You can tell them 100 hundred times

The Covid-19 pandemic has become [it would have always become] central to all political discourse because people know that the state of population health is a reflection of government performance. Especially now, when people are uncertain about everything, and looking to their governments for some answers.

On TV, there is a Covid sequence networks have developed. It goes something like this: they start with the number of infections, then, the number getting tested, and then, the number of deaths. In between they use some infographics to compare how other states and countries have been dealing with the pandemic. Following this, they talk to experts about infections, testing, deaths, and prevention.

I listen to the experts for their views on preventing the spread. They all recommend handwashing, social distancing and mask-wearing. They stress that people should take personal responsibility for adhering to the above guidelines. TV hosts then jump in with headshaking and sighing, and stress about why it is to so hard for people - who for months have been receiving expert information on handwashing, mask-wearing and social-distancing - to follow these simple guidelines. This is a standard lament. To understand why people might not follow these Covid guidelines, we should remember that the same thing happened with other epidemics like the tobacco epidemic, and the HIV epidemic. Over many decades, across the world, hundreds of millions were spent on prevention messages for the HIV, and the tobacco epidemics. But few ‘listened’. Some people ‘got’ the message, and worked to change their behaviour and habits, but many others didn’t ‘get’ it, and might never.

Behavioural Designers, like myself, know there is more to behaviour change than getting the ‘message’. This complaint about people ‘not getting the message’, is such a longstanding universal one that we shouldn’t be surprised at all, when we hear it today. All my life I’ve heard sayings like: ‘’Who don’t hear will feel’, ‘It passes through one ear and comes out the other’ and ‘You can tell them a hundred times and they still won’t listen’.

Design school in the 80s and 90s taught me why this is so.

Back in the day, while doing my undergraduate design degree at SVA in New York, we did not know about Behavioural Economics and decision making. But we were endlessly curious about how people made decisions in context, and what design had to do with all of that. That was extraordinarily exciting stuff. We were reading psychology like mad, and artists/psychologists like Gyorgy Kepes and Wucius Wong. We studied human perception and action in the work of psychologists Rudolf Arnheim, J J Gibson and Carolyn Bloomer. In the late eighties we would study Donald Norman, one of the pioneers of user-experience design. From the 1980s till now, there has been lots of brilliant work on behavioural science and decision making. Many of these studies of human behaviour have given us acronyms to make their work easier to remember, such as: NUDGE [Thaler and Sunstein], WYSIATI [Kahneman], B-MAT [BJ Fogg], EAST[BIT] and MINDSPACE [BIT]. [Sorry reader, you’d have to look up what they mean]. There is one acronym though that changed my life in 1988. It’s one of the first, from Professor Donald Norman: POET – The Psychology of Everyday Things. He would later change this to DOET – The Design of Everyday Things.

Professor Norman’s lessons have been so fundamental to design for behaviour change that twenty years later, in 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein used his examples, of the designs of four-burner stovetops, on page 84 of chapter five of their excellent book ‘Nudge’, to illustrate the concept of ‘Choice Architecture’. Again in Richard Thaler’s ‘MISBEHAVING’ [2015], in chapter thirty two entitled ‘Going Public’, on page 326, Thaler writes “We had a breakthrough in finding our missing organizing principle when I reread Don Norman’s classic book The Design of Everyday Things. After rereading Norman’s book, I realized we could apply many of his principles to the problems we were studying. What if we could design policies that were equally easy to create “user-centered” choice environments?” Thaler continues on page 327 “Designing good public policies has a lot in common with designing any consumer product.” I was really happy to have read this stuff because – and I’m nowhere near Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prizewinning intellect – I had figured out for myself, since the 1980s, that we could use Norman’s principles to design public policies.

To this day, I rely heavily on Professor Norman’s work. I remember emailing Professor Norman some time ago, right here from Trinidad, to share a blog post with him and to tell him how greatly his work has informed my practice as a human-centred designer. I was really humbled when he wrote back saying:

“Thanks, Steve

That's a wonderful post.

Alas, POET is retired. It is now DOET, not nearly as friendly a term, but it does emphasize the DO -- the doing. As I tell people about design thinking, the thinking part is useless unless you also practice design doing: 

thanks for the very nice words and, of course, the nice blog post”

Don