Manners by design: an essay
Or, how to host a party.
Happy Monday! This week I’m interrupting regular scheduling to share an essay about a topic that has always fascinated me: how design shapes behaviour.
Can design, in some sense, shape who we are? And if so, how should we approach this rather heavy responsibility as designers? As I’ll try to convince you, the best way might be to think of ourselves as the hosts of a party.
‘We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.’
—Winston Churchill
I’ll begin this essay with three stories. The first of which comes from London.
On the 10th May 1941 during the Blitz, a German air-raid succeeded in almost entirely destroying the debating chamber of the House of Commons in Westminster, the seat of British parliamentary democracy. In the debate that followed how to rebuild the chamber, Winston Churchill, delivered the now-famous quote above.
He believed that the spatial organisation of this one room—with Government and Opposition facing each other across an aisle—was an integral part of British democracy, and so to alter it (perhaps by moving to a horseshoe design like other assemblies) would be to make a deep and regrettable change to how democracy was conducted in the UK, with unknown but lasting effects on British society.
In the end, the chamber was rebuilt as a near-exact copy of the original by the architect Giles Gilbert Scott and reopened in 1950. For good or ill, British democracy has continued to be conducted according to the same design, with political opponents facing at each other across an aisle that is famously the width of “two duelling swords”.
Our second story comes from Africa.
Togunas are a type of indigenous courthouse building associated with the Dogon people of Mali. They are usually built from wood and thatch and located in the centre of villages, providing shade from the midday sun.
Each Togunas is deliberately designed with a very low ceiling. This means that no-one can fully stand up in them, preventing discussions from getting too heated or violent. Disputes must instead be resolved with everyone seated, inherently a more relaxed and conciliatory posture. The design constrains occupants’ range of physical motion to make some kinds of behaviour harder than others—ultimately serving a collective goal of maintaining the rule of law.
Our final story comes from Medieval Italy.
Murano goblets were made by Venetian artisans using a delicate process glass-blowing process which meant that they broke very easily. But this fragility was intentional, as it demanded a lightness of touch from those handling them. A 15th century aristocrat could insist on using a Murano set when hosting a dinner to ensure some a minimum standard of manners among those they had invited. Any boisterous or drunk guests would crack their glass and embarrass themselves, possibly forfeiting a repeat invitation.
What these three examples have in common is the way design choices have been consciously employed to influence behaviour. Subtly, and in a way which we might find hard to prove scientifically, they nonetheless project a distinctive point of view about how people should behave in a particular setting.
And though subtle, the everyday nature of design can give a particular inescapable power to the ideas which it projects. In the words of Adrien Forty:
'“In the way it transforms ideas and beliefs, successful design is like alchemy: it fuses together disparate ideas from different origins, so that the form of the completed product seems to embody only a single idea, which comes across as so familiar that we find ourselves supposing it to be exactly what we ourselves had always thought.”
—Adrien Forty
Because objects of design become so familiar and everyday, so too do the ideas they contain. When a medieval dinner guest picked up a Murano goblet, he did not encounter the desired courtly behaviour as a request, but as a material fact that was already in the world. I think we generally underestimate the power of design to make certain actions feel ‘normal’ and others ‘abnormal’.
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I want to fast-forward now to the present day in order to explore the design of software. A domain of design that—arguably more than any other—is preoccupied with shaping behaviour.
All design is psychological, but software is especially so, and any designer working this space will have a whole library of insights from behavioural science at hand to apply to a problem they are working on—from availability bias to anchoring. A skilled designer is able to leverage these insights about how the human brain perceives and evaluates information in order to influence the decision or action that users of their designs eventually take.
All too often sadly, this influence is exerted in the service of narrowly framed commercial goals, resulting in frequent examples of flagrant manipulation. A couple of years ago I wrote about an app called Dave, where to close your account you must navigate a long sequence of screens in which an animated bear becomes more and more distraught. An attempt to bring emotions like guilt into a user’s decision to leave. As I wrote then, it’s behaviour that would be creepy if a human tried it on you, and it’s doubly so when a company tries it hidden behind an animated cartoon character.
Examples like this are known as ‘dark’ or ‘deceptive’ patterns because of the way they attempt to coerce a user into making a decision that is against their own interests or intentions. But any designer of software will admit there is an extensive grey area that lies just back from an easy-to-condemn example like this. When even the precise shade of blue on Google hyperlinks can be honed to encourage the highest number of clicks, it can be hard to know where to draw boundary between harmless influence and harmful coercion.
What quickly becomes clear is how porous and shapeable we all are. Liable to behave quite differently from even tiny visual changes like an altered shade of blue. And for a designer this gives a new gravity to the choices that they must make. We do not quite hold our user’s life in our hands like a doctor or a surgeon does, but nevertheless do possess some kind of hold over how they might act, and thus, in turn, who they eventually become.
It sometimes gets said, normally in reference to social media, that we are living in a time before seatbelts. What is normally meant by this is the idea that safety regulation has yet to catch up with digital technology, as was the case with motor vehicle technology in the early 20th century before safety devices like seatbelts and airbags were mandatory.
Perhaps in a decade’s time, software will be tested and graded in its usage of psychological hacks in the same way that we test for food quality. Deployment of these methods will simply be illegal or require a warning for users when their decision-making might have been impacted by one. UX designers, like doctors and architects are already, might be liable for criminal negligence if their design choices lead users to outcomes that they didn’t originally intend.
But before this world arrives, I do wonder if we could put these powers of influence towards a more public-spirited kind of purpose.
If you’re on Twitter, your feed might recently have featured one of Soren Iverson’s satirical designs. The screenshots deviously twist familiar software with humorous invented features; a lie-detector in your messages app for example, or an AR preview of your Hinge date.
I’ve been interested in the way that several of them, such as the example above, show software pushing back against a user’s wishes to enforce the interests of others around them. Just as the Murano goblets subtly encouraged a kind of courtliness in their holder, so the smartphone in this example not-so-subtly enforces a consideration of others whilst out and about.
Insisting on particular forms of public behaviour sits uneasily within a pluralistic Western society and a design culture that is notionally centred around individual ‘users’ and their needs. We should rightfully wonder who would get to set the rules in the world of Soren’s image and how these would accommodate the full spectrum of human difference.
Nevertheless, I find the provocation the tweet offers—that design choices might influence us to think of collective as well as our individual needs—quite powerful. As of the time of writing it’s been retweeted over a thousand times, so it would seem others agree too.
For what also unifies the design choices in the three examples that began this essay is an orientation towards the wellbeing of wider society that feels much rarer to encounter in our digital era, especially on social media. I wonder if recovering even a little of this spirit today might do us a lot of good.
To some reading, this orientation might sound perilously close to something like ‘social engineering’ but what I’m talking about is altogether more limited and respectful. In fact, I think the best analogy, to come full circle, is of a party.
“One of the things we hit upon was the quality of a host. That is, the role of the architect, or the designer, is that of a very good, thoughtful host, all of whose energy goes into trying to anticipate the needs of his guests — those who enter the building and use the objects in it.”
—Charles Eames
I have always loved the joyfulness of this analogy from Eames. It perfectly captures how designers must pay close attention to people and celebrate life in the way they design things. What is perhaps missing from it though are the expectations that come with being a guest.
To extend it further for a second, we could imagine arriving at the Eames house in Santa Monica and, noticing the new carpet, take off our shoes. Or, on entering the living room, keep our voices down so that the record player at the far end can still be heard. It feels overstated to call nudges like the position of a carpet or the volume of a record ‘social engineering’, they just quietly help us to understand how to be in someone’s home.
This analogy is the best one I can provide for a world where our digital spaces might be a little more assertive about the behaviour they expect and then influence through design choices. It does not deprive anyone of their autonomy to hand them a delicate cup to drink from, but it does make it harder, or at least more consequential, for them to start swinging themselves unpleasantly around the table.
Good hosting is to anticipate and provide for what your guests will need, but also to help them be good guests to you and one another. In other words, whilst the practice of design is mainly to listen attentively and keep pouring drinks, just occasionally it might mean looking pointedly at your watch too 😉
Have a great week,
Ben 🦞
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I find myself looking forward to every post, and each so deeply satisfying - as if you were hosting a fantastic dinner party with such exciting threads of conversation that guests are reluctant to leave!
This has interesting parallels to the whole field of hostile architecture, especially your question: "who would set the rules?" Rowdy behavior at the dinner table is nearly universally frowned upon, but in some contexts—a celebratory dinner, perhaps, with lots of boisterous toasting—it might be appropriate. Of course in those instances, the hosts are free to use different glasses. But who decided that sleeping outside in public was ill-mannered and needed to be discouraged? Very thought-provoking as usual; thank you!