Is it a designer's job to change behavior?

I have read a lot of articles that specifically say a designer’s job is to change behavior. Perhaps I am but a naive designer, but I don’t know if I buy into that statement. I have been thinking a lot about it, and I had a fellow student ask me why I thought this. Here is my response to him:

Instead of “changing behavior” I think it is a designer’s job to “understand behavior” and design accordingly. This might mean changing behavior, but could also mean changing perceptions, or “encouraging” behavior. Nobody can say that any one way of doing something is necessarily better than another, so attempting to design a “better” behavior is at best arrogant or naive, and at worst is just plain wrong. If we only look at how we can change a behavior, we end up with solutions that don’t address the real problem.

Trying to change behavior might overlook what is important to understand about that behavior. If you are always looking at the factors that cause a certain behavior only in the interest of changing that behavior, you can miss out on why the behavior exists and if that might be something good. Perhaps we should pay attention to the difference between changing someone’s behavior within a system, or keeping the behavior and changing the outcome of the system.

For instance, if a designer (Mike) sees that someone (John) throws out his aluminum cans instead of recycling, MIke might design a system that seeks to change this behavior. So Mike creates a display that shows how many pounds of cans John throws out per week that could be recycled. In this case Mike is using guilt as a motivational tool to change the “bad” behavior. Maybe this works and maybe it doesn’t.

However, if you look at this behavior another way it might be seen as good. Maybe John throws the cans away because there is no recycling center nearby, and it is too much trouble to save the cans and then drive them across town. And maybe John drives a vehicle that gets poor gas mileage and the recycling center is in a bad part of town. Now this may be a poor example, but if Mike is only seeking to change one behavior to a “better” behavior, he might overlook something important about that behavior.

John’s behavior might come from wanting to be efficient and not waste time. That is not necessarily a bad behavior. But Mike is trying to change that behavior in order to accomplish something good: eliminating waste. But John’s behavior of “being efficient” isn’t what needs to be changed. It is the system that needs to be changed in order to gain a different outcome. For instance, maybe John just needs someone to come pick up his cans.

Depending on the perspective of the designer, this could be seen a couple of ways:

1. Mike wants to change John’s wasteful behavior of throwing out cans to a new behavior where John takes his cans to the recycling center, by informing him about how much he wastes.

2. Mike wants to provide John with a system that reinforces John’s behavior of being efficient by creating a system where someone picks up John’s cans.

Both 1 and 2 are solutions that make the world greener, but 1 is trying to change John’s behavior and 2 works because of his behavior. Both solutions have pros and cons, but the point is that there can be valid solutions that don’t always seek to change behavior. It isn’t the designer’s “job” to change people. It is the designer’s job to understand people and situations and come up with relevant solutions. Sometimes those solutions change behavior to get better results, and sometimes they change the system to get better results from a certain behavior.