OVERWEIGHTING

I continue to be amazed by the design decisions that people make. Not just my clients. But everyone.

How can it be that people are content to live in culturally historical dark boxes? How can it be that manufactured housing, which is something that shows up on the site on a truck and is put in place with a crane, always has a gable roof?  How can it be that when we have new building materials (cementitious, PVC, fiberglass, etc.), we use them principally in historical applications?

Designers could improve their process and approach if there was a commonly understood model of human reactions and decisions. This does not have to be and should not be simply hit or miss.  As a designer, I would love to have a working model of people’s decision making.  There has to be great commonalities of cause and effect that could be modeled.

The psychological aspects of the designer / client interface is a theme in these pages.

Another psychological term that might help our understanding is overweighting. Overweighting describes our tendency to focus on the unlikely outcome. Overweighting is part of Kahneman’s prospect theory.

For example, the odds are almost infinitesimal that any of us will die in a plane accident. Yet after an airplane tragedy happens, we have a tendency to cancel a planned trip.

A commercial plane accident is a rare event. We overweight our chances of being in a plane accident. And this can shape our behavior by, for example, canceling a planned trip.

Overweighting similarly effects our client’s decision making. Design is not perfect. Less than satisfying outcomes are possible. Our clients have the propensity to overweight the probability that an unsatisfying design will be produced. Thus the conservative and the tried and true becomes the default.

And clients have the tendency to overweight when what we are talking about is a rare event. The design of a house is a rare event. The vast majority of people never commission a house to be designed for them. And for those that do, this could easily be a once in a lifetime happening. The rarer the event, the greater the propensity to overweight.

Our minds are not predisposed to make good decisions when confronted by a rare event. When you have not experienced something, humans have a tendency to overweight the chances of a bad outcome.

Overweighting then provides another tool which we can add to our psychological tool kit. Overweighting helps to provide one level of cause and effect of design decision making.

So instead of expressing frustration that your cool design is not favored, you might say to yourself, well, this outcome was simply because of my client’s overweighting. While this does not make me happy, it is understandable.