BEHAVIORAL DESIGN

WHAT IS BEHAVIOUR?

Behaviour is defined as ‘self-propelled movement producing a functional interaction between an animal and its environment’1. This provides clear indication of what behaviour is and is not. Importantly, behaviour is an observable, external process. This means that you can measure behaviour from an outside perspective and it does not rely on subjective self-reporting. Behaviour also needs to be specific. For instance ‘eat healthy food’ or ‘exercise regularly’ would be considered too vague and ambiguous. Instead, behaviours need to be described in specific terms in order to be clear and actionable, e.g. ‘eat 5 fruits and/or vegetables a day’ or ‘run for 30 minutes three times a week’.

It is equally important to explain what isn’t behaviour. Behaviour is not the same as attitudes or emotions which are internal processes though these may contribute to or result from behaviour. Often in projects people will talk about the importance of these internal processes. It is important to position these with behaviour. You may, for instance, want to develop a stronger sense of trust in a company’s secure handling of user data so that people sign up to the service. Signing up to the service is a behaviour. A feeling of trust is not.

WHY DOES BEHAVIOUR OCCUR?

People act in order to achieve some goal within their environment. Behaviour occurs when adequate capability, opportunity and motivation align. Capability refers to an individual's physical and psychological capacity to engage. Opportunity refers to all of the factors that lie outside of the person that make the behaviour possible or prompt it. Motivations are those psychological processes that direct or produce behaviour. These components all interact as the presence (or absence) of one may alter how another component responds. The task in behavioural design is to influence the behavioural outcome by altering one or more of these three elements.

WHAT IS DESIGN?

Victor Papanek defined design as ‘the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order3. There are several important parts to this definition. The term conscious emphasises that design is an intentional activity. It is intuitive in that it is embedded in human capability and part of how we fundamentally operate. Effort refers to tools and methods used in an activity of designing and meaningful order is about design being a process of value creation.

WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL DESIGN?

The combination of design thinking (a designerly way of thinking) with the science of influence is behavioural design. This involves all design where behaviour plays a critical role. This may entail changing behaviour at times but it could also be about aligning, reinforcing or otherwise influencing behaviour.

GROUNDED THEORY

SUMMARY

OWNERSHIP

Ownership is no longer just about what we have, but what we feel connected to—digital spaces, political causes, or even personal data.
We feel ownership not just over what we buy, but over the projects we work on, the political movements we support, and the environmental impact we measure. This sense of ownership can extend to shared spaces—both physical, like public parks, and digital, like group chats—where the boundary between mine, yours, and ours gets blurry. When more people are involved, conflicts can arise—like when one person claims a dockless bike while another believes it’s still theirs. Ownership also unfolds over time, shaping how people connect to jobs, homes, and communities.
Many of our everyday interactions are dictated by what it means to (psychologically) own. Understanding what it means to possess something, for instance, is a prerequisite to appreciating the meaning behind buying, selling, gifting, stealing, lending, borrowing and more . Privacy too requires that we first feel that something is uniquely ours before someone can infringe upon this.
At some point everyone desires something that is not their own. Certain people, due to what might be called a shadowy formative context, cross the bar — they actually take what is not theirs. Depending on the item(s), it can be quite a gamble.

RITUAL

A ritual is an intentional behaviour or sequence of behaviours with a distinct emotional outcome. We often associate rituals with religious ceremonies or major events such as weddings and funerals but they can also be everyday interactions that enrich our daily lives. Do you, for instance, have a morning ritual which helps kick off your day? If something goes wrong with this, does it disrupt your day? Maybe a society to which you belong has a ritual to initiate new members. You may give extra care to making the perfect cup of coffee or a way to wind down at the end of the day. All of these could be rituals.
Rituals are as ancient as human society and have been a topic of study for millenia. Rituals have long been studied by anthropologists with submersive assessments of culture which

With rituals, it is less about what someone does but rather how they do it

BEHAVIOR SETTINGS

How does one act when they are at dinner at a restaurant? How about a football match? At a wedding? What about a networking event? Queuing for something? Behaving on public transport? A surgical theatre? The list goes on.

You could likely predict, with high accuracy, what people would be doing in all of those settings so long as you were familiar with them. But how curious is this predictive ability. There are undoubtedly many personalities in all of those contexts and in some cases, as is the case with different university classes, there are almost certainly some cultural differences. Nevertheless, you are fairly certain that you generally know what people will do. How is this so?

We are products of our environments. We respond to what is around us and our responses become particularly predictable when our environment is familiar and structured (e.g. all examples above). These structured contexts are called behaviour settings. More formally, behaviour settings are situations in which people, places and objects work together to create a common purpose

Behaviour settings emphasise how all aspects of a context work together (or don’t as the case may be) to produce a behaviour. From this foundation, design teams, regardless of their background, can consider the context from many angles to identify possible interventions. It also allows the team to contextualise any intervention and think through how a change in the setting would influence other aspects of the setting.