Behavioral economics is hot – for a brief introduction to the field, read this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics. Richard Thaler won a Nobel prize in economics in 2017 for contributing to the development of behavioral economics (see his Nobel lecture here: www.nobelprize.org.
Avani Parikh and Prashant Parikh have written an important introduction to how behavioral economics can, and should, be linked to design and design-decision making. Their book is titled Choice Architecture: A New Approach to Behavior, Design, and Wellness (Routledge, 2018).
Parikh and Parikh detail how users apply behavioral economics, largely unconsciously, in the spaces in which they find themselves and how designers can guide decisions made through options presented. That, alone, would be useful and significant. But Choice Architectureis also important for another reason. It teaches readers, in a straightforward way, a language that they can use to communicate to finance and accounting types – who often were finance, accounting or economics majors in college and are therefore familiar with the terminology and lines of reasoning that are fundamental to Choice Architecture.
As Parikh and Parikh state in their preface, their book “offers a new way to explain how architecture affects human wellbeing. It is the first study to use the seminal ideas of rational choice theory and behavioral economics to explore how architects can nudge people toward healthy action through the built environment.” The principles laid out in Choice Architectureare relevant to any sort of space and can be used to encourage any sort of behavior, however. Parikh and Parikh go on: “The insights from this model…go beyond various existing approaches such as phenomenology, Gibsonian psychology, systems theory, evidence-based design, and others. It is an interdisciplinary book…the key determining component of experience is human choice. People are active agents rather than passive experiencers, and what they experience is the result of conscious or unconscious choices based partly on the built environment in which they find themselves…The core idea in combining rational and irrational choice theory with an account of architectural meaning is that it is the particular human interpretations of the built environment that result in one type of action or another and lead to positive or negative effects on our health.” Relevant “principles are discussed via examples in a wide range of architectural settings such as streets, workplaces, neighborhoods, public plazas, playgrounds, doctor’s clinics and interiors.” In brief: the Parikh and Parikh framework “describes how a person chooses to act one way rather than another based on what his architectural encounters mean to him.”
Choice Architecture is packed with handy insights, and pleasantly, Parikh and Parikh make their points in a quick moving 116 pages (including index). Time spent reading Choice Architectureis time well spent.
Sally Augustin, PhD,a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.