Greengaged

photo by: Travis Drever

In 2008, I really enjoyed Greengaged at the Design Council, so was excited to attend Greengaged 2009's Monday session, Design for Life: Barriers to Behaviour Change, curated by Ed Gillespie of Futerra. Together with Sophie Thomas, Ed put together an intensive day of discussions addressing the necessity for individual and societal behaviour change in different areas of our lives, what designers can and should be doing about it, and the possible impacts of design moving into this area. This is, effectively, what I have been investigating for the past few years, so naturally very interesting to hear the perspectives on it from knowledgeable people: the programme included some of the leading voices in design research and practice, including Alastair Fuad-Luke, Fiona Bennnie and Professor John Wood.

First up was the breakfast debate, "Is it design's job to save the world?", where John Wood suggested that our inability to frame current issues in a comprehensive and accessible manner - a language problem - is a crucial stumbling-block towards real action. For example, until the word 'genocide' was adopted by the UN in 1948, the concept was shrouded in disbelief, yet we have no similar term for mass species-killing, or indeed mass environmental damage, he explained. Without a word for it, it's easier to believe that it isn't happening, or likely to happen, and therefore becomes difficult to get a handle on the implications. Donella Meadows' Leverage Points were also mentioned as something worth designers getting their heads around, with which I very much agreed with.

John further argued that "part of the problem" is based on how "designers have created a choice-based world of goodies", a controversial argument that a significant chunk of the design 'establishment' shies away from discussing (particularly during London Design Festival!) We touched on this area further later in the day as speakers' views on 'the public' and 'future' became more apparent.

Alastair Fuad-Luke - whose new book Design Activism is a goldmine of clever and intriguing projects and initiatives from designers all over the world - asked us to think about "Who designs?", suggesting that "the world today is [actually] designed by powerful clients, those who set the briefs", and that this is the main barrier to behaviour change: the fact that "the decision-making around design is not democratic", that design needs to be participatory and be 'capacity-building' for the public. 

It would have been interesting to expand on this last point further: I got the impression Alastair would have liked to talk more about it, but a similar subject recurred later on when Duncan Law (Transition Town Brixton) emphasised the need for us to "re-skill an entire generation", and design's ability to help with this - from ingredient kits which teach students how to cook healthy meals from scratch, to volunteer cycle maintenance classes, to the School of Everything where people teach each other - was tackled by both the panel and suggestions from the audience. (The RSA's Design & Society programme on design and resourcefulness, taking the line "You know more than you think you do", is approaching this area from a slightly different angle).

photo by: Travis Drever

Sophie Thomas used a plastic toothbrush to illustrate 'what's wrong' with so much design: how an item with a functional life of maybe 2 months, has an environmental impact far into the future, whether or not it ends up as part of the Pacific Garbage Patch, while Roman Krznaric gave an incredibly eloquent appeal on using empathy to influence behaviour change, characterising climate change as a "problem of empathy generation", with two proposals to address it: a 'Climate Corps' along the lines of the US Peace Corps, which would address empathy across space by allowing western young people to appreciate the effects of climate change right now on their peers in other parts of the world; and a series of 'Climate Futures Museums' (perhaps implemented as 'traveling circuses') which enable us to experience empathy across time, feeling the impact of possible futures via, for example, rooms which flood, areas without electricity, rationing, and so on. As an extreme example of feedforward, and reminiscent of Stuart Candy's work, this proposal particularly intrigued me.

A further morning session discussed "Fashion and Travel", with 'Green Traveller' Richard Hammond and Forum for the Future's Fiona Bennie, along with Sheena Mathieken and Eliza Starbuck of The Uniform Project addressing the balance between 'fun' and 'contentment' and the possibilities and hassles of long-distance rail travel as an integral part of a holiday rather than simply an inconvenient part of the journey, as air travel has perhaps increasingly become.

It was in the afternoon session, however, on "Food and the home" that some of what (to me at least) is a critical debate in the whole "design for behaviour change" field started to emerge more clearly. The discussions between Victor Buchli, DIY Kyoto's Greta Corke, Transition Town Brixton's Duncan Law, Toby Hammond from Better Generation and Ben Reynolds of Sustain, expertly orchestrated by Ed Gillespie, gave me an opportunity to see how different views of "what the public is like" (my pinball / shortcut / thoughtful user theory) were in evidence. 

Most "behaviour change" strategies I've come across, whether about legislation, social marketing or the actual design of products / systems / environments, seem to take one of three views of "the user" (i.e. the public), which is reflected in the kind of techniques employed or proposed. Many policy makers seem to view people as 'pinballs' (Lawrence Lessig's 'pathetic dot', maybe) to be directed and channelled and controlled through constraints and affordances intended to be difficult to avoid, such as legislation or the choices of technology architecture made available in the first place. This viewpoint doesn't care about educating the public, or making people more aware of the impacts of their behaviour. Victor touched on this perspective when talking about how even in planned command economies such as the Soviet Union, behaviour and decision-making inside people's homes and communities remained tantalisingly out of reach for the authorities. 

On the other hand, designers and politicians may take a view of people which sees them as primarily driven by the desire to do things as easily and simply as possible: to take 'shortcuts' wherever possible (so designing things where the shortcut - perhaps a default - is what you want the user to do). Here we are in the realm of behavioural economics, of heuristics and biases and 'don't make me think' usability (Herbert Simon's satisficing is a more nuanced view of this). Greta's discussion of DIY Kyoto's approach with the Wattson to frame the arguments mainly as being about cost savings (appealing to users' self-interest) rather than attempting to get users interested in the environment seemed to be an example of this sort of philosophy, particularly in contrast to Duncan Law's vision of Transition Town thinking, where communities are engaged to learn more about the problems the world faces, and what we can do about the situation, changing their attitudes as well as their behaviours (the Persuasive Technology movement largely takes this approach). This view of the public - that people are essentially thoughtful, and will change their behaviour after learning about why they should do so, is an optimistic one; as Duncan said, "if you can imagine what a good outcome would be, you can get passionate about working towards it."

Probably, in reality, we are going to need initiatives which take account of pinballs, shortcuts and thoughtful publics all at once, since (as DEFRA's Environmental Segmentation Model seems to recognise), people are different, and do respond to behaviour-influencing techniques in different ways. 

photo by: Travis Drever

Throughout the day, we were treated to insights into some great projects, and the impressive Talkaoke format, ably run by Saul Albert, meant that alongside close-ups of the speakers (and audience members asking questions), we had one-line summaries of the questions being discussed, annotated with a stream of relevant images and websites, and even Greengaged's Twitter stream all projected behind the speakers, who were arranged around an illuminated pineapple ring-style console, with Ed Gillespie looking rather Davros-esque in the centre. As always, there were a lot of very interesting people present, and talking to them during the breaks, learning about their projects and backgrounds and plans for what to do next, was just as much a part of the day as the sessions themselves. The day was very well organised, which helped these sessions and breaks flow quite naturally.

Overall the day provided a great range of ideas, questions and perspectives on design, behaviour and the environment from some very clever people, and (while inevitably self-selecting) I'm sure it had some effect on the audience, most of whom were involved in design in one form or another. Even increasing awareness of the possibilities of design for behaviour change (a 'thoughtful' view of designers!) is undoubtedly useful, as designers realise that we do have the power to change things, and that anyone who tries to change things is, in some sense, a designer. As Herbert Simon put it in 1969, "everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

* See also Ann Thorpe's ongoing work on design activism