UX nerd

As designers, we always concern ourselves with graceful product life cycles, re-use, recycling… anything that can deliver us form the trendiness-issued pile of garbage that we don’t want to leave as our footprint. I know I do, you can read about it here, or go for this article by the director of the London Design Museum, that says it much better. We live under one belief: however obsolete, broken, passé you think something is, it holds the seed of something new. This is the Ying-Yang of design.

A long time ago I attended a workshop with Alan Dix that applied this principle to leverage ancient (failed) wisdom for design inspiration: how to produce a good idea out of a bad idea. How does it work? You can have a look at the example Tomaso, Ting, Maria, Valentina and I worked on.

Objective:

To create a good idea starting from a bad idea; by analyzing the bad idea’s positive and negative aspects, identifying the forcings behind them, and using these forcings in a context in which they constitute positive aspects of a good idea.

The process:

We started by brainstorming for bad ideas. From these ideas we chose one, and traded the rest with other teams, receiving in turn two borrowed bad ideas. Then, we considered their positive, negative and neutral aspects, what causes the systems to behave in these ways, and how the context within the system affects our valuation (positive, neutral or negative) of these aspects.

The bad ideas:

1. Dinner payment chain: A payment system in a restaurant in which a customer pays the bill of the previous customer and cannot leave until he/she have found someone that pays his/hers.

• Pay-it-backward. As opposed to pay-it-forward, which usually requires honesty and proactivity on the part of the participant, pay-it-backward ensures that the chain will be maintained (positive). However, in this case it does not add any benefit compared to the mainstream alternative, in which each customer pays their own bill (neutral).
• Captivity within the chain. On the other hand, in this case, pay-it-backward is inconvenient for the customers who have to stay until someone pays their bill because they may have to spend time and effort looking for the next link in the chain (negative).
• Blindness about cost. Customers are also blind as to how much their meal will cost, because instead of paying the items they ordered, they will be paying another customer’s. This can cause fear to end up losing (negative).
• Snowball effect. Customers will consume a lot because they do not want to end up losing money, and for this they need to consume more than the customer for whom they are paying. In general terms, this means that as people feel they have already paid for something, they will make full use of it to feel they got their money’s worth. This is a positive for the restaurant owner that will see the business grow but a negative for the customers that will end up paying increasing amounts with each iteration.

2. Managing system for football fans (borrowed idea): A system which allows supporters to decide opponent’s team formation through voting.

• Public involvement. People participate in the decision making. They feel more engaged because the results they see are the consequence of their involvement (positive).
• People act on a narrow vision and inadvertently modify the system. People seek to satisfy immediate and individualistic goals, so they choose the worst players for the opposing team and as a result the quality of the whole league degrades (negative).

3. Beeper for restaurant kitchens (borrowed idea): A communication system for a kitchen in which all natural language communication is replaced with messages coded in “beeps”.

• More structured system. In a carefully engineered system it is easier to predict what others will do and cooperation becomes more smooth (positive), on the other hand people may feel trapped or unable to improvise (negative).
• Simplicity, limited communication and behavior. What can be said through beeps is much more limited than what can be said through natural language. This limits people’s freedom to communicate, and in turn it limits their freedom to act when they are working in a team and have to coordinate their actions (negative).
• Overly oriented to goals (avoiding socializing). This does not foster a very agreeable work environment (negative).
• Cognitive effort to remember codes. People have to learn a new language, which requires effort and raises the entry barrier (negative).
• Beeps are annoying (negative).

After the analysis, we combined some of the aspects mentioned above to develop a good idea. Below, we present the idea, and list the aspects of the bad ideas it includes. In the context of this idea, these aspects are all positive.

The good idea: A pay-it-backward vaccination campaign

Background: Vaccines do not work on all the individuals in a population. To be sure that a disease does not spread and all individuals (even those in whom the vaccine does not work) are safe, a population has to achieve herd immunity. This occurs when vaccination is widespread enough so that if one person becomes sick with an infectious disease the likelihood that he/she will be able to pass it on to another person is very low because virtually all the people around this person will be immune to the disease. This means that for an individual to be safe from infectious disease, his/her own behavior is not enough, he/she needs the collaborative behavior of the community.

The idea: We though of a system in which person-A gets vaccinated and pays for the vaccine. In turn, if person-A refers person-B to go and get the vaccine, person-A will get a refund for the cost of the vaccine. Each person wants to get a refund, what works to create a chain reaction that results in most people getting vaccinated and the population achieving herd immunity.

Below, we explain how the aspects of the bad ideas are integrated into this good idea.

• Pay-it-backward. The motivation to get a refund for something that has already been paid ensures that the chain will be maintained.
• Captivity within the chain. People have to spend time and effort looking for the next link in the chain, but this is compensated by the fact that they are sure to earn something in return (the refund).
• Blindness about cost. People pay for their vaccine and finally get a refund, so they perceive that the vaccine has a cost but that they get it for free. This has the double effect of attributing value to the vaccine and making the person feel they have drawn a benefit by not paying the cost. In reality, because all people entitled to a refund and finally the State (through a tax-funded program) ends up paying for all the vaccines, there is an unknown cost (the cost of the vaccine) paid indirectly by each person. But in this case, blindness about the real cost could be used by the people engineering the vaccination campaign to set an arbitrary “price” to the vaccine, maximizing the vaccine’s value perception and people’s motivation to get the refund.
• Public involvement. People can see in the whole of society good results that are the consequence of their involvement, this makes people feel empowered and predisposes them better to new initiatives.
• People act on a narrow vision and inadvertently modify the system. People have an immediate individual incentive (to get a refund) and the acting in pursuit of this immediate individual incentive creates a much larger collective effect: herd immunity. This occurs in this case because the individual and collective goals are aligned.
• More structured system. By creating a system in which individual and collective goals are aligned, the system can be expected to reach the desired equilibrium state without a huge external investment. The system just needs to be started and then each actor will perform its part until the whole system changes state. In this case, for example, although the State would pay for the vaccines (which we assume it would have done anyway) it would save the costs of public health campaigns, advertising, education, etc. to persuade the people to get vaccinated because each individual can be trusted to have an incentive to pass the message along for free.