MeasureD is a resource for anyone wanting to understand, measure, and scale the impact of social design in order to strengthen society and create the conditions for equitable human health. It is intended to represent the highest level of practice and help organizations and practitioners understand where, when, and how social design is most effective. includes case studies

To maximize the impact of Zika prevention programming efforts, a prioritization process for social and behavior change programming was developed based on a combination of research evidence and programmatic experience. Prioritized behaviors were: application of mosquito repellent, use of condoms, removing unintentional standing water, covering and scrubbing walls of water storage containers, seeking prenatal care, and seeking counseling on family planning if not planning to get pregnant.

We realized we were using insider language to describe innovation (as exemplified by internal blog post titles like “Using GIS Technology to Map Shelter Allocation in Azraq Refugee Camp”), rather than communicating what innovation looks like and the benefits it would bring to UNHCR staff (for example, “How UNHCR Used Creativity to Improve Journalistic Accuracy and Collaboration, One Step at a Time”). So, we hit the reset button and asked ourselves these four questions before crafting our internal communications strategy: What do we want to change? What do we want to be true that isn’t true right now? Whose behavior change is necessary to making that happen? Who has to do something (or stop doing something) they’re not doing now for us to achieve that goal? (This is about targeting a narrowly defined audience whose action or behavioral change is fundamental to your goal.) What would that individual or group believe if they took that action? In other words, what does that narrowly defined audience care about most, and how can we include that in our messages? How will we get that message in front of them? Where are their eyes?

Context analysis helps you to understand the elements of an environment and a group of potential users so that you can design a better technology project. It should involve key stakeholders, including implementing partners, donors, local and national authorities, and community members. We suggest five key lines of inquiry that context analyses should consider: People: Levels of education and literacy, information habits and needs, access to disposable income for equipment, electrical power to charge devices, and airtime and data to run them, and network access; Community: How membership of specific groups may affect access to technology and communications habits. For example, a nomadic clan may have attributable characteristics shared by its members, and variations in levels of access and freedom within the clan differentiated by gender and age. Market environment: An understanding of the key players, legal and regulatory issues, the mobile market, including both cost and distribution of agent networks, and the infrastructure, including commercial mobile infrastructure such as the availability of short-codes and APIs are all critical to making good design decisions. Political environment: understanding governance and control of, and access to, communications infrastructure by government and other actors Implementing organization: Many interventions have failed because staff were not able to maintain technology, because power or access to internet were not strong enough, because staff capacity was low or went away, or because the intervention was not supported by a broader culture of innovation and adaptive learning.

Well, if we want to sway other people to our “correct“ vision of things, we are most likely to do that by having a strong relationship with them. Ironically, it is through carefully and compassionately listening to others that we are more likely to sway their views.

In part four, we looked at the difference between hierarchical and collaborative conversations. Now we bring it all together and ask, “What can we do?” The answer is, a lot. There are, as it turns out, many solutions to how we can do a better job of talking to each other, and any one of these are approaches you can try in your own lives or organizations.

original “jobs to be done“ article from 2008

So how is it done? We’ve found that all jobs have the same eight steps. To use job mapping, we look for opportunities to help customers at every step:

There are a few enormous benefits to using challenge maps. First, challenge maps help teams surface the key decision points that will have the greatest potential impact, both for users and the business. Challenge maps also help teams get aligned and on the same page about the most impactful next step. Finally, and maybe most importantly, challenge maps help teams see where their thinking has been too limited, inspire fresh thinking, and unlock innovation.

The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations find their starting point and navigate the humanitarian innovation journey.

Common sense suggests that people struggling to achieve their goals benefit from receiving motivational advice. What if the reverse is true? In a preregistered field experiment, we tested whether giving motivational advice raises academic achievement for the advisor. We randomly assigned n = 1,982 high school students to a treatment condition, in which they gave motivational advice (e.g., how to stop procrastinating) to younger students, or to a control condition. Advice givers earned higher report card grades in both math and a self-selected target class over an academic quarter. This psychologically wise advice-giving nudge, which has relevance for policy and practice, suggests a valuable approach to improving achievement: one that puts people in a position to give.

Addressing massive challenges like climate change and poverty requires that we take a long-term view and have a preventative mindset. Since these perspectives challenge the deeply ingrained ways we have evolved to think and behave, we need to pay attention to why prevention is hard to think about and navigate the cognitive road blocks that stand in the way of progress. By presenting issues and information in ways that unlock support for preventative approaches, we can galvanize the ideas and actions social and environmental change requires.

In other words, it’s not a question of consumer choices being made that are bad, but of whether consumer choice exists. So when we ask why we ‘choose (or not)' highly energy efficient products, maybe we should ask instead if we're actually ‘picking (or not)' super energy efficient products. Picking vs. choosing. This is not a question of semantics. Far from it.

Some interventions are so obvious that they don’t need justifying. Or do they?

Wellth does this by “giving” patients money at the start of each month to take their pills. To prove they’re on track, they use the Wellth app to take a photograph of their medicines in the palm of their hand. But every day that they miss, they are penalized in the form of fee, which nets them less money at the end of the month. This loss-contract model is gaining notoriety and it should be: Wellth discovered that positive incentives accounted for adherence rates around 60% while loss-contract models account for better than 90% adherence rates.

***Psychology offers three general propositions for understanding and intervening to increase uptake where vaccines are available and affordable. The first proposition is that thoughts and feelings can motivate getting vaccinated. Hundreds of studies have shown that risk beliefs and anticipated regret about infectious disease correlate reliably with getting vaccinated; low confidence in vaccine effectiveness and concern about safety correlate reliably with not getting vaccinated. We were surprised to find that few randomized trials have successfully changed what people think and feel about vaccines, and those few that succeeded were minimally effective in increasing uptake. The second proposition is that social processes can motivate getting vaccinated. Substantial research has shown that social norms are associated with vaccination, but few interventions examined whether normative messages increase vaccination uptake. Many experimental studies have relied on hypothetical scenarios to demonstrate that altruism and free riding (i.e., taking advantage of the protection provided by others) can affect intended behavior, but few randomized trials have tested strategies to change social processes to increase vaccination uptake. The third proposition is that interventions can facilitate vaccination directly by leveraging, but not trying to change, what people think and feel. These interventions are by far the most plentiful and effective in the literature. To increase vaccine uptake, these interventions build on existing favorable intentions by facilitating action (through reminders, prompts, and primes) and reducing barriers (through logistics and healthy defaults); these interventions also shape behavior (through incentives, sanctions, and requirements). Although identification of principles for changing thoughts and feelings to motivate vaccination is a work in progress, psychological principles can now inform the design of systems and policies to directly facilitate action.

group facilitation methods for icebreakers, brainstorming, prioritizing, etc.

The Paradox Process is a model for brand development that when applied works for many brands facing complex challenges. Its primary purpose is to get insight into consumer pain points or contradictions that need solving, and it works by using contrary perspectives to arrive at new conclusions.

The IF/THEN Plan has helped people achieve all sorts of goals, including ones that are either habitual or automated. It has helped people deal with a fear of spiders (IF I see a spider, THEN I will keep calm). It has helped people score higher on IQ tests by completing them more efficiently (IF I complete a question, THEN I will move immediately to the next). It has even helped groups of business leaders make commercially advantageous decisions by overcoming confirmation bias. Again, this might seem strange, but let’s look to the evidence: In 2006, Peter Gollwitzer and a fellow researcher, Paschal Sheeran analysed 94 independent studies like the above, involving over 8000 participants and found a medium-to-large effect size of the IF/THEN Plan on goal attainment.

How and when to give different types of feedback on creative designs

templates showing different graphic ways to present frameworks

David Oliver wins gift cards for staying away from drugs. At St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia — which treats more overdoses than any other hospital in Canada — a program rewards users of cocaine and other stimulants with prizes when they don’t use. It’s a new approach to help substance abusers, and it’s also being tried in Veterans Affairs hospitals across the United States.