Applied Projects 2021 Launch — When and how to employ Design Thinking
Last week we launched the three applied projects that our members will be working on in the upcoming months. The aim of these projects is to work closely with UCL stakeholders to promote positive behaviour change at the university campus and beyond.
As part of the launch event, Edward Gardiner kindly offered to introduce the teams to Design Thinking and its processes, showing real-world examples of how to apply them to behaviour change interventions. Edward is the Behavioural Design Lead at Warwick Business School and is one of the Founders of The Cognition Company where he is the Director of Behavioural Design.
Design Thinking Session
In the session, we learnt about Design Thinking and defined it as a problem solving process. It is a people-centred, bottom-up approach, which starts with observing and understanding the people the intervention aims to benefit. “Looking at the world through their eyes”, as Edward said. We were also introduced to the five steps of creating a good design (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test), and looked at the Double Diamond four-step process. This starts with discovering the problem, followed by defining the reason of the issue, developing the intervention and ends with delivering it.
The overall aim of the session was to highlight the importance of starting a behavioural change approach with thinking in personas. That is, to create fictional characters based on observations, who are the users of the product, and whom the intervention aims to benefit. Personas represent the users’ needs, wants and behaviours. Edward alluded to the well known Psychologist Donald Norman’s idea that there is “no such thing as user error, but design error”. Thus, we were left with the knowledge that successful design starts with a thorough analysis and deep understanding of human thinking.
The session was extremely valuable and encouraged us to think about the importance and the time that we need to spend on the first step of Design Thinking, regardless of whether we choose to follow the five step process, the Double Diamond, or any other design thinking processes. It seems that the first step remains the same in most. We thank Edward for his time to deliver this informative and thought-provoking session, and for inspiring us to kick start working on our three projects.
And now, let’s talk about the Applied Projects.
Three teams of seven students will meet every week to design a behavioural change intervention from start to finish. This includes: researching the challenge, setting the target behaviour, analysing the influences on the behaviour, designing a testing phase, and analysing data and findings. Teams will present their intervention to stakeholders, and will create a portfolio and guidelines to hand over their project at the end of term three.
Reducing Business Air Travel
The first project aims to reduce business air travel and is targeting university staff. The team will be working with UCL’s PALS Green Team, which has been named the university’s greenest department for the 7th year in a row! Working on over 20 sustainability excellence projects, they are a truly encouraging team ,with a great sense of humour, who take their work seriously and refuse to stop until they reach the Moon (read about the Moonwalk project). The objective of this project is to reduce the air travel of staff travelling for business purposes, and consequently, reduce UCL’s carbon footprint. Staff will be encouraged to use another form of transport such as taking the train. The project is very similar to UCL’s first ever Nudgeathon, organised by our society in collaboration with Ideas42, in term one. The winning team’s impressive proposal from the Nudgeathon will give inspiration to this behavioural change project, and guide the design of this intervention.
Communicating Sustainability
The second project is in collaboration with Sustainable UCL, who run a wide range of activities, projects and campaigns tackling climate change, biodiversity and much more. One of their aims is to make sure that every UCL student is reached, and is given the opportunity to champion sustainable projects. There seems to be a communication gap between the team and students who are not in societies and green groups. Thus, these students miss out on the opportunity to get involved with sustainability. The aim of this project is to make sure that Sustainable UCL reaches every student who, as they outline in their broader objective, “go onto be the leaders of tomorrow”. The team aims to “empower every student to champion sustainability during their time here at UCL, and beyond.” Click here to find out more about Sustainable UCL projects and learn how to get involved with this inspiring team.
Student Wellbeing
Last but not least, the third team will be working with the Institute of Education and UCL Student Support and Wellbeing team in promoting student wellbeing. The project has been inspired by the UCL-Penn Global Covid Study, which aims to look at the effect of the pandemic. It’s found that 18–24 years old participants’ physical exercise decreased the most, during the pandemic. Additionally, this age group experienced the largest increase in their anxiety levels and depression. Their sleeping quality has suffered a negative impact as well. University students fall into this demographic, and therefore, the aim of this project is to design a behavioural change intervention to increase students’ physical activity, by using Project Active. Consequently, it aims to improve students’ mental wellbeing, contributing to their happiness.
We are delighted for the opportunity to be working with these inspiring teams, whose goal is to make students feel supported, encouraged, inspired, and taken care of. We know now, more than ever, about the important positive effect teams like these can have on students’ wellbeing.
As you can see, the projects cover a wide range of areas, from sustainability to students’ physical and mental health. There is a lot of work to do and we could not be more excited about it!
Make sure to follow our teams’ progress! You can do this by following our LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and reading our upcoming newsletters. Until then, take care of each other and stay safe.
