MDes Basecamp Fall 2022
As a part of the MDES program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design — MASSART, I traveled to New Hampshire with my peers and seniors for a Basecamp in the Fall 2022 semester. It was the first basecamp to be held since the pandemic hit in 2019.
It was a memorable experience with new friendships among the senior and junior batches. We cooked and ate together, brainstormed on the basecamp project topic together, and I, being the group's photographer, captured many memorable moments with my Canon D600.
During the basecamp, we were introduced to an interesting book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”, which talks about how a product or a service can influence certain behaviors in consumers. Since our masters program is strongly aligned with business principles, this book helped us deepen our design thinking process for innovation in sync with consumers’ habit forming behaviors.
The book reveals four stages of the “Hooked” model that induces a habit in a user:
- Trigger
- Action
- Reward
- Investment
The four stages move in a loop and keep repeating to transform the ‘use’ of a product or service into a ‘habit’ for continued use, making it a successful business offering.
Each stage has a very different experience and each individual may experience it differently, thus influencing their behaviors differently too. This book is for anyone who wants to understand consumer behavior and build a product or service best suited to encourage this behavior to engage the consumer for a long period of time. Hooked is a book for entrepreneurs, product managers and marketers, as well as designers and innovators!
While the book helps us understand how to creatively innovate to stimulate habit forming behaviors in users and steadily increase the use of a product or service, the MDES Basecamp 2022 asked us to question it.
The most important difference between a habit and an addiction is the ability to make a choice. The ability to choose to do something or not is what differentiates an action between a habit and an addiction.
Our topic was Digital Addiction through the lens of a Designer.
During the basecamp, we were asked to develop a campaign that informs designers about the impact and ethical responses to developing digital products that are habit forming , while initiating a dialog with design to contemplate their responsibilities in the new digital landscape.
The Basecamp led the students to ask a number of questions which designers and innovators around the world could give a thought to encourage and stimulate the need for a solution to help users of any product or service know and understand this difference and be able to make a conscious decision of choice.
We worked around developing an awareness campaign focused on the designer’s responsibilities in creating digital products, which are habit-forming by design — rendering transparent methods and ethics, challenging habits, and addiction in the designer’s digital landscape.
We touched on four key areas and facts in our Research:
- Net Compulsions
- Cyber Relationship Addiction
- Compulsive Information Seeking
- Computer or Gaming Addiction
Global access to internet and digital technology: 5.16 billion people — 64.4%
Global Internet & Digital Tech Addiction: 8%
Worldwide Gaming Addiction: 1%
An individual spends an average of almost 7 hours online each day that is around 40% of their life.
44% of teenagers need technology and feel helpless without it!
Facts’ Source:
“16 Shocking Technology Addiction Statistics for 2023.” Techjury, https://techjury.net/blog/technology-addiction-statistics/#gref.
Hot Questions for Designers around the world:
- Can a User Interface be addictive? #uidrug
- Could a User Experience Designer be responsible for digital addiction?
- How could experience research and design include features to mitigate ‘addiction’?
- Are Experience Designers responsible to bring solutions for this problem?
- How might we design a UI to moderate digital addiction?
- Should Experience Designers study and implement screen time management in their design strategy?
- How might we encourage healthy internet usage among users?
- How might we include Digital Addiction as a part of Ethical Design Principles for Digital Designers?
- Are we as designers and innovators solving for existing needs or creating new and undesirable needs?
- Does a User Experience Design solve to provide a long-term benefit or a short-term fix with a newly developed addiction?
- When does a habit become an addiction and how might we not only seek for a solution but also create awareness among users globally?
Instagram Reel — The #uidrug
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cn2YsvpDw73/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
How might we “Un-Hook” to detach addictive behaviors among users?
At Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MASSART), we are exploring this topic space and connecting with design thinking leaders around the globe to address this problem and identify opportunities to help designers collectively make ethical decisions while designing to ‘un-hook’ addictive behaviors among our users.
#uidrug #digitaladdiction #internetaddiction
