“If you really don’t want to share….DONT PUT IT ON THE NET!”

I am not a technological determinist, but we are crazy if we don’t realize that there is a lot of pressure to put things on the Internet. And we can’t just blame people for being uninformed. People do it because they don’t feel like they have much of a choice due to the impending social pressures of being “on Facebook.” Of course they do have a choice, just like how we have a choice not to fill out every single field when we create one of our hundreds of profiles in the digital sphere. But there are a lot of people who happily fill out every single field, unknowingly giving away lots of information that they don’t have to, because that is what the interface is telling them that it wants. Of course we should try to inform ourselves about these things, but we can’t really expect every person to become “Facebook literate.”

Think back to filling out doctor’s forms when they used to be on paper. Their officialness and connection to our personal health told us that we should fill out every box and not skip anything. In remediating the fill-in-the-blank form onto the computer screen, many people still feel the same way when they are presented with things to fill out on profiles. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen fill out every field when they created a profile for Skype, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Sometimes they go back and eliminate things from the profile, paring it down because they wished they hadn’t included some of that information, but not everyone does this and sometimes it is too late anyway.

We should stop blaming people for being “stupid enough to put things on the Internet that they don’t want known” and acknowledge the role that the design of the interaction itself plays in this. We have finally gotten away from interactions that force people to provide information by at least allowing people to opt out (even if this is still poorly done with an asterisk or a buried drop-down menu somewhere). However, interactions as simple as filling out fields in profiles or engaging with a variety of interactions on Facebook are still telling people that they should provide the information. As designers it is our responsibility to critique and question this status quo – and stop assuming that filling that database with as much discreet information as possible is in some way adding value to how people experience technology.

Ultimately, the profile fill-in-the-blanks is just one example out of many where we blame users for making bad decisions, when the design itself was telling them that it was ok to do so. It is like putting an “OPEN” sign on a locked door, and then blaming the person after they bumped into it when it didn’t open.

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.