Peace Innovation Protocols to Impact the Pandemic
The pandemic has shown us our deepest weaknesses and emphasized the importance of designing a better future.
Entrepreneurs and businesses have a special place in this pressing call for change, as they have the unique opportunity to create positive change in their users through their products or services. Designing a positive change in the world can be an overwhelming challenge, but there are many ways we can incorporate small changes in our product/service design process that would make a big difference.
Through business and ventures, we can create the impact we want to see in the world and shape the future we envision. As entrepreneurs and visionaries, when designing any kind of product as complex as a multinational company or as “simple” as a phone app, it is key to think about an extra dimension in design: what effect will it have on society? What role does it play in creating a better world?
Connecting with users to prompt for change
““When you establish a connection to your end-user, you are taking a huge step in creating work that has real potential to provoke positive behavior change””
What if when every scientist, engineer or designer added this extra dimension in their product design process? Asking themselves: What could we add to our design so it results in the empowerment of society? How can we prompt people to be the positive change in the world?
Many branding, marketing, and social media experts constantly study the effect product designs have on people to understand how to increase sales and popularity. How about incorporating this extra dimension to every step of the process in every area of relevant expertise? How could our design empower society?
The first step is to understand what effects products have on their users, focusing on the conditions and processes that contribute to our happiness and well-being. When a product has a positive effect on its user, it creates a positive experience in their brain, releasing chemicals such as dopamine or oxytocin. Igniting positive change is greatly related to the type of chemicals being secreted, and we can design for this. Are we feeling inspired? Encouraged? Moved by the product? Taking it a step further, what role can we play in empowering our audience? Encouraging a type of positive mindset such as the “growth mindset” which creates a powerful passion for learning and self-improvement. As designers, how might we foster growth mindsets that enable people to become their best selves?
When designing a product consider:
What kind of emotional response the product generates?
How can we model it to affect a positive change in the world?
How can we empower our audience to be their best selves through our designs?
How can we use it to prompt people to have a positive impact on the pandemic?
To impart real impact in the work and create true change, we need to add an extra dimension to our design process, where we connect with our audience, and design products with a sense of self-efficacy, the belief that one can cause change. An effective product or service should make the customer feel successful in their goals. By designing products and services that create tiny wins, we foster positive momentum and in turn, rewire people's sense of their own potential.
Using interactive Technologies for Positive Change
A notable example of how to design an experience that causes a positive effect and prompts for positive change is through technologies such as virtual reality. Schoeller et al. reviewed the potential of virtual reality technologies to foster empathy in individuals, by allowing them to “put themselves into other peoples' shoes.”
Halton and Cartwright through their study “Walking in a Patient's Shoes!” aimed to increase empathic levels of pharmaceutical workers and patients suffering from Inflammatory Bowel Disease. By providing a sort of virtual reality experience, where daily challenges faced by the patients were narrated, they showed an increase in the understanding and empathy of the workers towards the patients. Others like Recupero et al. similarly reported how a similar experiment based on experience design through storytelling could promote positive cultural integration of immigrants, reducing levels of xenophobia in individuals. They create and experience recreating some of the main challenges that immigrants face in their daily life, such as homesickness and the urge of cultural integration. They discuss how this type of experience and PeaceTech could further our understanding of other cultures, traditions, personal relations, etc
Data-driven technologies can also have a very significant positive impact on society. Apps like Nike+ give people the ability to gather and analyze data about themselves, tracking progress, and encouraging many to live healthier lives, changing the way people view exercise and increasing self-power.
“Living by the numbers, the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance.”
This effect raises a further question, can we ignite positive behaviors by showing personal progress, and individual data analytics of users of our product?
Behavior Design to Enhance Critical Thinking Skills
Fake news is one of the main issues accelerating the pandemic, they lead to public distrust of the government response, reduced compliance, and increases the alarm of the public leading to chaos. How could we use design, in particular, behavior design, as a path to discern real/fake information?
Doug Kreitzberg, a founding member of the Peace Innovation Network, applied behavior design to his company, seeking to reduce employee vulnerability to scams. Using Behavior Design and SnapTesting methods commonly used by the Peace Innovation Institute and Lab he was able to ”increase phish detection in employees by 68% and decrease employees clicking security compromising links to 0% within four weeks”
Here’s how Doug used Behavior Design to develop this solution:
Can we develop a cost-saving data security solution applying Behavior Design?
Can we change the behaviors of vulnerable employees?
Can we SnapTest our way to a new Behavior Design-driven product to achieve two primary outcomes:
Reduce unwanted outcomes; employees step clicking on security-compromising links
Increase desired outcomes; employees know the difference between a phishing scam and a real email.
After running tests in several organizations, they developed a consistent technology that decreased a negative behavior and increased a positive one. 82% of individuals reported being “more discerning with regards to internet sources when it comes to making decisions”
The goal of behavior design isn’t to just decrease negative behavior but to increase positive behavior, and create positive change. Could this type of design technique be used to educate society in spotting fake news, especially during a time of global crisis, such as the pandemic?
For this particular technology, the average cost of a data breach is $3.9 Million (source: IBM/Ponemom, 2019). During a pandemic, decreasing the spread of fake news could not only save millions of dollars in the economy but also save people’s lives.
Their process also opens our way to another aspect of design, the consideration of unintended consequences, to reduce unwanted outcomes while increasing desired ones.
The Unintended Consequences of Design
When thinking about design it is really important to think about potential unintended consequences, which can either be negative or positive and aim to minimize the negative and maximize the positive.
In our first example of designing for positive change by establishing a connection with our users, we warned about the negative consequences the effect particular designs may cause on our audience, these are the negative unintended consequences. But just like in behavior design where the goal was to decrease negative behavior and increase positive behavior, we must always seek to eliminate negative unintended consequences, while enhancing positive ones.
Great examples of positive unintended consequences are those shown by Uber and Airbnb case studies. Uber, one of the most popular transportation networks and the fastest growing startup in history; and Airbnb, a digitalized hospitality network with a value of $10 billion in revenues for 2020 (Winkler & MacMillian, 2015), demonstrate that the process of value creation has, in fact, several dimensions.
Diving deeper into an AirBnB case study, the company can provide value for hosts and guests, designing an authentic experience for interacting with a different culture, living like a local at their home, and interacting with their host. These types of interactions contribute to creating a more open-minded and connected society. Apps like Uber, or Grab, more commonly used in Southeast Asia provide similar experiences. These are the type of positive consequences a company should try to enhance while decreasing negative ones that may come along with it. In the case of Airbnb, local property owners made more money with Airbnb, exacerbating housing const and removing inventory from the market.
The power of unintended consequences of design is very powerful, it must therefore always be carefully studied.
COVID-19 and Closing Remarks
What impact can all these techniques have on the pandemic and redesigning the post-COVID-19 economy and the “new normal”?
COVID-19 brought with it fast and big changes, it has impacted the way we work, educates ourselves, our hygiene habits, the way we relate to people, Topics like remote working and telemedicine that had been discussed for years all of a sudden were implemented due to the urgency of current events.
Crises and times of great change, like now, present a unique opportunity to redesign systems for the better.
During these six months, we have seen fast radical developments. We have acted to adapt, now there is an opportunity to add an extra dimension to our design processes thinking about “how can we create positive change?” and shape society.
Using the previously discussed design techniques we prompt you with these initial questions:
How can we design products that excite specific parts of our users' brains, raising in them a sense of community and helping with compliance in social distancing and quarantine measures?
Can we use augmented technology to show the realities of people infected by the virus, creating more empathetic communities, and have society take the issue with the seriousness it deserves?
Can we develop a product that decreases negative responses to the pandemic while enhancing a more positive one?
What are the unintended consequences of our responses to the pandemic? How can we maximize the positive ones while decreasing the negative ones?
The 1918 epidemic prompted and helped many European countries create the national health services they have today. Will this one help strengthen them? We are in a unique time in history to create change. Redesign our economy, exploring and improving its flaws.
Crisis shape history. There is a pressing need and opportunity to design the change we need.