[Music] about half of you should recognize this the men should recognize this if you need some help um it's uh it's you know obviously a urinal uh and more importantly there's a fly in the urinal and I'll get back to in a minute to why that's important um but first I want to talk about um uh why this is my favorite example of behavior change uh and why uh you know Behavior change is an important topic right now there are three different kinds of behavior change according to a textbook that I read when I was in college in a political science class you know textbooks Never Lie right so uh I'm uh I'm going to talk about those briefly the first is laws laws can change our behavior um we're obeying laws right now rules regulations uh in New York City in 2003 they banned smoking in all the bars and the you know clubs and the restaurants and the cafes as you can see um and as a result people had to change their behavior around that we're also motivated by money whether we want more money or we need more money variety of reasons why we're motivated by money um speaking of cigarettes as taxes on cigarettes go up uh cigarette sales go down especially for people who don't have a lot of money and can't spend money on cigarettes um and we're also motivated by emotion U whether it's uh fear or desire um think about your reaction to this if you're a smoker and marble is now selling uh a carton of of cigarettes that looks like this you might respond differently than just buying uh the cigarettes but um if you're addicted Die Hard smoker it might be fine but uh some people respond to emotion in these ways uh there's a fourth way that we can be motivated to change our behavior and that's through environment I came across this more recently the past uh year uh and it brings us back uh to our urinal with the fly in it uh this little fly was used in Holland and um I think it was about 15 years ago is when it was introduced in the urinals in order to help men aim at the urinals so if you um for those of you who don't spend a lot of time in men's urinals they can get or in uh not urals in uh bathrooms they can be uh a little disgusting at times and uh that was the problem at the airport and so after putting this fly it's actually etching in the urinal uh uh spillage rates decreased by 80% immediate results were made by that such an amazing simple uh idea simple graphic strategically placed in the urinal forces men to aim it's uh pretty great um so obviously Graphics in that location can you know cause your behavior to change but what does the environment have to do with that um for that I'm going to rely on some research from two behavioral psychologists Wendy woods and David Neil they study habits and how habits form and um and the nature of our habits uh according to them 45% of our actions take place in the same places every day so we work we have a house we travel to work probably do a lot of things but um in those locations we perform a series of actions and those series of actions come together to form our habits and so the fact that we're located in these different places and repeat these U actions help us form behaviors so in this instance my one of my habits is to uh open the refrigerator and of course Nutella is in there it's uh staring me down and so I grab that and I make myself a little sandwich and uh and by the way I know Nutella is not supposed to be kept in the refrigerator uh but uh um you know we keep a lot of things in the ref refrigerator you probably shouldn't so um but uh Wendy woods and David Neil talk about us being integrated into our environment in this way so we kind of respond like sheep to um to uh prompts that we get in our environment uh and as a result we you know I'm not going to go there just yet as a result we you know have a a variety of bad habits or or actions with bad consequences so in order to break in order to break these bad habits or unwanted behaviors um they suggest that we figure out what that environment is how we're acting in that environment and uh figure out some way to disrupt that series of actions that forms a habit so thinking back to our uh example of the urinal uh from the time when men enter the bathroom to when they uh exit it typically you know there's a variety of things that take place during that time um but that fly disrupts the way people experience a bathroom as they normally would especially when you're in airport and you're moving quickly through an airport and you're not thinking about being clean necessarily so if we're to summarize uh the ideas of woods and Neil into a formula because we love formulas they help us figure out how to act um it might look like this first of all identify whatever habit or behavior you want to change it might look like this first of all identify whatever habit or behavior you want to change at that point ask yourself whether or not environment plays any role or factor into to that action and then lastly uh find some way to disrupt that I talked about Graphics it can be auditory it can be uh depending on your medium it can be a variety of things so um I always like uh testing formulas as I'm sure most of you do and there's a there's a building pretty close to where I live that I like to go to the coffee shop at and it's in this big commercial building it's got a lot of doors and entryways um and it always has the option of using either revolving doors or The Swinging Doors um and I noticed that a lot of people really weren't using the revolving doors and so I took this chance to think about how I can disrupt that behavior how I can get people to start thinking about using the revolving doors and again this is acting like thinking like a kid um we typically we don't think twice about it because we're used to it but I think it really takes a childlike mentality to step back and say how could things be different um so I did a little bit of research I found that that these buildings in the United States uh these large commercial buildings typically the ones that have revolving doors uh use about 19% of the total energy in the country which amounts to about $180 billion dollar a year um there's a lot of reasons why these buildings use energy and how they use energy um in the case of door use uh especially when swinging doors are opened there's a free exchange of air that happens which doesn't happen with revolving doors in fact uh times more air is exchanged when a swinging door is used than when a revolving door is used so when you do some calculations this can be in the thousands of dollars uh a year in larger buildings is more um there's one MIT study I saw which estimated up to $8,000 for one of the buildings that they had done a study on um so I was thinking about how I can U manipulate this and I did myself a little tour walked around mtown Manhattan where a lot of these large commercial buildings with revolving doors happen to be um and there are a lot of them I I visited about 56 57 um buildings and watch the activities that people uh have when they're given the option of using one or the other door it turns out that about 27% of people use uh the re um revolving doors so in other words 63% of people uh use Swinging Doors quite a quite a large percentage but these buildings also have their lineage um uh can trace their lineage back to one guy in Philadelphia in 1888 who got a patent for U for his revolving door idea um Theo van canel is his name and his idea was to uh create these revolving doors that are noiseless as they go around um that would be you prevent noise from coming in from the street that could uh prevent any wind of course it's a big deal any wind any dust any rain any snow any of those things from um coming into the building and then also in a rather genius way um uh help people not collide with each other when they're coming in and out of the building so obviously revolving doors allow more than one person to go through um a door so it's an ingenious invention when you think about it we take it for granted now but um quite quite amazing back in the day um so after I did all my research I uh um well a little bit more research I I was curious about why uh why people don't use re evolving doors um there's a lot of really friendly doormen out there who love opening doors for people having a conversation uh helping people out um but that same MIT study that that I I quoted earlier uh mentioned that people often feel cramped in these doors they feel like they might get hurt uh or they just feel you know a little unsafe uh and as a result they use Swinging Doors which are much easier uh and of course I should point out that swinging doors are essential for anybody who has a disability uh and need to use it and for anybody who's moving large equipment through um or into or out of the building but I chose to do a little study back at the building that I go to a lot um I thought about uh uh the signage there really wasn't much signage and as a graphic designer I think a lot about the signs and how we interact with them and so I thought let's let's do a series of tests and see how signs help people and what we can figure out in terms of the most optimal sign uh the first one really crude this is a just a 8 and 1 half by 11 sheet of paper uh very simple text and I taped it on the corners to the door so that it would look kind of like a freshman did it you know uh so before people were using this uh before people uh before I put this up people were using um The Swinging Doors about 62% of the time very similar to the other sets 62% of the time afterwards people were using revolving doors 27% of the time so it's a really big increase in um in the number of people who were using it the second uh sign that I made was directional I wanted to sort of Point people towards the revolving door uh this one's actually a little bit smaller in width and a little bit um a little bit shorter as well and it turns out only 53% of people uh use the doors as a result of this and but this told me that um first of all that signs were working and people were responding to them but second of all that uh the size is important people need to be able to see the sign and then interpret it and then have a have enough time to act on it a lot of times people were walking right up to the door and then reading it sometimes people just went right through it because they've already made all that effort um so my my third my third sign was uh bigger and better of course two feet long uh eight 8 in high the text is a lot larger and it also incorporates incorporates The Branding colors of the building which is this dark blue color and again it's pointing towards the revolving door so I had really good results with this happy to say 70% of people who uh who had the option of using both doors chose the revolving door so this is a much better example of uh the kind of sign that was important I have to admit at one point I was thinking about wrapping the whole door in a sign and seeing what the response would be there but uh don't really have the resources for that and also I felt like I might get kicked out of using the building so uh picking my battles um but this clearly shows that people respond to these kinds of cues the habit of walking into a door was completely disrupted for most of the people who came across this um so finding ways to change behaviors uh uh can be done in this way and as moving forward as you as you think about how you want to change a behavior or has if you want to make a change in your community I encourage you to just look around they're everywhere change possibilities are everywhere uh you don't have to have a lot of materials you don't have to have a lot of expertise it always helps if you can partner with people who who can do things better than you and um and and find ways to do things more efficiently but think about uh behavior and think about the way that people act in communities and act in environments at that point you'll have a much better idea of how to approach the problem and uh make an impact [Applause] [Music] thanks