Design, behavior and social interaction study
INTERESTING OBSERVATION
A phenomenon relationship I notice happens between, Noodlehead, a popular thai fusion restaurant, and Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream, an ice cream store locates right beside Noodlehead in Pittsburgh East Liberty neighnorhood. Often, customers finish meal in Noodlehead and go straight to Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream store for icecream.

MY EXPERIENCE
In Noodlehead and Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream
One day during finals week, some friends and I arrived Noodlehead for dinner.
Mental stage:
- stress
- need a break
- hungry
Original plan:
Dinner at Noodlehead -> Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream
Why go both?
- balance of salty & sweet flavor
- routine
- close by
What happened:
Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream -> Noodlehead
Why switch the order?
- Feeling need to spend finals precious time on something, not standing and doing nothing
- friend’s suggestion
- save time. The plan was to get Millie’s after Noodlehead anyways
- probably same satisfaction to go before or after. The order does not matter.
We decided to get Millie’s ice cream while waitng to be seated. After finishing the ice cream, we felt not as satisfied and comfortable as when we imagined eating them. I wonder why did we made the decision to eat the ice cream before dinner, even though we knew we will feel terrible after eating them?
The process of decision making to visit Millie’s before Noodlehead:
YES , NO , YES
Concept:
I am interested in looking at the situation when one desire for a thing, and knew the thing was not beneficial, but one still get it.
How does one sell the one’s desire to oneself?
How does one make decisions?
WAS THE DECISION MAKING ABOUT EGO DEPLETION?
willpower or self-control is low;
tired mind decrease decision quality
or simplify decisions by accepting our immediate desires.
implicated in
guilt
— dependent on one’s ability to reflect on past actions and behaviors
prosocial behavior
— voluntary behavior intended to benefit others.
— Empathy plays a strong motive
ex) helping, sharing donating, co-operating, and volunteering.
Ego depletion hinder the ability ot engage in reflection, meaning harder for one to feel guilty, which inderctly effect one to give or benefit otheres.
OR ABOUT HEURISTICS?
“identifying a decision, gathering information, and assessing alternative resolutions.”

“find” or “discover”.
any apporach to problem solving, learning, discoverying for
immediate goals.
As decision makers,
- no infinite resources or time to gather and analyse information.
- limitations to the amount of complexity to cope with
- make decisions based on rational process
- simplify assumptions and accept limited availabliity of information
- we use Heuristics technique as a way of reducing the complexity of decision making”
ex) associating a particular brand with quality, rather than engage in detailed evlautaion.
some approaches:
- framing the problem
- using information
- problems of judgement
- post-decision evaluation
EXPERIMENTS
HOW DO I MAKE DECISIONS?
(Physical & Mental documentation)
Example 1:


Example 2:

Example 3:

Feedback:
categories
(numbers of notifs affect how i decide)
(is it ever only only me)
(noticing what changed my mind)
pattern
place affect me to do this
reinforcing, loops of thoughts
FINDINGS
When making decisions:
- Situate at specific time and space, I need to make a decision.
- Throw out a question first.
- Thinking about time and space constrains, then checking how I am feeling.
- Imagine scenarios.
- Filtering options environments and people around me.
- I often physically situate myself at a space first, which filtered many choices already, then make decisions based on how I feel and how others are feeling.
- My decision making process shuts down, when external factors comes up.
SOURCES
https://www.umassd.edu/fycm/decisionmaking/process/
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/psychology/the-psychology-decision-making