Naohiro Matsumura

Crowd control is the essence of society. From religion to government and right down to the individual acting on him or herself, everyone seeks to modify behavior to suit their needs. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler collected a lot of such adaptations in Nudge many years ago. Now Naohiro Matsumura has come along with Shikake, where a Japanese influence can help design out obstacles to safety and efficiency. It’s a fun read, and everyone can do it – because everyone does.

It’s as simple as posting a drawing of two eyes over the box where people are supposed to pay for their coffees. It increases payment, clean and easy. Matsumura found that putting a mirror over a rack full of flyers caused people to stop and check themselves out – and take away flyers 2.5 times as often as when there is no mirror.

I particularly like the world’s deepest bin: a trash barrel that produces the sound of the trash falling – for eight long seconds – until it supposedly crashes onto the heap of other trash at the bottom. Matsumura says it has made people go and collect trash to throw in so they can hear the soundtrack again. And have a laugh.

These are win-win solutions, whereby the perpetrator gets the desired behavior, and the victims get a bit of entertainment, unexpectedly, in the otherwise most mundane of situations. Probably the most famous one is putting a sticker of a target or a fly in the bowl of a urinal. It causes men to aim, reducing splashing and the need to clean so often. Apparently, 51 mm above the drain is the ideal spot for the sticker, in case you were wondering.

Shikake even works on the perps themselves. Matsumura says he sets his own bread machine to operate overnight and complete a fresh bread for the time when he is supposed to wake up. The smell of baking bread awakens him pleasantly without an alarm, and he must rise and retrieve the bread when it’s done or it will shrivel and fall. Then, obviously, he also has fresh warm bread by the time he’s ready to eat.

Shikake is as simple as drawing a diagonal line across a shelf of binders, so people will put them back in the proper order for easier retrieval next time. Or it can be as devious as putting mint flavor on tickets at the parking garage. People tend to put them in their mouths and continue on in – mint or no mint. The result has been increased sales of mints in neighboring stores.

There is also negative shikake. Rumble strips warn drivers they’re over the line, for example. Or roll bars placed at a hallway intersection to prevent people cutting corners and bumping into each other. He calls them shikake too, but they don’t have the feel of playfulness and good humor of the other innovations. They are instead, forced.

Speaking of forced, Matsumura goes a bit too far. He is actively trying to turn this into a discipline – an ology. To give shikakeology a scientific foundation, he has divided the 120 examples he has collected into which senses they tickle, which stimulae they employ, and other such columns on a spreadsheet to make it look like a hard science. Kinda takes the fun out of it. Worse, he demonstrates no advantage whatsoever for all the tree branching and matrix listings he has created. You don’t select senses and stimulate to produce a shikake. There is no hierarchy of successful attempts, combinations or theories. It still takes creativity and inspiration, based on demonstrated need to change the way people act.

One great tip he gives is to learn from children. They notice more, are more curious and way more creative about reacting to what they encounter. He gives the example of windows lining a hallway, where they cast shadows that make an impromptu hopscotch grid for his daughters to skip along. Modifying a child’s behavior can lead to success with adults. Shikakeology is observation, not equations.

It is wonderful that we can be so creative that we entertain while solving some annoyance in our lives. But I don’t see how this is a Japanese discipline. Matsumura provides no history of it in Japan, and there is no school for it. It’s just him, looking for a home for it, he says, The Japanese weren’t the first to paint stairs like piano keys and have sensors produce sounds as you stepped on the concrete keys. But aside from ownership issues, Shikake the book is a delightful little stroll through the creative and the positive.

David Wineberg… (altro)