Nudge
Image courtesy: Yale Press - yalepress.yale.edu
The book, Nudge, talks about why people often make wrong choices, and how we can help make better choice by understanding ‘human’ and creating carefully planned ‘choice architecture’. The fundamental idea of welfare in capitalism has been to create as many options for choices as possible so that homo economicus(econs)1 can choose what best-fits their interest. The book claims, however, we humans unlike econs make wrong choices very often for many different reasons: delay of consequences, complexity of choices, social aspect and so on. For example one picks up another muffin not seeing the consequences today as well as being social with his corpulent family members and therefore the chance to become obese is higher when one’s family members are of obesity. Shockingly the chance of teenager pregnancy appeared higher when she has pregnant friends around in a research for the U.K.
Therefore the author advices us work on ‘choice architecture’ keeping ‘humans’ in mind. According to the given example in Nudge the nutritionist could increase or decrease up to 50 per cent of consumption of certain item in the school cafeteria by simply changing the order and the placement of food products.
I am now half way through the book and looking forward to more examples of application because ‘choice architecture’ is what we designers are doing pretty much every single day in our studios when creating posters, mobile phones, TV sets, software, furniture, whatsoever. We design products to make it more desirable, more useful based in human heuristics. We try to create things that are simpler and better for ‘human’ though many of our works are more commercial. At least many of us designers know that humans are not econs, or I think we should know.
In my opinion, Nudge gives us designers a hope that we can also make people better off by working in public and governmental sectors rather than helping only corporates excavate more, produce more, sell more, and dump more as we have been doing in the last century.
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1. Homo economicus or Economic human is the concept in some economic theories of humans as rational and narrowly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments towards their subjectively defined ends.