Transition Design Week 6
Social Practice Theory / Behavior change
In transition design, we choose to focus on social practice theory in order to create behavior change. What is social practice? Why transition design framework choose to include and leverage it as a way to observe human behavior and create social change?
A — Attitude, B — Behaviour, C — Choice
‘ABC’ model as a dominant paradigm, social change is though to depend upon values and attitudes(the A) which are believe to drive the kinds of behavior(the B) that individuals choose to adopt(the C) and we treat context as an external causal variables along with others.
However, it will be hard to explain some activities in everyday life. For example, people used to take a bath 50 years ago, now they are taking a shower. The transition of bathing activity actually save a lot of water but what factors make showering become a ritual? We could propose design solution by studying practice.
People tend to unconscious about the driving factors of their daily practices. As a result, a framework is proposed in practice-oriented design.
By taking shower for example:
- Image: Taking shower makes people feel relax and clean. Any social practice has its own meaning to people.
- Skill: As a daily practice, many skills are actually required including knowing how to use faucet, soap and other cleaning product.
- Stuff: Equipement in bathroom and cleaning product.
Innovations in practice happen when existing links are broken and new links are created: new ideas, new products, and new proce- dures are introduced, or existing elements form new links.
By using this framework, we are able to identify and deconstruct the elements that necessary to complete a social practice so we could further create interventions transition to sustainable behavior.
In the class exercise, our team try to review the crime problem in Pittsburgh through practice-oriendted design framework. However, we found it very difficult to do that. Since rime is not a daily practice, we turn our focus on community with high potential teenagers. After discussion, we think materialism is one of the main reasons for committing a crime by teenagers. But it is more like a systematic rather than a daily problem. How to decrease the influnece of materialism in daily practice might be a question we could think about.
In the second class, we talk about behavior change within transition design which mean that we aim for transit to sustainable behavior. Currently, sustainable design mainly focuses on doing existing tasks more efficiently in order to reduce energy used or waster produced. Basically, it keeps thing as it is.
Boiler kettle is a good example. Research shows that people tend to over boil their water. A intuitive solution is to design a kettle with temperature contorller so people could control the temperature they want.
We could also consider how the people understand the system around them as a approach. Improving infrastructure enables new behavior, or reinforce certain actions. For example, if energy company visualize your electricity billing, (perhaps) you will decide to save some energy. The other example is mapumental, an public transport online map for London. Unlike Google map, it tries to provide optimal public transport suggestion from multiple sources. We hope people could take more public transportation through this tool.
This is are all human-scale transition deisgn practice but the question becomes “ Is this the right level for transition?” Try to make people recyle does not necessarily means people will produce less waste.
In the behavior science, we used to believe that attitude leads to behavior change. If you want people to do something, you need to convince them first assuming that if we design “this” and people will do “this”.
Attitudes / Behavior / Context
Due to Fundamental Attribution Error, people tend to reflect their idea on other people and miss the context. However, through the perspective of social practice, many behaviors as a cultural norm do not have specific reasons. Either attidute and context could effect people’s behavior and the conjunction of them is where people change behavior. If either sides are strong enough, people will keep their behavior.
In conclusion, you need to “Design with people”, to understand the context and the nuances of everyday experience and people’s interaction with the world.
Reference
Shove, Elizabeth. 2010. Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of Social Change. Environment and Planning, 42 (6): 1273–1285
Scott, Kakee et al. 2011. Designing Change by Living Change. Design Studies 33 (3): 279–297
