Designing for Behaviour — An introduction

The need to design for behaviour

Awareness about how you react to the design around you can potentially be helpful for your productivity, emotional stability, health and wellness. Here I write about how the design of your home/office affects your behaviour.

“There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives. -Winston Churchill, 1924”

What is the behaviour?

Behaviour is, how an animal or person acts in response to a particular situation or stimulus.

Why is there a need to design for behaviour?

Now more than ever, the design of the places we spend our time in matters. There is no question that most of human life happens inside buildings, where their emotions play out and their relationships flourish. By looking at the actions and attitudes of people, a correlation can be drawn with design. Adaptations could include creating spaces that promote or decrease social interaction, encourage activity or lets its inhabitants do focused work. For instance, open office plans focus on increasing collaboration between employees but can compromise on long durations of focused activity, depending on the goal of the company, offices can be designed for specific workplace behaviour.

There is a need to figure out the best techniques that make our spaces work with us rather than working against us.

Next up — (Designing for Behaviour — Obesity)