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A Lesson in Designing Nudges from the World of Crime Prevention
The BBC has a great article up exploring subconscious efforts to fight crime through design. Among the ideas: Cover walls and buildings with pictures of babies, play classical music to try to calm people down and prevent young people from congregating, install pink lights that expose acne in an effort to embarrass teens and keep them away. These are all examples of designing around our subconscious--a theme I've been writing about for a while. And buried at the end of the BBC is a useful caveat: None of the examples I cited above actually deal with any underlying problems. They're simply aimed at keeping people out.
"These strategies are well worth trying," says Prof Mike Hardy, of Coventry University's Institute of Community Cohesion. "But would you really advocate the mass installation of pink lighting to promote community?"
He prefers preventative measures to stop disturbances happening in the first place….
"Driving adolescents away from an area, as with the mosquito device, protects the area, but it doesn't solve the problem," he says. "The difficulty that youth has is a lack of social belonging."
Hardy has been impressed by schemes in other countries designed to make sure that lack of social belonging never develops. He cites a graffiti wall in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where people are invited to paint whatever they want.
I found this last point--that the goal should be to increase cohesion, not drive people away--to be particularly notable. Being a member of a robust social network has all sorts of benefits--not just societal benefits, such as reduced crime, but being connected socially seems to be good for our health for reasons that researchers don't well understand. The challenge with this thread of research in health is that nobody really knows how to make people more socially connected. You can't, in other words, just say to someone: "Make some friends."
But this seems like an obvious--and important--domain for designers who are focused on using subconscious cues in our environments to shape behavior. That is, rather than trying to design environments that delay problems--whether they be committing a crime or eating too much--a better goal might be to design environments that motivate us not to cause problems.