rotmanmagazine.ca / 69NUDGING HAS RIGHTFULLY EARNED ITS PLACE in public policy as an
effective, efficient and relatively low-cost lever for addressing
knotty challenges grounded in very human ‘irrational’ behav-
iour: Which message will encourage citizens to get out the vote
or pay their taxes on time? What mix of social norms, commit-
ment devices and prompts increases medication adherence?
These kinds of behavioural interventions are primarily designed
to achieve efficiency and cost savings within current processes
and structures, through solutions to known, discrete behavioural
challenges. Think of it as ‘process improvement’, nudge-style.
Life, however, is full of complexity and adaptation that can’t
be tested with a randomized control trial. While field experi-
ments and pre-tests can bring us closer to the intricacies of real
life, nudging’s natural habitat of well-defined, present-tense in-
puts and processes may be at odds with the introduction of new-
to-the-world contexts or the ambiguity of the future. Nudges —
and behavioural science more generally — can absolutely help
people save more for tomorrow, today; but the fact is, tomorrow
may be characterized by a completely different set of life-stage
or employment norms and conditions that upend our current
conceptions of retirement above and beyond the mechanics of
RRSPs and 401(k) accounts.
This led us to wonder: To what extent is a focus on evi-
dence-based solutions of testable hypotheses contributing to a
form of confirmation bias — inadvertently limiting our sense of
which problems and spaces are ripe for behavioural attention
and confining our ability to imagine new applications and defi-
nitions for what ‘good’ could look like? Nobel Laureate Richard
Thaler and his co-author Cass Sunstein have recognized that
nudges are just one piece of the behaviour-change puzzle. So,
what’s missing?
Part of the solution, we suspect, is hiding in plain sight: Be-
havioural science can and should continue to make important
contributions through nudges and its other methods, but we
believe it can contribute at an even greater scale by turning out-
ward to partner with other disciplines — in particular, with the
field of design.
Design is a strategic lens with a history of grappling with
ambiguity and embracing user context, recognizing the need to
solve at the level of systems while also keeping one eye on the
future by building solutions that are designed to adapt. To do
this, design uses a combination of generative, participatory and
evaluative modes to expand our notions of what we should even
be solving for, as well as how to solve for it — with outcomes thatIntegrating Behavioural
Science and Design
Behavioural science is unusually, if not uniquely,
qualified to shine a light on designing for our future.
by Sarah Reid and Ruth Schmidt