I visited the V&A’s Decode exhibition over the weekend which showcases digital interactive art. Decode did a good job of showing how code was becoming a tool in its own right for artists and designers, how technology allowed people to interact more fully (read: full of very excited children) with exhibits, and how dynamic visualisations could be generated from vast networks. The video for Radiohead’s House of Cards was displayed on an interactive screen but others I hadn’t seen before, like Troika’s digital zoetrope which whizzed round displaying an incoherent babble of words, then suddenly clicked into focus showing snippets of a story: “stockbroker / 200k / belgravia / she left me” before changing speed again so that the words fell back into the babble. Putting the puritan hat of Edward Tufte on, I guess I’d say that a lot of the visualisations didn’t always have bringing clarity to data as their first concern: when walking around lots of things made me think “that looks complicated”, rather than “that helps me understand”.

In his 2003 book Persuasive Technology, BJ Fogg lists some reasons why using technology to influence behaviour is different from persuading people using other forms of media like traditional advertising. For example the anonymity of interacting with a machine can encourage people to be more open in their responses to questions which could allow a computer to present more tailored responses. Computers can also sift through enormous volumes of data to present people with an overpowering case - or find the one fact in millions that they find most persuasive. Another reason Fogg gives that I find convincing is that computers can present people with a rich variety of text, video, audio and the ability to interact and simulate, allowing people to select the media that they find most engaging.

Decode wasn’t an exhibition about changing behaviour of course, but it was interesting to read an interview with one of the artists, Golan Levin, who when asked “what do digital technologies allow you to do or investigate that other tools do not?” replied “I can create ‘behaviour’”.

My Wii age is the same as my real age. This means that the makers of Wii Sports consider that, based on my age, height and sense of balance - I am fit. Nice to be given the approval from a games console. If on the other hand it calculates that you are overweight or obese it rather nastily swells the tummy of your mii (your avatar in the game) in proportion. It’s a cheeky response from a lump of electronics and plastic.

It’s difficult not to get uppity when people imply (at least when you haven’t asked them) that you should correct the way you live. We tend to think our lifestyles only have an effect on ourselves and our close family and friends. In many ways it’s just not true though. Stats last year showed that NHS trusts saw spending rise seven-fold in three years on obesity-related costs; a trend that will come under scrutiny when public sector spending as a whole faces cuts.

There’s been an explosion of research in public policy over the last few years into more effective ways to encourage “behaviour change” – renewed interest in social marketing, behavioural economics, neuroscience,  social and cognitive psychology… Through a heavy pile of papers and reports, we seem to know more than ever about what affects the decisions we make. In theory allowing us to design intelligent policies and measures that give us freedom while protecting others from the fall-out of our actions.

One of my frustration is that we need to put more of this research into action – behaviour-change theory is fascinating, but it’s only half the challenge. We need good ideas for how we can convert knowledge into practice.

One way in which the RSA is trying to jump this theory/practice gap is through a short project with the police. Working with the National Police Improvement Agency, we carried out some short qualitative research with officers and the public to identify a few key behaviours. We chose behaviours we thought likely to affect levels of public confidence in the police – the police force’s main target – and chose an approach of using design and technology (everything from handcuffs to websites) to form behaviour change interventions.

Working with a few designers, we used the Design with Intent toolkit to brainstorm new ideas which could encourage more desirable behaviours. These ranged from using heart rate monitors to help officers monitor their levels of stress, to using Waitrose-like plastic tokens to allow people to vote for the police force’s neighbourhood priorities. We’ll publish a more comprehensive list in a few weeks here.

We ran through the same process a couple of weeks later with a larger group of people more familiar with the police. One of the strengths of the DwI toolkit seemed to me to give those who aren’t professional designers the confidence to come up with new ideas. By looking at how others have used design to influence behaviour it is easier to transpose those ideas to the behaviours that you are trying to change.

It’s methods like DwI that are one of the components missing from much of the behaviour change discourse. We need that idea-generating process to help policy makers work with designers, behaviour experts and people to make the leap into practice. Maybe then we’d find some better ways of reducing obesity and its rapidly rising social costs.

Matthew Taylor’s thesis that a more engaged citizen (as opposed to a consumer) is required to reform government, one that will understand the need to make trade-offs and one that takes personal responsibility for their actions, is perfectly exemplified by many of today’s activist geeks. Individuals like Tom Steinberg and MySociety, a voluntary organisation of technical experts donate their time to the challenge of scraping data from public sector websites (like Hansard records) and re-published it in websites that are far more engaging, allowing others in turn to become more engaged.

Today, principally because of their example, and reports like the Power of Information review, both the present government and the opposition fully recognise the value of making such data available online, where communities of people linked by the internet can ‘get excited and make things‘. This appears to be causing the enormous pent-up enthusiasm to be released; indicated by the membership of the new http://data.gov.uk/ site’s discussion group reaching 1,464 (at time of writing) with some extremely active discussions.

Stephen Timms recently spoke at the RSA, highlighting the success of the government’s effort to open up more data, and the efforts made are likely to remain, with the Conservative party also showing enthusiasm for the idea. When it comes to opening up government data, the most ambitious example I’ve seen so far is http://www.recovery.gov/, the website for the US Government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Obama’s stimulus package.

I often write about ”persuasive technology” on this blog, which has, as a pretty foundational tenet, that allowing people to see the effect of their actions, or “self-monitoring” can enable and encourage them to change their behaviour (a la real-time energy displays). Freeing public sector data is simply this on a much more ambitious scale.

Tomorrow (Wednesday 6th) is a special day at the RSA as it marks the 255th Annual General Meeting of the Society. To celebrate, we are hosting a day of seminars for the Fellows of the RSA about the project team’s work, followed by the AGM itself and the Chairman’s speech in the evening.

The project team’s seminars include:

Connected Communities
10.30am – 12.00pm
Steve Broome and William Shaw will discuss their programme of action research projects that work together to understand how social networks operate and can be better used in creating the kind of sustainable communities we want to live in.

Peterborough Project
1.30pm – 2.20pm
Sam McLean will be on hand to talk about The Peterborough Project; an exciting, long-term partnership between the RSA, Peterborough City Council, Opportunity Peterborough and Arts Council East with the core aim of reshaping the identity of Peterborough around active, sustainable citizenship.

Design and Education
2.30pm – 3.20pm
Emily Campbell from our Design & Society project and Louise Thomas from our Education project will explore the ways in which design principles might be applied in education to support rigorous innovation, as well as increase the agency, independence and capacity of educational practitioners.

Social Brain
3.30pm – 4.20 pm
Matt Grist will discuss new ways of thinking about brains and behaviour that offer insight into how to create a more self-reliant and ‘pro-social’ society; in line with the RSA’s vision of social progress.

If you’re able to visit the RSA tomorrow you will also see a fantastic exhibition that details the society’s varied and surprising history – from chimney brushes to the RSA academy with everything else between. Not simply a retrospective, the exhibition will develop over time as more people, projects and ideas are added. You can see a virtual version on the RSA’s website, but I’d recommend popping in if you can.

Other ways that Fellows who aren’t able to get to John Adam Street can listen and talk on the day include watching the speech online from 6:30, or by tweeting your thoughts to #rsaagm.

Looking forward to it!

“There is nothing new under the sun”, said a depressed Solomon. That’s certainly true of government using psychology to influence their people, notwithstanding the excitement among policy makers around behavioural economics. An example is the good story about Frederick the Great’s attempts to introduce the potato into Prussia in the 18th century, or the shift in public health during the 50s and 60s from “a culture of secrecy to a culture of communication”.

The other example that not too many people mention is propaganda. I’m not yet quite sure where government interest in behaviour change policy stops and propaganda begins. This is a question that arises in an article by Conrad Bird for the Foreign Office, when applying lessons from domestic policy to public diplomacy. He says:

Strategic communication has a key role to play in securing behaviour change. Although the examples used above are from the UK domestic policy context, the principles that underlie strategic communication can be applied universally. Where there are people, there is insight to be generated – all the more so if we are working with peoples of differing cultures, ethnicities and religions. And we will always need to work out how to segment our audiences so that we can craft and tailor compelling propositions.

One review of Bird’s article picks up on the theme that the public diplomacy that Bird speaks of is really propaganda (apparently an old argument to diplomatic types) under a new name and is skeptical about how appropriate a strategy it is:

“If all this [behaviour change / strategic communication] is public diplomacy or is, at least, on the minds of some of those practicing it, then I would not like to be one of their targets”

The FCO response to the review is worth a look – and among the points it makes is that one distinction between behaviour change (or public diplomacy in this case) and propaganda is that the latter is one way and doesn’t seek a dialogue with its target. But I’m not yet convinced that this distinction is upper-most in the minds of policy makers keen to experiment with the new knowledge of behavioural economics.

Where do you think “behaviour change” stops and propaganda begins?

On a related note, one piece of public health advice that looks uncannily like propaganda tried to put a face on AIDS – and ended up using an image of a mass-murderer. The campaign has attracted a lot of criticism, and the linked image is quite strong [link].

Mr Micawber delivers some valedictory remarks - courtesy of http://charlesdickenspage.com/

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

…et cetera, et cetra. Spending and money management is a behaviour I haven’t thought too deeply about, but there are a few interesting instances of design that encourage particular money-related behaviours that immediately spring to mind.

A while ago when working on a university project on Personal Carbon Trading (a parallel currency of carbon credits often described as another card that people would carry in their wallets) I wondered whether incorporating a display that indicated how many credits remained on the card would be a good idea. Something like e-paper could work well; it’s flat and consumes little power. Leaving aside the privacy issues and risks associated with displaying account balances on cards for everyone to see, a display on the card would give people some feedback (or self-monitoring) on their balance and could help them manage their account more effectively. Perhaps it could even take the idea of being in the red or the black literally and change colour according to the balance of your account.

Adding feedback to cards isn’t a new idea. You probably remember BT’s earlier phonecards, which had a strip which was marked each time the card was used. Here’s one (it just happens to be prisons issue phonecard) that looks from the marks like it’s been half-used:

Phonecard by Flickr user everydaylifemodern

Another interesting example of design for behaviour change to help money management is given by Dan Lockton in his Design with Intent toolkit. Yahoo’s loan simulator provides people with the ability to project their loan repayments into the future (it doesn’t seem to work on Internet Explorer 6 by the way):

Yahoo's loan simulator

It’s a helpful utility I think, but does it give the simulation in the right place? Maybe a loan simulator on a mobile phone be a better influence when you’re out spending money? Would it be better if you could plot other big expenses you’re expecting in the next few years?

Do you know of any other good examples of design, behaviour, and money management out there?

Mark Easton wrote a good summary yesterday of the government’s work in trying to encourage people to adopt more “pro-environmental” behaviour. He references Defra’s work, which takes a social marketing approach, segmenting the UK population by their attitude towards the environment and choosing specific behaviours (like “install insulation” or “adopt lower impact diet”) that will suit them.

I’m glad he wrote his post, as I think Defra’s approach is novel. But what I’m particularly interested in is how people respond to knowing that central government are approaching behaviour change in this way; which might seem more redolent of an advertising company than a government department.

I’d love someone to release content analysis service for blog comments, but without having that at my disposal, I read the 31 comments that were posted by 9:31 this morning and divided them into the following groups:

• Issues about whether man-made climate change is real and the science certain
• Issues about the relationship between the state and individual
• Issues about individual human behaviour; our incentives and agency

The first section is not really of much interest, and simply reworks old ground.

The third section maps to about 10% of all comments which suggested, among other things, that adopting more pro-environmental behaviur was just not in human nature.

The middle section was the largest; at least a third of the comments fell into it. Comments argued that the government should set an example (Heathrow’s 3rd runway, the Department for Energy & Climate Changes’ apallingly energy-inefficient building etc.) before telling people what to do, and should treat people intelligently when it did so. Various comments also highlighted people’s willingness to change but poor existing infrastructure or policies that trapped them into environmentally damaging ways of life. This section was also the most strongly worded, with comments suggesting that the approach from government was Orwellian and could feed conspiracy theories about climate change.

What is the right way of developing effective behaviour change interventions and policies? Writing from a design perspective I immediately think of public service innovation companies like thinkpublic or Participle. Could a co-design approach to behaviour change interventions help improve the fractured relationship between the individual and the state?

Segment of a Social Network Analysis (Creative Commons, courtesy of Wikipedia user DarwinPeacock

In a fascinating bit of research from MIT (covered here by the BBC), social network researchers have used mobile phones to collect high-resolution data on communication (via call-logs), location (via GSM base-stations) and proximity to other people (via continuous bluetooth scanning) in a study of 94 people. The Beeb’s report majors on the disparity between how people describe their own interactions with other people (self-reporting) and the data from the phones reveal, but the main point is really the implications of being able to accurately map these relationships within communities.

One of the analyses the researchers performed on the data was to find out whether they could predict the nature of relationships between people (defined in the charming terms: reciprocal friends, non-reciprocal friends and reciprocal non-friends) from mobile phone data. Using the volume of phone communication and the proximity data from the bluetooth scans, they were able to predict friendship with 95% success.

You can have a look at the full paper here. It contains phrases like “Using a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure, common to the analysis of the adjacency matrices representing social networks, we can assess the significance of the predictive value of variables”.

The implications of this could be pretty staggering to social network analysis. As the paper concludes:

“…these methods allow for an inspection of the dynamics of macro networks that were heretofore unobservable. There is no technical reason why data cannot be collected from hundreds of millions of people throughout the course of their lives. Further, while the collection of such data raises serious privacy issues that need to be considered, the potential for achieving important societal goals is considerable.”

This particular study was based on under 100 people at MIT, but imagine what an insight it could give to researchers and policy makers interested in social capital, or (dare I say it) behaviour change initiatives. Some behaviour-change research that I heard about, for example concentrates on identifying people in communities who are the influencers (or mavens to use the Gladwell-ism).

For more on social capital and social networks (online and offline) – do have a look at the RSA’s Connected Communities project blog.

Last month the RSA’s Design & Society team launched its new programme. Emily Campbell, our Director of Design, described how although the UK has always produced great designers, (unlike other professions who have lively amateur communities) their skills don’t seem to have spilled over into the general public. In a masterful demonstration of this leaving-things-to-the-professionals, I’ll let Emily’s prose take over from mine to explain the context:

“We all know exactly how the gap happened. In last century designers achieved such sublime exercises of skill and judgement right across the gamut of need – from the toys and baubles of private luxury to housing and transport and labour-saving devices for everyone, and iPods – such sublime exercises of skill and judgement that of course the rest of us are cowed into assuming we leave design to the professionals. The twentieth-century triumphs of designers have led everyone else to forget how much they know.” [link]

Design & Society’s new programme explores how “non-designers” could benefit from a little bit more of the resourcefulness that designers have. The best designers can look at the detail, but understand the big picture too, they’re not phased by messy problems, and they learn by jumping straight in and prototyping.

This was picked up on by Alice Rawsthorn in the New York Times, who pulls together some interesting examples of digital technology allowing anyone to customise products – in the same way that the first desktop publishing systems opened up graphic design to non-professionals. Alice writes about some of the customisation ventures that are out there like NikeID, and also covers Digital Forming, a company that provides an “online platform for the ‘Mass Customisation’ of personal designed objects”.

[ As an aside, Alice also uses the expression co-design a lot to describe this sort of customisation, which interested me - as it tends to be associated with design that improves people's experiences of services rather than products, see for example thinkpublic's video on the approach. ]

My suspicion is that although the ability that technology now gives us to customise our own products can be quite cool, it’s the act itself of engaging in the design process that is empowering. We’ll know more as Design & Society works through the variour projects it has planned.

What does resourcefulness mean for Design & Behaviour Change? Some thinkers have suggested that using the ideas behind Nudge and Libertarian Paternalism (which overlap with this work) to develop policy may lead to an immature society, so I think that one of our jobs in the project is to ensure that we design-for-behaviour-change in such a way as to increase people’s resourcefulness.

Furthest yet!

Come to think of it, the experiment may have been more effective if I’d leveraged Matthew Taylor’s competitive edge, who bought a Nike+ at the same time, but I haven’t yet been bold enough to pitch my fledgling running skills against him.

So far, so good, but now I’ve decided to up the ante by testing my new level of fitness on a half marathon (still a bit of a challenge, as the furthest I can run is about five miles).

I’m running in support of Practical Action – a great NGO who work in Latin America, East Africa, Southern Africa and South Asia and use appropriate (often quite simple) technology in a people-centred way to make people’s lives better. In their own words:

“Practical Action has a unique approach to development – we don’t start with technology, but with people. The tools may be simple or sophisticated – but to provide long-term, appropriate and practical answers, they must be firmly in the hands of local people: people who shape technology and control it for themselves.”

If you have some cash to spare and would like to support Practical Action’s work – then do please consider sponsoring me to drag my body around 13.1 miles of central London. Any contribution is really appreciated to help me reach my £500 target. Thanks!