How to use the psychology of color for climate behavior

There’s a problem with my movement. Most of us in the profession of trying to change the world have little skills or training in the actual craft of influencing human beings to do stuff — especially stuff that is new to them such as composting, putting in LED lights, or cycling to work.

Us Earth-professionals know about scientific things like the chemistry of air pollution, the engineering of solar power, or the data of climate change, but few people know about other fields, like behavioral psychology, branding, UI design, story-telling, gamification, copywriting, and the craft of just getting someone's attention, changing their mind, and getting them to do a thing. If your job is to change the world, these are the most important skills of all.

When I learned about the psychology of how to influence people, I found it so compelling that I wrote a book about it called How to Save the World. Now I design “Fitbit for the Planet” software — and color spectrums applied to data have become central to my new trade.

Using color to communicate data for change

We need to use color in a feedback loop of data about our planet. We’re not talking about the “moods of color” here (like red means hungry, blue means aloof or whatever). We’re using color to signal a data event and use it as a core feature in a project’s UI design to display feedback and performance to the user. Green means you did good. Red means you did bad.

Color is subconsciously instant

Nothing communicates as swiftly as color. If you read a word or see numbers in a table, it takes a little time and energy to interpret, but color alone can often say the same thing instantly.

Think of a traffic light. As soon as you see a color like red, yellow, or green, you instantly and unconsciously identify it as stop, slow, or go. If a traffic light displayed only the numbers 1, 2, or 3, or the words stop, slow, or go, it would take more mental effort to figure out what was going on, and would probably lead to many more crunched up cars.

Fire danger signs use color

You can correlate a spectrum of colors to your user’s data. A familiar example is the fire danger dashboard. Each degree of fire hazard severity is assigned a color, and we immediately know what it means. Colors naturally trigger an emotional response associated with the player’s rank like, “I’m red, BAD, Why am I red! Yikes, I don’t want to be in the red zone!” or “I’m green, phew! Great!”

You can go low-tech

You can easily start applying color grading to your project. You can purchase graphics templates of dashboard and dial illustrations from stock image websites, you can design your own, or you can just add color to a spreadsheet of data. You can have fun with stickers, too. You can assign people in a team with color-coded stickers based on their performance.

I’ve often thought that cars should have colored stickers on their plates that indicate their fuel efficiency. I think people would be deterred from owning a car with a red or crimson sticker on it, even if the sticker is small and hard to see.

Electronic color can drive energy efficiency

The Ambient Orb was a spherical light that disclosed a household’s energy consumption by glowing red when the home used a lot of energy and glowing cooler colors when the home was using less energy. The makers of the glowing light claimed that it caused people to reduce their energy use by up to forty percent. Forty percent is a huge reduction. It worked so well because the glowing colors are immediate and easy to understand. The Ambient Orb was superseded by a new startup called Glow that launched a colored energy light in 2018.

I’ve recently been working on a new startup called Energy Lollipop. It’s a Chrome extension that shows people’s CO2 emissions based on their electricity use. Color is core to the design — and it works. The background changes color based on the user’s kilowatt consumption. Early testing has gotten many users to cut their CO2 by 50 percent in the first week of using it.

Color LEDs to signal data

You don’t need to keep your use of color in the two-dimensional world. You can build an electronic display using LED lights and an Arduino micro-controller that lights up and flashes in response to your player’s performance. With electronic parts you can buy on the internet, you can make something bright, colorful, and wonderful that changes people’s behavior, and lights up the world with a data display that is not just meaningful, but beautiful, too.

Color can bind your data to the behavior you want to make happen, and help you influence real humans to do real things that matter so we really can change the world.

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