User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

by Cliff Kuang

As a kid in the 1910s, decades before he would come to loom over academic psychology, Burrhus Frederic Skinner assumed that a person could be molded just like any machine. He was already testing that thesis out as a boy, using himself as a subject. Once, after his mother hounded him about picking up his clothes, he resolved to train away his own forgetfulness by redesigning his bedroom. First, he arranged a flag to block the doorway. This he attached to a pulley, and on the other end a clothes hook. The flag would raise only if he’d hung his pajamas there.7 Skinner couldn’t articulate it at the time, but the guiding thought seemed to be: Here is something that I don’t want to do, that I can never remember to do. But the right environment will make me do it. The idea hovered over his life with an eerie consistency.