You might not be surprised to learn that behavioral psychologists consider pro-environmental behaviors to be one of the most difficult behaviors (compared to exercising, quitting smoking, etc) to get people to adopt. While we-the sustainability-nerds are a devoted few, why has our environmental messaging so often failed at persuading the bulk of society to become active participants in our quest to save the planet?

Maybe it’s the way we’ve been doing it.

This question has fascinated me so much that I ended up reading many academic papers on the psychology of what drivers pro-environmental action. I even wrote a book on it called How to Save the World and now I interview the authors of those papers on my podcast.

That’s how I discovered the deeply insightful and interesting, Jesse Schell. He’s a professor of experience design at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of the canonical textbook The Art of Game Design.

It might sound weird to mix an environmental engineer like me with a game designer like Schell, but it’s in this mix that I discovered some magic.

What do game designers do, exactly? Think about these qualities: peak motivation, obsessive focus, drive to win, life-long mastery of complex problems, a drive to succeed at epic planetary-wide quests —these all sound like pretty good skills to save the real planet, right? Manifesting those emotions is the craft that game designers specialize in.

I invited Jesse to join us for our monthly Fitbit for the Planet video hangout where he shared these insights on how we can get better influencing people to save the planet:

Listen to the full podcast interview here.

1. Design “an experience”

Think of an environmental behavior as an experience, instead of an obligation. An experience may include emotions, desires, smells, memories, textures, novelty, or aspiration. The experience would contain the behavior you want people to do.

“It would certainly be problematic if no one was designing experiences the experiences that we live with, because all life is, is a series of experiences.”

You are designing moments in peoples’ lives. How can you make those moments as good as they can be?

2. Be prepared to do it wrong many times over

If you want to truly innovate and be creative, you need to prepare to try a bunch of weird and unconventional ideas — and you need a team who will fearlessly jump into new ideas and iterate on them.

You need to be comfortable with getting it wrong over and over and keep trying anyway. It’s normal to create ten failed ideas for every one success. You should expect it to be this way. Don’t underestimate how hard it is to design for change. Expect to have to work at it.

“I truly believe one of the keys to success is not being ashamed of being wrong. If you’re afraid to be wrong, you’re going to be afraid to try things that are out there. You have to follow an inner compass and not be afraid to fail.”

3. Get out of your silo and look everywhere else

Jesse tells a story I love about a juggling festival (in the video below). It’s about breaking away from the trap we fall into of copying everyone else in our industry. He emphasizes that we need to look in other places and not imitate the style of those close to us.

“These guys all learn by copying each other. The secret is — look everywhere else. People can steal your moves, but they can never steal your inspiration”

In our podcast interview, Jesse tells another story of how Henry Ford revolutionized car factories after taking a tour of a slaughterhouse. That’s where he learned the assembly line process for making cars.

You can take a technique from a totally unexpected place. That’s true for experience design, all the time. It should be for sustainability, too.

4. Don’t (necessarily) ask your peers for feedback

Does asking for input from other people help to make your work better? Not necessarily.

Jesse explained how Nike created a computer program to help people design shoes — and then ran an experiment. They created two groups of people and asked both groups to design a shoe: one group got feedback from their peers while they were designing their shoe, and the other group didn’t get any feedback.

Which group created better shoes?

They found that the people who didn’t have feedback generally created better designs — they had stronger and bolder ideas.

Asking for lots of feedback made people risk-averse, less creative, and they watered down thier ideas.

5. Build around the emotional center of your inspiration

6. What’s the barrier that will keep people from doing it?

Usually, there is something in the way of people doing the thing you want them to do. Ask yourself, why aren’t they doing it, really? This question leads to a deeper understanding of the causality of change. When we get causality wrong, then we can’t design to fix the cause.

7. Show feedback of the impact the action made

The reason why feedbacks loops of data (think of a smart meter display that shows your energy consumption) helps to drive behavior is that after you’ve done the action, it shows you the results of your action.

People need a signal that says “Ok, this is working.”

The problem with many environmental behaviors is that you get little-to-no feedback that it worked to help save the planet — maybe it's helping, maybe it’s doing nothing.

Jesse thought up the idea to create thermochromatic stickers people could stick near their window seals that would help indicate which windows were the most drafty. The sticker would change color with the temperature — and after the window-owner had sealed their windows from drafts, they’d get a feedback signal that their efforts “worked,” shown by the color change.

There are many case studies of this tangible feedback being brought into physical product design:

Bagless vacuum cleaners encourage people to vacuum more because of the satisfaction people receive by seeing the dirt in the clear capsule. It’s the feedback that your efforts are working. Swiffers are designed so that you can see the dirt. You feel it’s working, so you clean more.

The car company, Mini Cooper noticed people weren’t opening up their convertible roofs enough, so they created a new dashboard gauge called a “fun-o-meter’ — a needle gauge that gave drivers a score on how often opened their convertible roofs.

Is there a way you can design these things to get a sense that it’s working? Can you make it visible? Can something say “Good job!” “You did it right!” “This is the impact you had.”

8. Reduce cognitive load

The most popular book on user interface design is titled Don’t Make Me Think — and for good reason. Psychologists call thinking “cognitive load.”

When you are designing for action, you need to reduce cognitive load — because it drains your user’s mental energy and kills their motivation to take on a new behavior. Keep your design reductive and simple.

These common marketing quotes say it well:

If you confuse, you lose.

A confused mind always says no.

This is why I designed Energy Lollipop with a “one color, one number” theory. It shows carbon emission from the grid using color — and it works.

Ask yourself, is there is a way to standardize it? How easy and friendly can I make it? If they do need to think, are there ways to make the cognitive load rewarding, such as turning it into an enjoyable challenge?

9. City-to-city competition and community-scale feedback

You always need to be asking, what can you measure? How can you get feedback? In the absence of a feedback loop of data (such as with individual composting), there could be a way to show the feedback loop for the entire city instead. For landfill methane emissions that come from food scraps, you could measure the methane coming out of every landfill all over the country— and gamify that data.

Towns could be pitted against other towns in a contest to reduce their landfill-generated methane emissions — and the city could win a prize that everyone could share in.

Design a one-off completable event with a specific measurable goal to rally people towards. People will take meaningful steps if they feel like it’s possible to win, and that the win means something.”

10. Reward everyone, not just a few

Be wary of competitive incentives such as leaderboards that will only reward a few people at the top and cause everyone else to lose. When there’s no incentive for the regular folks who don’t win, this type of design can actually be a disincentive.

The way to get around this dilemma is to reward the progress. By measuring progress towards a goal, even the poorest performers in a group can be rewarded for their improvement and you can find a way to keep encouraging them.

Your design needs to be helpful for everybody— it takes a lot of design and experimentation to figure it out.

11. Test the hypothesis quickly and iterate

The book User Story Mapping has an insightful diagram on how to build software. I’ve seen this illustration stuck above many desks and computers around San Francisco.

It’s a big deal when you really, deeply get what it means. It’s an instruction to come up with a small hypothesis and prototype to start — then test it on real humans, learn from it, and iterate. Avoid the urge to master-plan a big concept and do a lot of work on it before trialing your idea on real people.

12. Choose your target person very specifically

The experience you are designing for will differ greatly depending on who you’re targeting. Are you targeting children, teachers, real estate agents, seniors, managers, politicians, or stockbrokers? Get specific with who they are and sub-target your demographics within your player base with different kinds of messages.

In my behavior-mapping workshops, I use the process in the diagram above to tease out each type of actor and then design interfaces that are tailored to each type of person.

13. Influence adults via their children

It can be hard to teach an old dog new tricks — like to get adults to adopt new pro-environmental norms — but there is a way. Children can become the influencers of their parents via school education programs.

There are many examples of environmental education programs impressing behaviors onto children, who then push the new behavior to become adopted by their parents, and this ultimately spreads it into popular culture.

14. Make it special

Is there anything interesting, special, and unique about your mission?

Ask this of the people you are trying to inspire:

How does it fit into my life in a way I’m going to be proud of, that I’m going to celebrate, that I’m going to tell people about? What is it that makes it worth sharing in a viral way?

15. The two lenses of behavior and measurability

Your project needs to pass the test of 1) influencing a behavior and 2) leading to a result you can measure. Have you identified the specific behavior you are asking people to do? Once you have clearly isolated the behavior or action, then think about how you will measure it.

This principle is such a cornerstone of change that I devoted a double-page to it in the opening of my book, which I call “The Two Lenses of Behavior and Measurement.”

16. Design with self-determination theory

Self-determination theory says that humans need three things to be happy: freedom, social connection, and mastery.

When you’re thinking about how to be more like a game designer, you might presume you need to make your project “fun,” but Schell says that designing for “fun” is a misnomer. Frequently people playing games are not having fun — they are struggling, but the struggle is rewarding because the game delivers freedom, social connection, and mastery.

17. What can big game studios do?

Don’t try and create a fancy new “Save the Earth” game. Instead, see how you can activate the fan base of an existing game. Game studios are looking for novel ideas that keep people interested in the games they have already created. Is there is an active game out there that would be well-suited as a partner for your environmental project?

18. Add novelty

The mind craves novelty. How can you bring novelty into the experience you are designing?

You can incorporate novelty by adding an unexpected animation, a creative garnish, or a charismatic avatar to a web interaction. Ask yourself if your project feels novel — does it continually present more novel experiences to keep your audience stimulated?

Changing the world is a creative process. Bringing the art of game design into the cauldron of how we imagine, design, and iterate environmental campaigns is an essential process because it matters that our projects engage people — and that they engage lots of people to make real changes, and to make them fast.

Changing the world should be the greatest game we’ve ever played.

Let’s make it so.

Listen to the full podcast interview with professor Jesse Schell and get his book, The Art of Game Design.

‍