as “the path of least resistance,” and these incentives are key when thinking about design, especially the design of sustainable systems. I will use an example from my own life: recycling.
I want to recycle everything. However, I don’t consider myself to be a “green” person, and I am not really motivated out of guilt or because I want to save the planet. I want to recycle because it makes sense. I tend to be motivated by logic and waste isn’t logical to me. However I am also motivated by efficiency, the same as many people in American culture these days.
But the apartments I live in don’t have recycling bins anywhere. If I want to recycle, I have to separate all my trash in my apartment. I don’t have a vehicle, so my options are to get a friend to let me pile up all my garbage in their car and take it to the recycling center across town. With this system in place, there is no incentive (path of least resistance) for me to recycle.
Conversely, when I am at school I recycle every can and every piece of paper because there are recycling bins everywhere. Since I find it illogical to not recycle, the path of least resistance at school is to recycle. The recycling bin is located right next to the trash. There is no reason why I wouldn’t recycle it.
Then back at home everything goes into the garbage. This is because there is no incentive for me to go through all the trouble to recycle outside of my own altruism. And sadly altruism is not the best incentive for most people.
I feel that design for sustainable systems suffers from not understanding this. Many projects and ideas that I have been presented with since I have been studying human-computer interaction design have focused on raising awareness. The assumption is that if we design systems that make the amount of waste visible, people will be more aware and will waste less. While this will certainly make a difference, it is not the answer that is going to help change an inherently wasteful culture.
For certain the tone in our culture is shifting, and being “un-green” will exude a poor public image. Perhaps there will come a time when being seen as “un-green” will carry such a bad connotation that the path of least resistance is to do the eco-friendly thing. But we aren’t there yet. That is why we need to understand that for most people, the path of least resistance is to toss everything in the trash.
Maybe we could focus on changing the system based on incentives. My current system has no incentive for me to recycle, and I actually want to. This could be solved by any number of recycling programs (bins, more recycling centers, recycling pickup, etc.), and eventually they will be implemented. When thought of from the point of incentives, or the path of least resistance, there is no way I can be expected to recycle within my current system. The same could be said for many others within many other systems, and a deeper understanding and appreciation of incentives may be key to designing better systems in the future.
