DEEP INNOVATION: DESIGN FOR REAL BEHAVIOR CHANGE
Presenters: Fred Dust and Allison Arieff, IDEO

There's a building in San Francisco, an innovative building designed to foster health and wellness: the elevators stop every three floors to encourage people to take the stairs. But people take the handicap elevators instead—because they don't stop. It's an example of how the best intentions don't play out as intended.

We're going to talk about behavior, about designing to change behavior: how to get users to be part of sustainability and a green future. IDEO's business is product design, so we understand what appeals to people. We pull, instead of push. We're going to talk about how to get people to want sustainability and green design—how to pull them there.

Sustainability: What does it mean anyway?
This is a picture of a package of green beans from the UK food chain Tesco. There's a label that everyone can understand, and in addition to the nutritional information there's the source—Kenya—so people can make educated decisions about food purchases. The UK has a green/red/amber system to tell people how healthful food; these green beans are green. This is an example of how to express greenness in a clear way without overplaying it. You don't need to create a museum.

It's about straightforward language: communicating green so it's easy to understand. It's the difference between talking about a "LEED building" and a "living building."

So, what if homes came with labels? On the heating system, on the windows? Maybe people would begin to respond to home buying the way they respond to whole foods, making informed decisions. When people talk about greenness of space they're talking about health issues like air quality, the smell of paint. Wellness is not as off-putting as "the environment." It could be an easier conversation.

Acting Small Can Make Us Forget About Acting Big
Messages like the ones about compact fluorescents, which equate light bulbs to cars on the road, are confusing because people think they've done more than they have. It's one tiny step, but it's not enough. We need to think about the larger context.

People need a place to access this information. People are carrying their own bottles now, but Evian is still bottling water because there isn't enough pushback. There are bigger moves you can make.

There are examples of taking small things to a large scale. A design collective called Civil Twilight has developed lunar resonant streetlights that are modulated by the strength of the moonlight. It began as a student project in landscape architecture, and they're trying to implement it on a larger scale, on university campuses and in small communities. It has the added benefit of making the people who experience it happier: the beauty is as important as anything else in the design.

Sustainability Is Not Enough
Now we have durable shopping bags—and people waiting in line to buy $15 designer bags (some of which are going for $400 on eBay.) The sustainable thing has become a fashion statement. Why not just bring a bag to the market? Because this is a way to bring sustainability to what we're doing—but also to feel cool.

So how can we do the sustainability thing and take pleasure in it? Sustainability must offer added benefits—tax incentives, pleasure, status. We read about movie stars and their electric cars (although it's their fourth car).

Architect Larry Scarpa's house is beautiful as well as sustainable, the result of dual-function decisions—environmental and aesthetic. There is a market for well-designed, sustainable homes. (Although when you see Ted Turner building his daughter an 11,000-square foot sustainable show home, you realize there is still a lack of clarity about the concept.)

People Don't See Past the Product or the Logo
460,000 cell phones are discarded daily. How can we convince our clients to make something that will last, that doesn't need to be replaced? We all know the key to sustainability is using less, but how does a design firm deal with that?

New York City's Birdbath Bakery was constructed using the remnants of other bakeries built over the last five years, so the whole space is recycled. On their website you can click on any element and find out where it came from. It's an opportunity to start revealing things to consumers, so they understand where things come from. They do things like offering a discount to people who come by bike, to get people to think about the larger system.

Think About How to Design the User into the Process
A design review committee doesn't give you the best end-result because those people didn't participate in the process; they just weigh in on what's wrong with it. How do we get the owner and user involved in the planning, so they can communicate the story?

The University of California at Berkeley asked IDEO to help with the planning for a community center, which had come to a standstill over where to locate it, although people assumed Sproul Plaza was the obvious place. We paired members of the planning group with students and told them to follow the students all morning and note where they stopped, where they seemed to engage with their community and academic lives. When they returned, they mapped the students' movements, marking their social connections, the places where they found community. They found that no student ever stopped in Sproul Plaza, which allowed them to break through the idea that there was a single place for community. They went on to adopt a neighborhood plan with a number of different community places.

How Do We Design Systems That Reward Effort?
There's a lot of work to do, and architects shoulder much of it. The question is how to create systems that enable and engage the end users, so they can do their part in living a green future.

IDEO worked with the American Red Cross on a project that dealt with generational differences: younger people complain about their service, and older people see donating as work. How do we engage people in a community that has an ethic of labor in it? We developed a system in which you have to write who you are, why you're donating and other information, as well as let them take your picture. The Red Cross was in an uproar, but the pilot was a big success. It engaged a multiage group in the feeling that they're all part of a common cause.

The question is: how do we get people to walk the stairs because that's part of what they should do—not because the elevator stops at every third floor?

Additional Information

IDEO: www.ideo.com

Civil Twilight: www.civiltwilightcollective.com/lunar1.htm

Birdbath Bakery: http://buildagreenbakery.com