Fitbit for the Planet Design

Episode 5 – Katie Patrick

Katie Patrick joins Eric to discuss why if educators and designers really want to create climate action they must use a behavioral science toolkit to actually get people to act. Only teaching about the climate isn't enough to create a big enough change, but instead using environmental or energy data to design fun competitive reward-based games will create that positive climate action we need.

Listen to this episode on: Spotify, Apple, Google and other places you get your podcasts

About our guest

Katie Patrick is an Australian American environmental engineer, designer, and author of How to Save the World, How to Make Changing the World the Greatest Game We've Ever Played. And host to the podcast, How to Save the World, where she investigates academic research in environmental psychology.

She specializes in what she calls Fitbit for the Planet Design, which means applying data-driven gamification and behavior change techniques to environmental problems. Katie has worked on environmental gamification projects with NASA, JPL, Stanford University, UNEP, Google, the University of California, Magic Leap, and the Institute for the Future.

Katie is the founder of urbancanopy.io, a map-based application that uses satellite imaging of urban heat islands and vegetation cover to encourage urban greening and cooling initiatives. She's also the co-founder of Energy Lollipop, a Chrome extension - an outdoor screen project that shows the electric grid's CO2 emissions in real-time.

On the web

katiepatrick.com
urbancanopy.io
energylollipop.com

Music in this episode

The musical guest is Joshua Singer.

Theme music by Casual Motive

Climate Design Assignments

At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.

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Episode Transcript

[00:03:05] Eric: Well, it's wonderful to meet you, Katie. I'm excited that you're here on Climify. I want to get started and jump right in, uh, get down to the basics. So, I want to know more about who you are and what you do, and where you do it.

[00:03:20] Katie: Okay. I'll just start with telling my story of how I got here. So, I grew up in Melbourne, Australia and I was the granddaughter of these master, um, German craftspeople. My grandmother was a fashion designer, and my grandfather was a graphic illustrator. Not very highly trained. We grew up around this technical illustration.

And I never talked about this before in my story, but now that I'm really putting myself out there as a designer, I realized how fundamental it was growing up in a household that was made of not the kind of crazy app they're out, but the very structured, technically skilled artwork. But then, I grew up in the, I was a child in the eighties.

And so, there was a lot of like Greenpeace marketing than of we saw whales every night on the news, these whales getting dragged onto these Japanese whaling vessels, you know, with blood coming out of them and trees being cut down and the big machines just crashing into the…

[00:04:18] Eric: Terrible images for a childhood. Yeah.

[00:04:22] Katie: Yeah.

And there were also these famines in, um, in Ethiopia and Somalia at the time. And they, ah, just harrowing pictures of these children were on the news all the time. And so, in my, it was probably around the, you know, eight or nine years old, I found these images enormously distressing, and I'd be like, mommy, can we please like help sights of whales?

Can we get the, I heard that the dolphins get stuck in the, in the tuna fishnets, you know, um, I also grew up on a, on a big property out of the city. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of trees and bonded very closely with nature. So, my sustainability journey was kind of cemented in those early years.

Um, but I loved science. It was good at math and physics really, really into, into understanding the, um, the, the STEM journey, which led me to study environmental engineering, went into green building. So, I thought eco-cities would be cool. Why don't we build like towers with like vegetation coming off the sides and like, skywalks, you know, the sky mangroves of the top of skyscrapers had this really futuristic kind of fantasies about what I could do with green buildings.

But the reality is like literally, the only job you could get was doing energy efficiency audits in, um, like office buildings. Like that was like the job of being a green building engineer. And I thought that was like the most boring thing I could ever do with my life. I was like, kill me now, like measuring the kilowatt-hours in buildings.

I actually found it quite interesting. I've got a whole new angle on it, but at the time I was like, never. Um,

[00:05:47] Eric: How old were you during that time? How old were you when…

[00:05:50] Katie: uh, it was like 20, 22, 23. So I got a job sort of while I was still studying and that lasted for a couple of years. Um, but that journey was over in commercial property.

It was a bit of in the age of it sort of 20, 21 and 23 years old. Um, and then I, uh, started, so I started a media company. I started my first. Which was a magazine called Green Pages and it was also a directory and a website with videos and events. Um, it was all about trying to rebrand sustainability as being really cool.

So, we started this like Wired magazine. I mean, it was like Wired magazine, but for sustainability. So, it was one of the first times was during that time. That sustainability was rebranded as something that was really cool. I mean, before that time there weren't any like hipster, organic cafes, you know, like, um, sort of expensive, really cool foods, uh, organic fashion labels, like it was really dorky and really, it was.

Birkenstocks and at the truly, and, um, you know, like deep environmental scientists who went hiking and watched the birds and did scientific reports like this whole idea of it being fashionable and stylish or particular products like it did not exist. Or it was like a turning point as zeitgeists around that early two thousand.

And so, I went out on a mission to try and make that to try and totally rebrand the image of sustainability. And there were other people around the world kind of doing that at that time. And that was a really wonderful time. It was like, you know, really working on creative production, going the opposite. End of energy efficiency audits in buildings, super uncreative and boring to like a full like creative production company with like 20 full-time staff.

But then everything went sort of the Silicon Valley direction of startups and technology. Um, you know, can you build like the next app, you know, apps for like a big deal, like nobody's ever seen that app before? Uh, so we don't really, we're all sort of like learning how to code, like learning how to build MVPs.

Uh, so I moved to Silicon Valley and that company ended up, even though it was successful at the time it died, uh, moved to Silicon Valley to start over. And I became very fascinated by this said your feedback loops. Cause I'd been learning how to code. And I was like, why can't I show somebody like a Facebook notification there. Carbon emissions from their home, go up over a certain level. And there were these Zynga games, you know, there's like Farmville

[00:08:04] Eric: Oh, right.

[00:08:05] Katie: they were big.

[00:08:06] Eric: Oh, gosh,

[00:08:07] Katie: Yeah. I don't know what happened to them all, but like there were, this Zynga was like the big thing and I'm like, well, can't we build little things into like Facebook that show you like, oh, this is how much water you used in your shower. You know, like tracking, could we track the, um, the amount of petrol gasoline in America? Cause, and I was like looking for these data feeds and I was like, there are No. the database anyway like I was literally, I cannot get an API or data feed for my own kilowatt-hours for the carbon emissions of the grid for the amount of tree cover in my city for the air pollution on my street, my car doesn't even know it, it doesn't have a car at the time, but all the cars don't even know.

Petrol goes into them. Like if you drive a car for a year, it doesn't tell you how many miles you went, but it doesn't tell you like this year or two of what you're doing sort of

[00:08:52] Eric: probably on purpose, right? Probably on purpose. They don't want you to.

[00:08:55] Katie: No, I just don't think, I think a lot of these things nobody's asked for, like, they just haven't been thinking about this stuff.

And then I was like, oh my God, this is basically this, um, this lack of environmental data feedback loops. Like I can get an API for anything for like Stripe, you know, to get to process payments like for Google, uh, clicks, you know, Google analytics, you can tap into their API. You can tap into all these API APIs and get all the data you want to measure the planet there.

Hardly anything. It is so backward. And then I just had this big epiphany moment that was like, this is the rest of my life. This is what I'm going to be devoted to, you know, satellite data sensors. Get this data, try to build API APIs that can get those real-time feedback loops. And then, you know, so people that I'm designing the front-end interface or other people are that you can actually get this data.

So if you want to put a little dial or a screen next to your shower, that says, you know, this is how many leads because of water and how much carbon emissions happened from heating the water from your shower, the light goes off, or it gets a smiley face or ding or things you on Facebook or Twitter or something like we can actually get this data to build this stuff.

Um, and that completely fascinated me. So, I never. Building the startup, which I came to Silicon Valley to do, but I did a very deep intellectual dive into the theory of this type of design. I could read a whole bunch of academic papers. I still read these academic papers on this design theory of, well, what happens if you show people the numbers?

What happens if you show a hundred people? What happens if you compare them? How does color affect that? How real-time does it need to be? What if it's daylight? What if it's a month? Like what if it's on paper? What if it's elegant? Really understanding these, these theories, which led me to write the book, how to save the world because I accrued all this knowledge.

I was like, oh, I have to share

[00:10:38] Eric: When did that book come out? When did your book come out?

[00:10:41] Katie: it was about two years now. Yeah. A year and a half, two years. Um, and so that's what I do now. I specialize in this type of design, which I call Fitbit for the planet design.

[00:10:52] Eric: It's a great

[00:10:53] Katie: Feedback loops of data. I don't even know what else to call it.

Um, nobody understood what it was. Feedback loops of data, just like. Showing environmental impact. So, the front-end user design, but also the kind of like backend technology for individual behavior, but also for bigger systems change as well. Like it's not just about individual behaviors. It's about giving whole systems of people, this data to help encourage change all the way through.

From individual through to the system. And I just have to add that bit on the end because a lot of people have been coming out saying, but you can't change the load with only behavior change. And I was like, no, no, no, that's not what it's all about. It's really about trying to get the whole system, you know, in a better direction through the disclosure of numbers.

Um, and that's the close of my nutshell long, long, big, big, big, not a big nutshell.

[00:11:42] Eric: No, it was great. I want to get into your current work, but I want to backtrack just for a second. Cause there were two things that really stood out to me about your journey, this, this big, um, nutshell as you'd call it. First of all, was, uh, you had mentioned when you were a young, growing up in Australia, you witnessed a lot of these things.

These, these images stuck in your head. And these things you couldn't unsee. And then you mentioned you had this epiphany. Once you get to Silicon Valley about what you want to do with your life and your career, which became some of the work you're doing right now, including your book. So, do you think that there are these two moments, which you mentioned these terrible things you witnessed as a kid, and then what you learned when you got to Silicon Valley?

Do you think, how connected were those things, do you think both of these were just two different awakenings where you can we're committed to environmentalism, or do you think they were very similar?

[00:12:43] Katie: Uh, that's an interesting way to put it. I don't think they would directly connect it in, in any way. Like my childhood experiences were making me feel concerned for the planet and that was something I wanted to do central too. Life. I mean, that started off pretty young. Um, and then that sort of led to, you know, one thing after another one thing after another.

And then that kind of, um, my, my revelation about feedback loops of data was quite far away in that, in that journey. I suppose that where it started was that, I mean, I've done like a whole bunch of different things in my, my career, and I'm always trying to learn new things. Um, it's just created a kind of like a channel, you know, like I never deviate from environmental sustainability.

It's the only thing I've ever done. It's the thing that I know well, um, and I don't really do anything outside of that, but within that channel, within that river, I mean, there's enormous. Um, mean you can do almost anything. So, the, and this is why I kind of like, I add the little, um, sort of outfit at the beginning of this story.

Now, when I tell it because I've always gone into everything with this very, um, hyper curious mind like I'm always trying to learn. I've been obsessed with learning all my life. Like I love reading papers. I love reading textbooks, audiobooks, podcasts. I'm just like this cookie monster, just devouring knowledge all the time, but I could just feed them.

Since I was, I don't know, 12 or 13 years old, it was just, ah, so when you just constantly trying to grow and trying to learn and trying to always try to break down this, I'm trying to crack the nut different nut now. Um, the nut of like, how do you actually create change? Like, how do you do it? Like, how do you change a million people?

Like how do you, and a whole bunch of roads for a whole bunch of buildings, like this is really hard stuff. And honestly, nobody really knows the answer. We have ideas. How we think we can do it. And the deeper you go into that, trying to learn, study and learn, study, it reveals itself kind of like.

layers of the onion, you know, like at first you might think, oh, well, it's just, you know, people used to say, it's the media, it's the news, you know?

And then the news kind of went away and then everyone's social media. Nobody says it's the nature of the news anymore. Everything's kind of still the same, you know, really the media, you know, like, is it, people's greed people that is grieving. And you're like, I don't really think so. Democracy. And I'm like, well, you can have a democratic process and have people vote against carbon taxes and vote for Trump.

So maybe it's not democracy. Maybe if you let everyone be super democratic, everyone's just going to be like freebie a free pizza that used to happen at university. We'd have like student democracies and the free beer, and the free pizza movement and all the anti-patriarchy feminists would freak out.

They'd be like, oh my God, the free beer party, you know. Um, so you can't really necessarily blame that. And. So people are just trying to figure out what it is, and you've just got to keep learning and keep peeling it away. Um, and that's the, just the process, the intellectual curious process that brought me to this, um, this had your feedbacks and behavioral psychology.

Cause I find that that's getting pretty close, real close as I've come to the center of the onion of what really does create change or it's the best toolkit that I've gotten to know after 20, if you added my teams, you know, 30 years of doing this now,

[00:16:05] Eric: Well, I'm really connected to that story. Cause I see a lot of myself in that as it as a kid, um, I grew up with a lot of. Camping and being outdoors and really being connected to the world around me and really respecting that. And then I had like a moment later in life where I was like, I have to do something to conserve this or protect this or make it better regenerated.

So, I'm really connected to that story. And I always ask myself, you know, what would ten-year-old Eric think about this? I kind of bring that up, you know, and maybe it's this naive a TA or something, but, um, I think that's sort of a guide that that little, little kid is still there and that wants to save, you know, the animals or, you know, I always watched like, Shows about Africa and the wild kingdom.

And I was always connected to that. So, I think I'm definitely see a little bit of myself in your story. Cause I was also very creative, and I did the arts and drew and painted. So, uh, I appreciate that. And I'm wondering too, cause I. There's a sense of optimism there, right. That, um, you have to have, and I'm wondering, it seems like all your work is really rooted in that hopefulness.

And where does that come from and how do you, how do you inspire others to be as hopeful and sometimes, and, uh, when you read some of the dire news about the.

[00:17:30] Katie: Well, I think my, um, thank you. And, uh, yeah, it's lovely to hear your story as well. I think, you know, for humanity or just like people, I think we need to invest in these more altruistic kind, sensitive and creative parts of ourselves, you know, going out, being a bully, being like, well, I'm just gonna like make money.

Pay a mortgage and I'm going to buy a car, whatever, all that stuff is like, I don't know. I honestly don't think it gets you that far in life. I think the most sensitive parts of you to cultivate are the nicer ones and we should be, be real, be real with that, even if it feels hot to some time along the way.

[00:18:07] Eric: It is very hard, right? It's...

[00:18:11] Katie: Yeah. I mean, I've been going on a journey, just trying to really like ground into that. Like every day I'm like, how do I have the best energy I can and how do I do the best creative work for the world? Like, that's my overarching belief systems sort of umbrella of how I live. And I li I, honestly, I let go of everything else.

I'm like money eager, like, whatever

[00:18:32] Eric: How do you do that?

[00:18:33] Katie: The Silicon Valley hype machine, which has a very strong sort of sucking force or that you need to get into Y Combinator and raise money. I mean, that's a big sort of cultural thing that I live in. I'm connected to, um, just try and let go of it and just, well, I do it.

So I block out time. I'm like, okay, three hours, just pure creative channeling of your essence, uh, into the most interesting world-changing thing you can possibly think of. So, it's an allocation of time. Um, and then it's also just very consciously deciding to let go of the outcome and let go of the goals and the society creates.

Goals around that. Uh, that's just something I do. I'm not necessarily pitching that as a good idea, because it can be enormous. Like if you have a mortgage or, I mean, I have one child, maybe if you have like four children, it might be really hard to do that. Um...

[00:19:26] Eric: ...Yeah.

[00:19:27] Katie: ...and I'm Okay. I'm okay with going through a year or two without really making any money, or maybe you're only making like $10,000 a year to cover the bills.

Like, I really don't mind doing that. Other people might struggle to do that, so I don't want to pitch it as the ultimate way of life, but it is the way that I've chosen to live. That works, um, for me. But you asked about, about hope for. Optimism. I think sometimes people can misjudge, my efforts with that as just this kind of like, oh, let's just be like, happy about the future and just be like hopeful and stuff.

Um, that's really not the lens that I'm coming from. The lens I'm coming from is we have this human have this superpower of imagination. We are the only creature. The only animal that has, this is the one. Distinguishes humans from other animals is that we can invent mental models of things that are going to happen.

And then we can plan our lives in very long-term 10 years, 20 years ahead, and then do things now. So that, and the other animals can't really do that. And so, for us to engage in, uh, the enormous kind of innovation that it's going to take like we cannot change the world with just switching off the lights and recycling and just eating organic food.

Although I do, I'm a strong believer in individual behavior change

[00:20:45] Eric: Yeah.

[00:20:46] Katie: in order to. Get to a new chapter of human civilization that is sustainable with the planet. We need a massive revolution in all about civil engineering infrastructure, the way we do building all of our material science, all of that.

Transportation systems, the vehicles and aircraft, and ships, all of the production manufacturing of the stuff that we use, the closed-loop type of recycling, the way we grow food, the way we cook, the way we educate people, even our belief systems about we want what we want out of life and our values. Need to change.

Like there is a massive, highly technical revolution that is going to have to happen in every single industry. And that is so much bigger than going to the moon or going to bars or even, you know, like solving cancer. Like people don't realize the technical complexity in this challenge. And we need an epic dream to guide us to that.

Like going to the moon is a great, um, Colorado for that, because it was a big, exciting, highly technical dream. So, we made the dream of what would an environmentally sustainable utopia world look like? would that be? And then how would I play a role in that? Not in my individual, zero-waste behaviors, which is nice. 10 or 20 years, like if I'm going to be, you know, I'll probably be alive for another 40 years, at least like actively, like I've got 40 years to do some serious technical innovations with this feedback loop stuff that I work on, like what is going to be my, my investment in this, this journey. And when I.

Think of these eco-city visions and like what society, what, what society, but civilization could be like, what would be the next chapter? I mean, you feel that the history of humans has civilization. Like they were really nasty. That was like torture or more. It appears that it's kind of a pretty, pretty awful story until quite recently.

So, we're at a turning point now where we noticed violent Nazi as we, where we can become this new. Um, sort of semi enlightened species. It's all having all of our processes integrated with this deep ecological understanding of, of nature. That's the high-tech version, as opposed to more of the tribal low-tech version that it once was thousands of years ago.

And, um, that's an enormously inspiring sort of epic story to join. So, when I'm pitching this idea of like, I don't use the word hope, but of optimism of imagination and vision, I'm trying to unlock. This epic journey that is bigger than the moon landing and to invite people to come on this multi-decade innovation, um, experience or investment, a multi-decade investment in their own innovation in their careers to contribute to this, uh, this new world.

And I think that's a that's much bigger. The more serious story than just like, oh, let's be hopeful in the face

[00:23:49] Eric: No. Not exactly.

[00:23:51] Katie: So, I don't want to get to. I don't want to get pigeonholed as just as, oh, let's be likely to just be happy about everything like Greenville. Yay. It's quite deep technical roots to what are the story I'm trying to, I'm trying to say, and it's in my Ted talk.

Like that's what I, that's what I say in the TEDx talk of why we need creativity and optimism to save the world.

[00:24:09] Eric: Well, you mentioned, um, education there and that's, that's what I do. That's what a lot of our listeners to this show do for educators. And so,I'm wondering what you think, um, what role. You can play in helping that achieve that mission, this whole systematic change, um, through what we do in the classroom.

What, what are your insights into that?

[00:24:33] Katie: Well, when I was studying environmental engineering, the way the degree was structured, I felt was really problematic and did not lend itself. Big vision or next chapter of civilization, because the thing is that all environmental systems, all interrelate to each other, trees affect urban heat, which affects water runoff, which affects air pollution, which affects the kilowatt hours on the grid and all these things.

We're all working together. After, I think it was my third year in environmental engineering school. I went to the head of school, and I said, listen, I think we're doing this whole degree wrong. We study like soil science. And then we study, um, pollution, chemistry, and then we study fluid mechanics, and we get a textbook, and our job is to learn the textbook.

And then we do an exam, and we do like a project and it completely. Like they never stitched together. I said I think what we need to do is actually go on a full-year project where we have to design up a completely eco, like an environmentally sustainable city. And so, we start at the beginning of our four years and the vision is to create a city that's completely sustainable.

And then we have to start reverse engineering that. And so, we still learn, you know, like the soil science and the rainwater runoff and the water pollution. And all these things, but it's all interconnecting like puzzle pieces into this master thesis at the end, which is the complete eco-city, because nobody is seeing the ultimate destination and all of the interconnections between these different things That we study.

And she was like, that's a great idea, Kelly really, really cool. I don't want about like I left and graduated, and nothing happened. Um, but it's like the education, when you start with the vision like this is what we want to create. A whole city is completely in synchronization with nature. There's a lot of engineering and science to go into that.

And then you reverse engineer the education that you need to learn in order to get to that vision is a totally different style of education. And it's really practically focused and that just learns the discrete puzzle pieces and all the puzzle pieces are scattered. And then maybe at some point in your life, we'll figure out how to

[00:26:38] Eric: That the connectome you're 40, right? Is that.

[00:26:40] Katie: Yeah. Yeah. I think that it's a really, um, anyway, that's just my thought of how to do environmental education with a kind of like a master goal experiences, real-life focused as the, um, the endpoint and all of the detail you learn in the process of that. Um, but where my own personal work really fits into education.

Um, which Is that.

I discovered this thing a few years ago called the value action gap. And I was quite late in my career. Like I was in. You know, almost in my mid-thirties, when I, when I figured this out and it is that education doesn't necessarily lead to people taking action. And this is studied by behavioral scientists over and over again.

There's a great Wikipedia page. You can look up called the value action gap. It's also called the information deficit hypothesis and a lot of climate scientists would think this they'll be like, oh, if people just knew more about climate change, if they were just educated about. Then people would change.

And so, if you are an educated person and you are setting out to do education, or maybe you're an activist and you're setting out to do education, you will be successful in educating people. Like, look, let's learn about climate change and then people learn, but that does not necessarily lead to action.

And action design and educational design are two completely different. So, if you're trying to do education design and your whole goal is just education and it really doesn't matter what actions people take after that, then you can just go forth and do some interesting educational design and a lot of fun stuff you can do there.

But if your intention is to actually get people to take action, which might be to contact a politician or to swap over their conditioning unit. Switch to an electric vehicle, we'll get rid of their car and ride a bike and stuff. Like you cannot use the educational lens to get them to do that. You need to look at it as a behavior designer and behavior design have a completely different architecture of a tool.

To use you go into your toolkit. How do I create behavior design? There are like 20 things that work that are tested and proven that get people to act. And those things don't have much in common at all with an educational process, like your sort of textbook on climate science or the documentary or the book or whatever.

They're completely different. They almost have nothing in common at all. And this is what I talk about to people all the time is valuable. Action gap. Don't assume that educating people is going to work. Probably won't work. We need to be using the behavioral science toolkit to actually get people to act.

And you can get by with very little education and emotional concerns. Like people don't even need to care that much about the environment that they didn't know much about it. And you can still get them to take action if you design it. And we really need to start thinking like behavior designers and like environmental psychologists, if we want to create change.

And this is my current fascination, I read academic papers. I practice it. I have a podcast on it. I'm all about the environmental psychology of action. Now I think it's the next big thing to try and share through the industry.

[00:29:44] Eric: You know, I agree with you and that's why you're here on the show because I wanted to pick your brain more about this. I see that a lot with the students that I teach, you know, there are 20 students in a class. We have. Climate science-related projects. And graduation happens and there's like two or three that are out there really motivated.

Cause they want to do something about it. But what about those other 17? So I'm wondering, you know, you mentioned toolkits, you mentioned, uh, thing, resources that you can use. Where do you find these? Are these something that is in your book or that you write about on medium? Where can we educators get more information on this?

So, we can. We can do better in, in our work.

[00:30:30] Katie: Well, I put it all together in my book, how to save the world. Like it's a full design process to follow. It's like a 10-step design process of which all of these behavior and gamification techniques. Are in that, and it goes into the theory of why it works. So, it's like a textbook with exercises to follow.

So, it's a perfect tool for educators to use as a project, or if you're holding a workshop or something it's completely designed for that, um, for that type of thing. Yeah. And I put it out on my, on my Instagram little tutorials and on my medium page, and I know my website, Katie patrick.com.

Um, but I can go into what those things are now.

[00:31:07] Eric: can you share a few? Yeah.

[00:31:09] Katie: Yeah.

in another, um, another, um, nutshell that I will keep not too, too big, probably. Uh, I just compensate from my big nutshell to talking really fast. I'm not sure if it, if it works that well, um, but the first thing to do so we start off by looking at okay.

Just educating people and trying to get people emotionally concerned. Probably not going to create action. So. And this we, except that, and now we move to what does create action. So, the number one thing is we first start by looking into the data. What data do we have to work with? Can we show people feedback loops, um, really looking into the numbers, you know, like turning lights off, especially in a day, it doesn't have a big carbon impact, but thermostats do, especially. really, I sort of look for the low-hanging fruit, right. And again, this is not just about individual changes. It's about getting everybody around us to change or trying to create social influence networks as well. So that's cool. Like the theory of disclosure, like just put the data out there somewhere.

If you can't do it electronically with senses and with a digital screen, you can do it by hand. Like you could have a group of people, for example, in your classroom, you could get everybody to figure out what they can do, what hours were for the day. Often you can log in to your electricity provider and get the data, and then you can have everybody turn up and then put everybody on a leaderboard from like top to bottom.

Right? You can work out what the carbon intensity is off the grid. And you can just multiply that. Whatever that number is. And then you could say, hey everybody, we're going to do a design, uses the word design to make it sound fun. A design experiment, where are we going to try and figure out where all those kilowatt-hours came from?

And then we want to do design interventions into All of these behaviors and do something creative and fun with you. Great design skills to figure out how to intervene in your home. To get that down and then we're going to come back next week and we're going to do the leaderboard again. And then we're going to measure the progress.

We'll do one of what top to bottom, and then we'll do another leaderboard that measures the progress everybody has made. So, if someone's like uses a lot of energy, they can still do well because you want. You know, ranking people by progress, not necessarily then at school and then, you know, credit discussion and then talk about the iterations.

Talk about the problems, you know, is it technical? Is it behavioral? Sometimes you can just get like a, like a sticker and put it on your fridge or something can be like one thing you stuff doesn't have to be high tech. right.

So that could be a way of doing education. It was like, and design education.

That's interesting in terms of the kids. And then it's designing, cause pick, you're asking people to design solutions. Um, but then it's also really behavioral. So, you're tapping right into the behavior rather than just learning climate science from a textbook. But you've got, you have the disclosure of numbers you want to use.

See backlit. So, when people see their numbers, just like a Fitbit. In itself creates change and it can be anywhere between 10% up to 50% just from seeing the numbers. And then what gets really exciting is when you compare people to each other, like I just mentioned with leaderboard, when something says, hey, you do 20% worse than everybody else.

And telling people that do worse than average, it's much more powerful, but telling people that you're better than average. So, the people that are like on the lower part of the, again, it probably gets psyched and probably change more than the people who are doing better. Cause they'll be like, well, I've already doing well.

Why do I need to, why do I need to change? Do you want to use reward systems? Like if somebody does something good, you give them a smiley face. It might sound silly. But smiley faces are actually a really powerful way to, um, to affect people. Something that says a good job, thumbs up. Right back to the primordial side of the brain.

You know, like if you get like a hundred compliments and one person says something mean it's like,

[00:34:37] Eric: you remember that one.

[00:34:39] Katie: this primordial system of seed back of faces to us being happy for us or sad for us. So, if you get, like, if somebody put like a, just a Franny face on your Instagram posts, you'd probably get really upset by that If somebody did that to me, I'd just be like, what did I last fall? Like, I'd probably be upset for like an hour. It's like, so if someone put the smiley face, you feel good, right? And one.

Franny Fife is a lot more powerful than many smiley faces, right? So, these things might sound silly, but they're actually very powerful behavioral mechanisms.

So. you can do a lot more with an emoji than you can potentially do with a climate science textbook.

[00:35:13] Eric: Wow. Okay.

[00:35:15] Katie: well-positioned,

[00:35:16] Eric: This is good advice.

[00:35:17] Katie: um, so, in your terms of your, you know, design students taking on these actions, you, maybe something for a week is like to give your roommates or your family, like smiley faces or frowny faces.

And then just to like to monitor the reactions that they, that they have. Um, so yeah, comparing people is a super superpower. Once you get data, once you get feedback if you compare people and most of mine. Entrepreneurial work is all based around trying to get this comparison, comparative scores, you know, just giving people a goal.

Like your goal might be to get 50% of your 50 is probably not a good number. Maybe 90% of your calories are from plant-based foods. Often asking people to go vegan is too much for people, but you can ask them to get maybe 50%, 90% of their calories. So, you know, monitoring people. The ratio of the calories, you know, really starting to understand, um, how-to, you know, nudge people away from eating meat and dairy.

Um, and it, you know, just get, but the point was giving people an explicit goal. You know, this is the carbon, and we do that with one of my projects, energy loaded. And it's quite powerful when you say your mission and you say it like a video game, like, hi, there, there's this problem. And we're going on this quest and your mission is important in this quest is to reduce 50% of the carbon emissions from your home and people.

Okay, got it. Uh, which is quite a different mental landscape to just randomly do good things for the planet. So, giving these explicit

[00:36:43] Eric: Where can we find energy lollipops? Sorry to interrupt there. But energy

[00:36:46] Katie: Oh, no problem. Just go to the Chrome store. You haven't seen it before. Go to the Chrome store and you type in energy lollipop, just type in energy lollipop. Chrome store into Google.

And it's just a really great little Chrome extension. And it shows you the carbon emissions of the California grid in real-time with color. Very simple. No crazy metrics about wind and solar and coal, like energy people like to put out. Um, and you can just click on it, you know, through the day. Uh, and now, yeah, I've put, like, I understand the exact problem load profile of the grid throughout all of the year now.

Like I'm like hot days, weekends called that, clicking on it for a year. And, um, yeah, it's really, it's great for you around carbon literacy. And I definitely do feel really bad using electricity at night when the grid is really high. But the only thing I do know now is how often I leave lights on in the day because I'm like, oh yeah, it's all solar powered.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. Um, but maybe it doesn't matter. Um, oh, another gamification technique. That's really cool.

It's using emotive animals. I just had this guy on my podcast who tests. He gets this mechanical cat that smiles at you. If You save energy and frown that year if you use too much

[00:37:56] Eric: That's powerful. You know, that right. Cancer is super powerful for change, right?

[00:38:02] Katie: Are they like in just, you mean kind of like spiritually

[00:38:05] Eric: Yes. Yeah. It works.

[00:38:09] Katie: or you mean like, like the Chinese cat is like with its arm thing that,

[00:38:12] Eric: Any, any cat we'll make it happen.

[00:38:14] Katie: Right, right. Well, this was really profound. It actually got a 47% reduction, which is the highest that I've seen in any of the studies have looked at. Um, and so what they're doing is calling this thing and I'm an empathetic character gay.

So, it's like a gauge, you know, like a dial gauge that says whether you're doing bad or good, like a speedometer, but it's via the face of an animal that's like smiling or frowning, depending on your performance. And it's way more powerful than just using numbers or gauges or, um, you know, notifications. So, I would encourage everyone to figure out how to make an animal that changes its expression based on your, uh, performance, uh, really exciting stuff.

Hasn't really been implemented. know, you can like track progress. Where are you going to tracking progress through a game through steps or levels using novelty, using storytelling? Like I mentioned before, like starting people on an onboarding process, it's like, this is where we are. This is where we want to go with bringing you on the journey.

We. And then isolating those very specific tasks. It could be five or 10 things that you want people to do, and you're bringing them through that journey. And then it has like an end. Okay.

We've now succeeded in decarbonizing your home or your workplace. Great, great job. Um, you can use color. Red is good.

Green is bad. Uh, adding a color spectrum to data is very powerful. It might sound obvious, but not always done. You can use maps. Maps are incredibly interesting ways of showing progress as well. Like if you are needing every house or every building or every school to do something on a map, you can present it that way you can use pledges, asking people to give a promise, like writing down, like, Yeah.

Eric, I promise that I will not use any plastic for the next week.

And then I give you. And now if I screw that up, I will feel like a really bad person. Like I've lied to you. And that's a very powerful psychological mechanism. This they're called the called commitment devices in the psychological literature. When somebody, because trust is so deep. Important to our social relations.

You don't have trust; you don't have anything. Right? So, it's just getting into these very deep, psychological causes that get people to do stuff it's quite remarkable. Actually, just getting somebody to write something down on a piece of paper, I've done it with a bunch of people just casually, and then they're still doing it like years later.

And I'm like, Wow.

this really works. And all I did was just like ask somebody to do it at a party. Like just randomly. I actually stopped doing it because it was so powerful. It was like, Ooh, I feel

[00:40:39] Eric: You could start a

[00:40:40] Katie: unethical now. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I think everybody should be using pledges because you do not need to do any computer work.

Um, and you can use things like chews and chimes, like a red dot notification or a sound like why can't you build something? And nobody likes doing computer stuff, do something that makes like a sound. When the electricity grid goes up over a certain level of emissions, about seven or 8:00 PM has been at spikes.

So, you could have something that is. Like a notification on your phone. Um, I designed one thing for classrooms that showed indoor carbon dioxide. And, uh, one of the people on the team said, oh, why don't we make it make a sound? Do you know? So, it reminds the kids in the classroom to open the window to get fresh air in.

And I was like, yeah.

chime time, sound, you know, so it a little red dot and it makes it. And now the kids that know that the indoor carbon dioxide is high, and they should open, open the window. And, um, and my last point is a social norm, which is just using language like 83% of people in your neighborhood are doing it.

So, you're not being like the Well's going to die. Climate change is terrible, and you should do it because really bad things are going to happen. That's not really the most powerful way to get people to do things. And it may even make people completely turn off there's research, a reasonable amount of research coming out that showing people, climate doom, just create a wall

[00:42:04] Eric: Right empathy.

[00:42:06] Katie: well, it's not even, it's a shutting down.

It's like, can’t you shut down. Uh, so. What you can do one, and it's just a little bit of copywriting, right? You can just be like; did you know that? And you can even use stuff like everyone like it doesn't even really need to be accurate. You can be like everybody in your neighborhood and switching to EVs, or like, it's what everybody's doing.

You know? Like just stand standard, like copyrights. Yeah.

Like it can just be like a tagline. It doesn't need to actually be like research data. And then you, you show images of the people doing it. So rather than showing the melting glacier in the polar bear, what you show is this like super cool hip's family, you know, would they like Evie and the bicycles and like everybody's going in carbon-free now.

And then you're like, oh, are they, is this idea that the group is going that way? You want to follow the group? So, you want to create images that we can. Imitate, not images of what we don't want. We want images of what we do want that we can copy because humans will, we can't, we cannot help copying everybody around us.

It's an unconscious mechanism for us to copy the group. So, people will copy, even if they don't even know they're copying they'll, everyone is, will be copying everyone. So, the more images you can put up for the behavior you want. People will just adopt it. Like they can't, they can't help it, but to, but to adopt that.

And so that's another reason why this I'm against this climate doom messaging and this negative stuff, because, uh, it doesn't work, and it can even go backward. It can even get people to adjust to that being the norm. So, I, not that people are going to be acting like, Ooh, it's like literally everywhere or whatever.

But what you're doing is saying that this is normal. This is what everybody is doing. Like, if you put a big picture of like a really polluting SUV with like smoke coming out of it, what you're doing is normalizing that, saying that this is what everybody, and you say like 93% of people drive polluting SUV's.

So don't do that. Like, even though consciously you're like, oh, what an asshole would that fleeting SUV unconsciously, the unconscious copying brain will just be like, well, if I drive an SUV, including SUV it's okay. Because everybody

[00:44:12] Eric: Yeah, 90% of the people are doing it. So, it's fine. Right?

[00:44:16] Katie: And, um, that's basically it is all those toolkits. You follow that in a systematic process to try and change the numbers. And bingo you'll have a really great behavioral intervention that will most likely get people to change.

[00:44:29] Eric: Yeah, I think I'm, I'm really, I really believe this will work. I think about all the students that I've taught over the years and even now, and I don't know, I, the vast majority of them play games, they love to play games. And so. Um, why not use that as part of what they do in the classroom as design students?

Right. I mean, I'm, I, uh, I'm a runner and I don't really, really cross-train and bike and all that, but I've learned I need to do that. So, I got a, I got a Peloton and, uh, I can tell you that, um, I wasn't really interested in it until I started to see the metrics. And so, looking at the numbers and saying, oh my God, I can do this if I just go a little faster or, uh, so I, I was, I'm really addicted to like beating certain numbers.

Right. This is a game it's a game to me. And I could see that working in a very positive way. Right. What if you're, instead of it's like Peloton for the planet, right? Like if you were doing something like you usually do exercise and that turns into something positive and a positive change, right? Uh, you could, you could turn that into a project potentially.

So, I really like,

[00:45:42] Katie: Peleton, oh sorry. Just a Peloton can pay you to other Peloton uses. Is it a group dynamic?

[00:45:48] Eric: yeah. I should explain that. Yeah, it definitely does. Like, you can see what other people are doing, and usually people will high-five you, and then they'll pass you on the leaderboard and you get all upset and then you try to pass them again. Then you virtually high-five of course. So, it's a competition, right?

It's. Produce the most kilowatt and lose, uh, uh, go the fastest, all this type of stuff. And, um, I think that's a fun idea for a design project. So that, that kind of leads me into my last question for you. Cause, um, this is what I ask all the guests and they come on the show. Uh, I want to put you into our shoes.

You're a design educator, uh, for the next four to six weeks. And by the way, I think you'd be a great educator and your project. Or what you're talking about, I think is super interesting. And I think the students would really, really enjoy working with you. So, you're a design educator for the next four to six weeks.

What kind of project or projects would you assign? Uh, the students, um, in relation to the work that you do to, um, create more climate action.

[00:46:58] Katie:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, my last podcast was all, you know, um, about experience design. A little about that. But, um, with Jesse shell, he was, um, he's, he's a professor of experience design. And we talked about that in the context of, uh, sustainability, which really honestly never comes up with environmental engineers and scientists.

Um, well, I, I think the, um, the first, well, that's why we need people like us trying to get out there. These other concepts that often are traditionally not, not thought about when everybody's thinking about, you know, like perhaps chameleon and, uh, liters of whatever. Um, I think the first thing that. It's often not thought about when it comes to products and companies in the bigger context, they sit in.

So, if you're looking at making like a product, everyone will be like, say it's like a box or a toothpaste, or even like a video game.

[00:47:49] Eric: Hmm.

[00:47:50] Katie: Look at the thing itself, like, let's look at the materials that come from it. This is usual, like sustainability way of doing things. If you're making a PlayStation, we just look at the actual plastic that goes into the PlayStation and the kilowatt-hours that it draws, and our servers powered by solar, solar panels.

And just looking at the product is this one discreet thing, I think. I, I mean, look at that. It's not important, it still needs to be done, but that's not what I specialize in. And I think there's a much bigger and more impactful way to do it. So, if I was teaching a course, what would I call it? Maybe I'd call it Fitbit for the planet design and the phrase I like to use, or perhaps, you know, environmental behavior.

Is that I would ask all the students too, which is more or less what I already do, um, ask people to choose a data metric. So, we're not just going to focus on making the tube of toothpaste more. Eco-friendly we're going to look at the bigger metrics. So. It could be the number of trees in your neighborhood, the number of green rows.

It could be the surface temperature of your, uh, of your town because roads get really hot and credit urban heat island. Um, trees don't get hot. So that's. Um, the kilowatt-hours of that, the carbon emissions from kilowatt-hours, the amount of gasoline is being used in cars. You know, if pollution, it could be like water pollution.

I would get people to choose a data set that they are most attracted to. And so that's the first principle of. And then we go through a process of looking at, well, how do we work with the steady to get people to drive action? And so, I do this behavior mapping workshop where we isolate who are the individual people that are going to be involved in this system.

Like it could be like a government agency or a, um, you know, like a parent or a homeowner or somebody who's out of school or somebody who sells cause like, it could be anybody at all. And you map out who those people are, and then you go through a process saying, well, what's the cue that we want to get to them.

All the cue is like, you know, they're going to see something on Instagram or we're going to reach out. So, there's a kind of like the marketing tentacles of whatever it is you'll you're doing. Or it even could be like a chime, right? Like the kids in the classroom. And then, you know, we look in and then you're like, well, okay, what is it. Data sets we're working with. So, it could just be one thing like carbon emissions from harm, or sometimes if you get into something more complex, like water, there's actually, there's like multiple metrics to work with or in an ecosystem. And then what is the action we want them to do? So, once you've had a deep dive into the data, you should know what these actions are.

They're not just like, oh, here's like 55 eco-tips. You know you want to just be like, try and get very narrow with the specific actions which will emerge. Once you look in the data, what those actions are. And then once you figured out what those actions are, then we go through all of the behavioral stuff that I just went through earlier, which is Okay.

like, how do we show the data to people?

How do we add, you know, comparison? How do we compare stormwater, drain to stormwater drainage for the lake? And you've got five stormwater drains coming out. You know, holding lectures, telling you the lake is polluted. Isn't necessarily going to get you there. Let's go to each storm, water drain, test it, give them a ranking for the stormwater drains on a leaderboard.

It'd be like worst stormwater drain down to the best, what a drain or maybe the other way round. Um, and then you can give them like a star rating, you know, you know, they were like, you know, one-star down to five. And the action that you might want to be is like, I'm not sure exactly how the pollution gets in.

Maybe it's like oil from cars, like going down after rainfall or people putting paint down. Um, there could be a factory nearby or something that you need to get, um, you know, better environmental regulations on, I don't know what, anything, whatever. So, you're putting like a disclosure, then you're putting a star rating.

Then you're putting that out there. Maybe you make signs, maybe the, and this is where the design comes in. It's like, okay, going through this process, You're like, Okay.

well, the first step is data disclosure. How do we get it out there? Let's all paint a sign, right? And another one in, you know, you understand, oh, cognitive load.

Let's not, over-design it. We want to kind of design it and make it simple. So, we're all very used to these like, um, fire dials with like, is it smokey? The bear who has to fire, you know, from like very scary fire, you get a die, you know, all the way to green. Like there's no fire. So, people are used to these like public dials of color.

You probably don't need to ask anybody's permission or hopefully, the school will have some supplies and then you go and put one, you take a photograph and send it to the local paper. Um, and then you make a little mock website single page. This is what we're doing. Put it on Instagram. And put the message out there, you know, why is, and then everyone's like, why is that still water dry and so much more polluted than all of the others. Um, but anyway, so you're going through this, like this process of like, what is the action? So, then you figure out what the action is. And then you can say, well, how do we prompt people to take this, um, this action and using all of these types of design kids that we've got, like, how do we make it normal?

Do we need to leader board? Are we going to track progress? Um, you can even use things like behavior charts, you know, like a stick, a chat when you've been a kid, and then you get like 10 in a row, like for somebody who has maybe like really, um, going plant-based is really hard for them. I mean, creating a sticker chart and you don't need to write any code 10-day plant-based challenge, right.

Like super easy, low tech, you know, that stuff really works. And once somebody has on a 10-day plant-based challenge, they're probably could, you know, for the next decades they're alive will have an impact. So, you can do simple things like that. Um, and that's another thing like a design student can come up with.

Um, you know, like the creature that we thought out, maybe, you know, if you are looking at stormwater drains, you don't have smokey. The bear you have, like, I don't know. Sylvia the fish, you know, and then Sylvia, the fish is like on the third day and she's like really miserable, like flaw covered in like, you know, sores and looking really sick.

And then there's like the happy fish, you know, for the good stormwater drain is when people go past it, it's really silent. You're like, oh my God, there's a star rating. There are numbers, there's a color. It's got like a red face on it. Fish looks really sad. I was like, oh my God, there's really got to do something about this.

There's like something really bad going on in this area. Um, And, uh, you know, you can map it out. You can map. Maybe you can use pledges. And maybe if there's something that you need to get a lot of people to do, like something like oil leaking from cars, it's not like something like a factory. That's like a lot of individual behavior to get to do.

Then you can use something like a pledge instead of just educating everybody on it. You can go out to everyone and saying, would you commit to this pledge of getting your car tuned up? Because this is stormwater drain. Really bad-looking Katra and fish that's doing in really bad shape. Um, you want to help the fish be happy and then get people to write down this promise? Yeah, every six months, I don't know that much about the cause, but like, I don't know, every six months to get the engine looked at or

[00:54:42] Eric: Yeah, the oil change thing.

[00:54:45] Katie: it looked for oil leaks. Yeah. And then, uh, get them to write that pledge. So, we'll most likely do that. If they write it down and give it to you, and then you can like photograph everybody's pledges and put it on Instagram, and then people are like, oh, and then you can even give people a little identity.

That's something. I didn't mention a sticker. That's like I'm, uh, an oil change pledge person now. So you give people like a name.

[00:55:08] Eric: Right to get a badge.

[00:55:10] Katie: Yeah. Yeah. They did this by getting people to turn their car engines off for now picking their children up. They ask people to pledge. Then they gave them a little sticker to put on the dashboard.

It was like, I'm a, I'm a, um, engine turnoff picks up kid person now. Um, and it really worked. They got like 70% of the. So, switch their engines off, but very simple low-tech interventions, right? So. if your design students all have wonderful graphic interfaces into graphic design skills, they can go through this whole process of looking at this data, applying all these behavioral mechanisms and they're completely empowered to make it look amazing.

So instead of having all the engineers do it, where it will look ugly, you can get your students to do the whole process and they'll make it look amazing. Um, but it. You know, if they're not using those tools, they could just come up with really visually wonderful stuff that does not have the behavioral interventions at all.

But when they use these tools, they could have, we're all really working for behavior, but then looking amazing as well. And it's just so much more creatively enhancing through creative person to think like, well, Wow.

how would I make an app to assign, like, how would I design a pledge? How would I design a stat chat?

How would I design something to sit on the fridge? Like what would be the ultimate fridge reminder sticker? To get somebody to do something. How would I get people to work in groups? How would I get people to copy each other? And then there's just, there's just so much more tools in the toolkit to design for as a creative person.

Then if you're just like, okay, I got to design something beautiful for climate change now, or interesting or scary, you know, you just don't have as much to work with. Um, anyway, so that's what I, that's what I would do. Um, and you can use my, my, my, the book I wrote had a sense. The world is more or less a system to go through.

[00:56:55] Eric: Sounds like really cool. And, I hope that people who are listening might try it in the fall or whatever semester. Um, and, uh, and they can talk about it on our Instagram page afterward to see how it goes. Uh, Katie, it's been fantastic having you here and, uh, before we go, why don't you give an opportunity to, uh, tell our guests where they can find out more about you, obviously your book, how to save the world, uh, tell us where we can find you on social media and.

[00:57:24] Katie: Well, the best thing to do is to sign up to my website, Kenny patrick.com. And I have a lot of free resources. Once you sign up that you can get that sort of will help you along this journey. I'm really active on Twitter, KatiePatrick, K A T I E. That's how do you spell my name on Twitter and also on Instagram.

Um, and, you know, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, really active on LinkedIn and love, uh, chatting with people. My podcast also called how it says worlds is easy to find, but I definitely recommend people read through the steps in the book. I mean, it has a, um, a life-changing effect on some people, if they've been going in the wrong direction, the value action gap direction.

I hadn't realized that, like I get people emailing me quite often. I shredded my whole project and started again in 3d in your, your book or like I had like a complete earth-shattering, like, oh my God, what am I doing moment? And then started again, or for much more sound principles. And, um, that's really wonderful to see.

Is there always a bit shaky a bit like, like a kind of like you, you, you momentarily ruined my life. Um, but then I'm like, no, this is good. This is good. You're going in the wrong direction. And so. Yeah.

If anyone who's interested in design and climate change, it's a really good framework to, um, make sure that you're making a real impact.

[00:58:40] Eric: Well, thanks again, Katie. And I'm happy that you were able to take some time out and talk with me today.

[00:58:45] Katie: Thanks. It's been fun, Eric.