prior changemaking Projects

I’ve co-founded and led large global projects such as the COVID-19 Design Challenge with the World Design Organization and Design for America and the Future of Design Education Initiative alongside design visionary Don Norman. I’d like to tell you about my current project.

Habits for a Better World Project

In an era where global challenges like climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, and biodiversity loss escalate, there is a pressing need for swift and effective action. Despite the availability of solutions to combat these issues, progress remains frustratingly slow. Why is transformative change not occurring at the pace required? What barriers are preventing us from securing a sustainable, ethical, and equitable future?

The Habits for a Better World project led by Carly Williams and me is using a research-based approach (using UX research methods) to determine the reasons why change isn’t happening rapidly enough at both an individual and systems level, designing (using UX design methods) ways to address the inhibitors we discover, and then a film-based approach to get those ideas out in the world through a documentary and social media outreach (using compelling storytelling and film making).

The response to our call to action was overwhelming and so gratifying with so many people—300 in total— volunteering to use their expertise, insights, and passion to create a better tomorrow.

The teams have now gone deep in understanding the existing research and literature on each of the major challenges we’re aiming to address: climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, biodiversity loss, and generative AI. They learned about the factors that have the greatest negative impact as well as what individual behaviors could mitigate the challenge. The latter included adopting more plant-based practices, reducing plastic use, embracing native plants, fostering empathy, and even changing our use of generative AI.

Every member of each of the teams then carried out self research, introspecting about what they learned and how they had or hadn’t practiced the desired behaviors themselves. Following that, they conducted team research, all leading to the creation of draft targeted personas and hypotheses to explore with external research. Each of the teams is currently carrying out external research.

All of this will inform how we inspire people to adopt the desired behaviors to address the challenges which will then go out in the world through a full length documentary as well as social media reels. We’re also open to whatever our research shows regarding any other form of outreach.

It’s an awesome project and I love working with Carly and our 300 researchers, designers, and filmmakers.

Check out our website for more about the project including progress on it.