Design Research Conference 2009

Our team would like to thank everyone who came to our presentation at the Design Research Conference last week. We'd especially like to thank all the participants of our roundtable discussions who gave us great feedback and insights for our project. Our group had two tables at the lunch discussions. We were happy to see that both tables were completely filled and also excited to hear a lot of enthusiasm about our topic, Irrationality and Design: Influencing the decisions that real people make.



We had an international group of participants including professionals and students from multiple disciplines. We were interested in how designers and researchers could help people make better decisions by understanding irrational behaviors. How might they incorporate some of these principles when going out into the field and doing ethnographic research? What might they do differently if they knew that people tend to anchor to a familiar or previously introduced piece of information when making decisions? If they were aware of people's biases, how could they design for this? These were just a few of the questions we posed at the table.


We selected 10 tendencies to focus on for our roundtables to help facilitate discussion. From a list of over 80 tendencies we had ranked these in terms of relevance and importance to the design process and how easily they could be understood, and these were the ten we chose for our first prototype: 1)Anchoring 2)Availability Heuristic 3)Decoupling 4)Framing 5)Intertemporal choice 6)Loss aversion 7)Choice Bracketing 8)Status quo bias 9)Attention Collapse 10)Optimism Bias


Each card had a definition of a bias on the front and an example that illustrated the bias on the inside. We wanted to present this set of tendencies to learn how designers and researchers might incorporate them into their design process. In addition to having lively discussions about cognitive biases, we got a lot of helpful feedback on the cards themselves. For example, people liked the anecdotes on the inside of each card and felt they really helped clarify the concepts. Several participants felt that many of the concepts could be clustered into higher-level groups or further coded in some way. In terms of the discussion setup, people liked having artifacts at the table to help guide and focus the discussion.


The card deck really helped generate ideas, but were they a successful tool? These cards were just the first iteration of many possible design tools and there were a lot of great insights to take away from the discussion tables. We'll be referring to them as we revise the card deck and as we continue to develop new prototypes in the coming weeks. Hopefully, as we develop other prototypes we will be able to evaluate the usefulness of the deck of cards a bit better. Currently we have been working on pulling some insights from these discussions to continue to develop tools that might help researchers and designers address irrational behaviors.