Translator: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Maricene Crus
Your first instinct is usually right.
Is that correct?
Do you listen to your instincts?
What are your instincts saying right now?
What it is?
Is it an elevator? Is it a stair?
Is it telling you that you have a choice and you have choices all the time?
Some of you might think, "That's a trick, and I don't like it."
But let's look forward.
How about this?
It's not only about our choices, it's all about choices of designers.
So they might think, their instincts say, this is a beautiful design,
but you see that people and their instincts
lead them around this design.
So this is what we have today.
How about looking into the future?
And imagining ourselves and listening to our instincts?
Do you want this?
Or we would rather look back to what we have today?
So all of this makes me ask more and more questions to myself.
And evolutionary, certainly instincts help us to survive and reproduce,
but nowadays, when we have these all fundamental changes,
what is the role of the instincts?
And here, I am standing with all of these questions
and imagining this man is myself.
"What's it all about?"
At MIT Media Lab, I'm thinking about these questions.
How can I help people to overcome huge changes we are facing every day?
And you know, change -
What is it?
Is it difficult? Is it hard? Maybe.
If you would ask yourself, "Do you want a better life, do you want a change?"
you would say yes.
And if somebody would ask you, "Do you want to change yourself?"
that's a different question.
So,
have you ever had, in your life,
at least one New Year's resolution?
Say, from January 1, I am going to do this new thing.
How many of you? Please raise your hands.
And now, how many of you have had the same New Year's resolution
for several years?
And how many of you have achieved a change in yourself
that you have [promised] yourself on January 1?
How many of you?
I did, this year,
and I'm still quite successful with it.
Now, just to illustrate,
this is the target group that I'm working with,
and I'm trying to help people of January 1 to be successful, that's my work.
But we also need to know that there are people
who, if they want to change,
like I saw some of them are here in the audience,
are successfully doing that, and that's the green circle.
So, if I want to change, I do it.
And there is a red circle.
We also need to acknowledge there are people who will never do that,
maybe you know some of your friends or your relatives,
and you said to them many times the same thing,
and they say, "OK, I'm fine."
So, for the yellow circle,
people who want to change but not always succeed.
We need to look for reasons why the change is not happening.
And social cognitive theory says
there are two areas where the barriers can reside.
One is in attitude, so the attitude might change after January 1,
or in the environment,
so there is not enough ability to do that new thing.
So we need to change either the environment around us or the attitude
to enable these people to succeed by getting into this new behavior.
And if you look at the different ways, what can be done?
People can be motivated.
Maybe you know these two guys:
carrots, those are incentives, the stick is a punishment.
Do they work? Yes, they do.
For how long?
For as long as they are present.
For as long as somebody gives you a carrot,
or stays next to you with a stick, right?
So, it's a limitation.
There is another way that can be used to motivate people;
it's through argument.
For example, here, this one runs on money and might make you fat,
and the other one runs on fat and might save you money.
If you ask yourself or somebody,
they would say, "Yes, that's most likely true."
But does it work?
Do people in the end try to switch over to bikes?
And there is a third [option]: there can be different kind of campaigns.
Maybe some of you remember this campaign.
That's Riga, and people on the bikes with a bamboo structure around them
try to exemplify
how much space one person takes up riding a private car.
A very nice campaign, good social media coverage,
but at the same time, not many people remember it anymore.
So if all of these ways to help people to achieve behavioral change
have limitations,
the question is,
"Is there anything else around us
that can serve as a helpful source of motivation for people
to achieve their changes?"
Oh, wait a minute.
Did you just do like this?
You did it because I looked up?
And, if you did, this is a question,
"What is this and why it was so powerful that if I looked up, you looked up?"
It's called social influence, so how people react to other people.
That's such a powerful source of motivating everyone,
that you are able to see other people doing the same thing that you want to do.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say you want to do more exercising in the morning,
or you want to ride a bike to work.
What's important is the weather forecast.
You look at the weather forecast, you have two options in this case,
two cities, Stanford and Eindhoven,
a better weather, and not that good one.
In the case if, in Eindhoven, you are hesitating to take your bike
because the weather is not that good,
what if the same mobile application tells you how many other people
right now are riding their bikes to work or to school,
at the very same moment on your street or in your neighborhood?
And although you see in Stanford it's 74, and in Eindhoven it's 11,
11 is maybe a smaller number than 74,
but if 11 are there,
you question yourself, "What's wrong with me if the 11 can do it?"
And you know, when we do design mobile applications on devices like this,
there are millions and millions of applications
that try to help you achieving your behavioral change,
there is still one huge limitation.
Who is in control?
A user.
If I don't want to, I put it into the pocket,
or I just throw it away, and that's about it.
That's why my work is focused on this.
It's a publicly available, instant information
about what's happening.
So, on this street, there is a bike lane and a cars'.
And this screen is telling you that in the last hour,
the speed of the cars was 9 miles per hour;
the bikes,12 miles per hour.
The only way you can make a difference, as an individual, to what you see,
is your choice:
which mobility mode you choose next time.
And there is no one behind writing an agenda,
it's just making transparent what's happening.
Based on this idea, we also ran a large study
in Boston and Cambridge area, Massachusetts, United States.
We engaged [organizations] like Google, like MIT, like Boston Children's Hospital
into reporting how their employees commute from home to work,
and we specifically looked at those people commuting by bikes.
Based on that metric, we arranged them in rankings,
and what did we ask?
We asked them to put it in a big large display in their organizations
so people who never rode a bike
and were never aware of their colleagues riding bikes
finally saw that in their [organization]: "Well, there are colleagues riding bikes.
Oh, and we are number two on the ranking.
How can I help my [organization] to become number one?"
And there is a clear, simple answer:
take your bike.
Then we can look at our habits towards healthy eating.
If we look at the grocery store,
where products can be scanned at the counter already,
based on the screen that has red and green,
products that are scanned can have healthy or unhealthy attachment to it.
Then, in the end,
everyone's grocery basket can be divided into healthy and unhealthy food,
and this color can represent that,
and it can be put also outside of the grocery store.
So if today most of the people have purchased mostly healthy stuff,
you can see that grocery store, from the outside, as green.
Or, vice versa, as red.
So, you can ride your bike,
and you can see: red grocery store, red grocery store, and green one.
Which tells you nothing more,
just the fact how people have purchased their food in that grocery store.
Another thing is some people say we're sitting too long.
If we have a chair that can tell us that we are sitting too long,
and it turns the color from green to red,
red means we are sitting already more than half an hour, for example.
And it's not only that we see it ourselves,
other people see that too.
This is how we prototype this kind of innovations.
It's a simple chair;
she's my student from my class, she puts a pressure sensor on the chair,
and a LED strip-light that currently is changing the color from green to red.
It's all programmed, it's all prototyped, and now she demonstrates how it works.
When the strip is red, she stands up and does exercising, stretching,
a lot of fun,
and then she waits while the strip goes back to green
which is the indicator it's safe to sit down.
So you can imagine your own workplace having the same chairs,
and somebody comes to you and says, "It's time to stand up."
And then, think beyond just indoors.
So, outdoors new innovations like this tricycle -
it's a new way of transportation in a city,
and you can pedal on it or use electrics.
Certainly, if we ask ourselves which contributes more to our well-being,
it's most likely pedaling, if we can do that.
This would instantly tell you
how you perform comparing to your own previous behavior,
comparing your behavior with the behavior of other previous riders on this vehicle
or to the neighborhood where you're riding.
And now, even looking more forward, I would like to show you a structure
which has been built more than a hundred years ago,
located in one of the beautiful capitals of Europe.
It was built for a different purpose a hundred years ago,
and nowadays can be used as a large communication channel
that can provide information about how people behave in a certain way.
A structure that has been built a hundred years ago,
today can tell you that number right there, the large one,
it can represent how many people have achieved their New Year's resolutions
globally, for example.
It can tell you how many kilometers people ran over the last year, for example.
So different kinds of things can be exhibited
at a larger scale to a larger population.
And once we have that kind of innovations placed in the urban space,
looking back at the audience we're trying to help,
these people of January 1 who want to change already,
what we are doing
is we are actually exposing the green circle,
people which already have changed,
which already run in the morning, ride their bikes and so forth,
to the yellow ones.
And what happens?
They gradually change the yellow ones into green,
and also the red ones into yellow.
And now you would ask yourself,
"OK, that is all future, it's all going to be.
Can I do something today?"
Let me give you an example.
I have had two of my private experiences with eating
because I need to exercise to keep my weight,
and I have some trouble, I need to look back to what I eat.
And you know, one simple trick for you that you can start doing today:
you anchor your desire or your New Year's resolution
to a behavior you do multiple times a day.
Just like this one.
What I did every time I washed my hands,
I reminded myself, "My New Year's resolution is to eat healthier."
And it worked for me, and I believe it can work for you.
Thank you.
(Applause)