Key Indicators — How has the pandemic shaped our behaviour?

There is no doubt that coming out of strict lockdown has been incredibly beneficial for our wellbeing. Over the last few months, we have seen massive rises in domestic violence, loneliness and stress, to name just a few. So, the period we are transitioning into now is, I’m sure, a massive source of relief for millions of people worldwide, even if it’s just because your family is driving you mad.

However, this phase presents its own challenges, how can we manage this transition without compromising public safety and the health of others? Is social distancing here to stay? What effects will this have on our use of public spaces, transport, etc?

This is another question we posed to you in our study.

The results this time around were more conclusive than with Personal Data, the general consensus from your answers is that our behaviour and our habits are going to change in the long-run. But, is that what is actually happening in our transition out of lockdown?

What out there gives us some clues?

For a moment there, it felt like we might be doing okay. Infection rates were slowing down, things were crawling back to pseudo-normality, but it was short-lived. Due to the disproportionate infection rate, last week 19 districts around Lisbon were placed back into the “State of Calamity”, and we have been seeing similar localised measures pop-up around the world, from Leicester to Melbourne. It seems that in Europe, at least, the allure of summer outweighs our concerns about the virus. In the past couple of weeks, we have been inundated with news of overcrowded beaches and massive illegal parties, people are — understandably — itching to get out of the house in any way they can.

But what about those of us at the other end of the spectrum? Lockdown has caused many of us to suffer from first-time mental health issues, and the Mental Health Foundation is advising that “we should be prepared for the fact that the end of lockdown might be as hard for us as the start was.” Post-lockdown anxiety feels somewhat unfair, after managing to get through these months we are now presented with a new set of so-called unprecedented challenges.

So, we clearly need some help in adjusting to life during a pandemic (because we are still in the middle of it all, remember). Gaps such as this — where there is a clear need but not yet the infrastructure to serve it — can create the space for some interesting business ‘experiments’. When we look at the industries that have been hit the hardest, generally they are shoulder-to-shoulder: education, the arts, tourism. So can this time be used to foster some much-needed innovation in these areas and help people safely transition to life after lockdown?

It seems that we are simultaneously experiencing movement towards this and resistance against it. On one side, we are seeing a renewal of the entrepreneurial spirit in the cultural and artistic worlds, with drive-in cinemas opening all around the UK, the reopening of Barcelona’s Liceu to an audience of 2,292 plants, theatres in Berlin removing seats to comply with social distancing regulations, and that’s not to mention all the live shows now available in the comfort of our own homes. While this may not come as too much of a surprise — as Phillipe Kern said in our wonderful interview, artists are ‘the original innovators’ — are these measures a sufficient replacement for the ‘real thing’?

Well, the education industry certainly doesn’t seem to think so; with many large universities across the world stating that they will reopen in-person in the Autumn. The obvious motive behind this is financial; universities need tuition fees to function, and the best way to secure them is to make this promise, however unfounded it may be. The aspect I am more interested in, however, is the experiential one. In his book Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed shows that a major part of the university experience is the ‘melting-pot’, being exposed to new ideas, new people, new behaviours. We are among peers in a ‘safe space’, where our beliefs are challenged, where we can experiment and get things wrong; all in the pursuit of figuring out who we are and who we want to be. I don’t see how this can be replaced by online classes taken from your parent’s house.

And yet, we cannot afford to simply wait it out. Studies have already been done into the potential effects of social deprivation on adolescent development and mental health and the outlook isn’t great. This article urges policymakers to treat this group (ages 10–24) as a priority when looking to reopen, but I don’t know if we can rely on the glacial pace of public institutions to tackle an issue as urgent as this; we need to proactively design mechanisms to mitigate the damage this phase is likely to cause. Bubble football, anyone?

Our behaviour, and indeed our culture, is shaped by our surroundings and the experiences that are available to us. While it is brutally unfair to ask people to stay at home indefinitely, we can’t ignore the pandemic just because we are bored. We need to find new, innovative ways to keep having these experiences without putting ourselves and others at risk. While this could be seen as a little optimistic, the role of design has always been to change our reality to match our desires. And if we don’t? The satirical rant from Jonathan Pie paints a picture of what that world might look like.

“In a year’s time, after watching Netflix and Amazon Prime and your Insta-feed and nothing else, I guarantee you’ll turn around and think where the fuck did all that go? How many times have you read a sentence in a book or heard a lyric in a song or a line in a movie or a play that articulates a thought that you never thought that anyone else has ever had, but you? In fact, you didn’t know that it was possible to articulate that thought or emotion until you heard it articulated. That’s some powerful shit. There’s a cure for a lot of society’s ills right there. There’s magic in that, that you are not alone, that you are part of something, a community, humanity. The realisation that human experience is something that we experience together. Dancing together, laughing together, crying together, singing together. That’s art.”

The big picture

Moving away from the role of businesses in all of this, we find ourselves navigating an increasingly complex system of identity-led behaviours. The other day, I was scrolling aimlessly through my phone and came across this tweet:

Putting the humour to one side, it raises an interesting point. On an individual level, the things we are being ‘asked’ to do really aren’t that radical. Why, then, are we experiencing so much backlash against seemingly small compromises for the so-called greater good? Is this just another byproduct of late-stage capitalism? I explored this a little in my previous article on data privacy, talking about the narrative of personal freedom versus public health, so I’m not going to push this angle much further here.

What scares me about this is the clear politicisation of our behaviours. While not quite as prolific as a MAGA hat, in the United States it seems as if the simple act of wearing a face mask has become a statement of political affiliation. The interesting and slightly contradictory thing about this is that a large amount of those who oppose mask-wearing are the very people who are most vulnerable to the virus (people over 65 tend to be more conservative).

Now, I should mention that the benefits of wearing a mask have been thoroughly discussed, and while it could be argued that the act of personal sacrifice for political freedom is both poetic and historically effective, these ‘sacrifices’ aren’t just personal. It seems to me that, in times such as these, we need to abandon our ego and individual exceptionalism in respect of something bigger than ourselves. Thinking about it like this, the last four words of that tweet come to mind, ‘boy is it easy’.

But when trying to find things to back up this point, I came to understand this perspective is a little reductionist. There are several models that try to explain our adoption of behaviours, from the Health Belief Model to Social Cognitive Theory to Diffusion of Innovation, and I think it is safe to say that this is a complex issue. Our behaviour is subject to our context (both political and social), the opportunities available to us (what alternatives exist), and our perception of our agency in the situation (how much we believe our actions make a difference), to name just a few.

The question I’m left with at the end of all of this is what will happen when the behavioural changes we need to make are actually hard? What lessons can we learn from the pandemic that we can apply to the efforts needed to combat the climate crisis, for example?

Writing in the Current Biology journal, Professor Andrew Balmford, from the University of Cambridge states, “We’ve seen the consequences of delayed action in the fight against COVID-19. The consequences of continued inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change and mass extinction are too grave to contemplate”. The similarities between the pandemic and the climate crisis aren’t hard to spot: system-delay, reinforcing feedback loops & complex geopolitical dynamics.

But perhaps the issue here isn’t just the fact that systems are notoriously difficult to comprehend; today’s political climate feels almost synonymous with the delegitimisation of experts. In a context like this, it’s hardly surprising that we either don’t understand the impact of our behaviours or simply don’t care. I don’t know exactly how to behave in situations like this, but the beauty is, I don’t have to have all the answers; we can and should trust the experts. Dr Brendan Fisher, who co-authored the above article, states that these experts are being “tragically ignored”.

To address these potentially catastrophic systemic challenges, I am certain that we will all have to make changes to our ways of living. We can no longer afford to act in ways that rob future generations of potential prosperity. Yes, it is the role of those of us in the innovation industry to find creative solutions to the problems of our day; but we should have respect for an unspoken social contract, in which we all have a part to uphold, for the. But with all the protests about haircuts, I think we still have a way to go.