Wednesday Workshop 12: Build a Forcing Function for One Recurring Slip

Materials: whatever is already in the room (paper, tape, string, a mug, a phone, a door, a charging cable, sticky notes). No special kit.

1. Catch the slip

Pick one action you perform almost every day that sometimes goes wrong: leaving without keys, pouring too much coffee, plugging the wrong cable, taking the wrong bottle, locking yourself out of a mode on a device, etc.

Write three short lines only:

• What the intended goal was
• What actually happened
• Which Norman category it most resembles (capture, description, data-driven, associative, mode)

Do not analyze yet. Just name the mismatch.

2. Externalize the hidden schema

On paper, draw the sequence as a chain of boxes. Mark where your mind “assimilated” the familiar pattern and skipped a check. Circle the moment the environment failed to give a clear signifier or mapping.

This is the Grove schema lesson made tactile: most knowledge stays buried until you act and the action fails.

3. Invent a cheap forcing function

Build one physical intervention that makes the wrong next step harder or impossible, and the right next step obvious. Keep it ugly and reversible.

Examples of the spirit, not the assignment:

• A cardboard sleeve that only fits the correct charger
• A string-and-clip “lock-in” that must be unclipped before the door can close
• A paper interlock that covers the extra button until the first step is done
• A color-coded wrap that turns a description error into an obvious mismatch

Test it three times in real motion. If it still allows the old slip, modify it immediately. That is the “natural evolution of design” loop from Chapter 6, compressed into one sitting.

4. Close the loop

Photograph or sketch the before/after. Note whether the new object reduced the slip, merely moved the error, or added creeping featurism of its own. That last observation is the point.