“People don’t like my odd shaped potatoes”

Design Thinking & Behavioural Economics

A farmer walks into a design bureau and an ad-agency on the same day, with the same problem — “People don’t like my odd shaped potatoes”

The designers set to work, feeling for insight into the nitty gritty of daily life. Asking ‘why’ to every insight that arises. Solving through empathy and putting prototyped solutions to the test.

Why is it that people find odd shaped potatoes difficult to peel? Why is it that odd shaped potatoes cook at different times?

The ad-wo/men set to work looking for the emotional drivers that form the bias between the ‘perceived normal potato’ and the ‘odd shaped potato’.

What drives their decision to buy potatoes? What does a potato mean to them?

Both are smart, both will probably solve the farmer’s ugly-veg challenge — but how these two tribes of creative strategists solve the brief will be different. Clearly there’s something that both approaches can learn from each other.

I make the crude distinction because there’s currently not enough at play in design to blend these two very effective methods — one could even say these two tribes of creative strategy.

This short comment is to very lightly introduce and spark your curiosity into the profound benefits that harnessing cognitive biases can bring to design thinking, and creative strategy generally; for problems large or small.

Undeniably, advertising and design consultancies have the matched ability of formulating an abundance of intangible value. In combining empathetic, user generated and experiential problem solving with decision-making beliefs and behavioural biases a beautiful synergy is found.

The behavioural sciences is already at play in design thinking, alas not as potential solutions to a challenge but rather informing the method. The rationale of prototyping and testing (‘failing fast’) is in order, not just to find the ‘best’ solution, but to overcome the designer’s ‘congruence bias’. That being when a designer or design team responds to a brief based solely on their own hypothesis instead of looking elsewhere, conducting objective R&D.

As design widens its role to service different kinds of organisational challenges, and as advertising wrestles with ethics, solving the farmer’s odd shaped potato conundrum, by combining these fields, is a smart way forward.

So I encourage psychological theories such as ‘selective perception’, ‘hyperbolic discounting’, ‘availability cascade’, ‘the cheerleader effect’, ‘the contrast effect’, ‘availability heuristics’ and so on to enter the designer’s tool box.

Behavioural economics will soon match design thinking’s sex appeal , you just have to lower the threshold, and get stuck in to some deep mind exploration.

BrainFood:

Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation. by George Loewenstein

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. by Cass R Sunstein, Richard H Thaler

Thinking, Fast and Slow. by Daniel Kahneman

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. by Robert Kurzban

Risk Savvy: How To Make Good Decisions. by Gerd Gigeren