Resource Efficient Living: Behaviour Change by Design

 

In terms of the sustainability agenda, it is becoming clear that over and above generating energy or resources in a sustainable way, efficiency at the point of use, i.e. the behaviour and demand of users, will be one of the most significant factors in reducing our overall carbon footprint. Therefore a key sustainability concern is how to persuade people to use and waste less.

 

And policy tools are of course becoming more sophisticated. Predicting behaviours and designing appropriate policy is a highly complex art: in any situation there are an infinite number of possible human responses – as many responses as people in fact. This understanding translates itself into detailed research – mapping types or groups, and generating scenarios. More attention is being focused on how people can be influenced using a range of behaviour change interventions that rely on measures other than prohibition or the elimination of choice. The PM has set up a ‘Nudge Unit’ or Behavioural Insight Team that will be advised by Richard Thaler, the Chicago professor, the co-author of ‘Nudge’ and generally recognised as popularising "nudge" theory – the idea that governments can design environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves and society. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has recently appointed a sub-committee to guide an inquiry into the effectiveness of behaviour change interventions in achieving government policy goals and helping to meet societal challenges.

 

Chaired by Nigel Adams MP, the seminar on the 2nd focused on the interplay between these three themes, the world where ‘social scientists are everyone’s new best friends’, with a case study on what this kind of thinking might mean in one particular sector and regarding one particular problem: namely, the shortage of water in the south of England.

 

 

-         Bob Ryder from DEFRA spoke about the ways in which behaviour change tools and techniques are beginning to be understood and utilised by government, in particular the newly convened DEFRA team, the Centre of Expertise for Influencing Behaviour, taking cutting edge socio/ psycho theory and mapping it onto policy to seek out those areas where behaviour change tools could have an impact.

 

-         Ken Peattie from Cardiff Business School discussed the use of social marketing, invoking the experience of those operating in the commercial world (businesses) to influence users (consumers) to behave in certain ways – the grey area in between legislating to force people to do things, and assuming if you simply provide the information they will act on their own volition. Traditionally, 95% of social marketing campaigns have been to do with personal health (persuading smokers to quit for example), but that there was increasing interest in the way these tools could be applied to other social problem areas.

 

-         Mat Hunter from the Design Council, with a wealth of career experience in the field of design, discussed the specific contribution that designers could make, distilling his thinking into three points: design already has the tools with which to think about behaviour change/ designers have a power in as much as they make the physical artefacts that help us change and maintain behaviour/ designers can find the small and sometimes inexpensive details and make them significant.

 

-         Darren Bentham, speaking on behalf of a business that has to manage the peculiarly emotive resource of water, discussed how Southern Water turned a problem for the organisation (in that most users see no link between the water they use and the bill they pay) into an issue that users could grasp and respond to – primarily by making the links to saving energy and money, and carefully designing the educational journey for users, and different types of users at that. Professor Chris Coggins summed up the predicament nicely with his question: ‘Is water stuff to be bought, or is the shortage of water a problem to be owned?’

 

 

A by-now familiar message from all speakers and attendees was the pace of change with regard to sustainability needs to be much faster, that knowing which problem to tackle is half the challenge. There is an ongoing and interesting debate to be had about how this thinking ties in with the Big Society concept and localism, and how to kickstart processes that at heart should be ‘unplanned’. But the seminar highlighted that at least there is a new sophistication to the discussion, a growing understanding that tools like social marketing are one of a suite of legitimate measures, not ‘wacky’ alternatives to old-fashioned regulation.