Topics Nick Frequently Speaks On
The Incidental Approach
Over the last 8 years, we have evolved an approach that we describe as ‘incidental behaviour change’, laid out fully in Nick’s new paper “The Incidental Approach: New Methods in Behaviour Change”.
At the heart of our work is the belief that telling people what to do doesn’t work: firstly there is an inherent ceiling to the audience that can be reached with openly social/environmental comms, due to an inherent judgement that always comes through, and secondly the conversion from communications and awareness to real behaviour change is very weak — as social psychologists and behavioural economists have been articulating so clearly in recent years.
So, our solution is not to use messaging to shift behaviours, but instead, build new, positive behaviours into products and tools that people like or need, rather than feel obliged to take up. Examples include our I’m Not a Plastic Bag, Historypin and Internet Buttons.
The talk lays out this approach and how it can be applied in different ways, and in different environments.
Using personal and local history to generate social capital
The starting point for our development of Historypin was our 2009/10 work on the state of inter-generational relationships, particularly in the UK and USA. Using a body of existing work and taking on our own consultation and research, the depth and importance of the divide across older and younger generations became very clear.
Exploring the lack of contact and negative perceptions that have become gradually ingrained since the 1960s, we could map this against our ongoing analysis of changing patterns in the social capital, to find similar forces at work: disintegration of associational life in many communities was pulling older and younger generations apart, just as it was reducing many other indicators of healthy community life.
So, we set out to design something that, in the short-term, could bring people together in ways that created new, positive associations and, in the longer-term, could help shift the negative perceptions of different generations, cultures or communities. Ultimately, we wanted to build something into the heart of communities, online and offline, that could grow and grow and become a natural, permanent incentive to come together, collaborate and reach out across these gaps and differences.
Through research and testing we discovered ways of older and younger people spending mutually enjoyable, mutually rewarding time together by facilitating conversations and story-telling around personal and local historical content.
This talk explores the breakdown in social capital in today’s society and demonstrates a practical way of overcoming it.
Using the internet for good
The internet is an extremely humble technology. When the founders first thought about what they were building they realised that they had no clue about what the technology would be used for. And so they built it recognising their ignorance right at the core of its architecture. They made it so its future was not determined by anything except the extraordinary innovators that build on top of that platform.
Lawrence Lessig, Director of E.J. Safra Foundation for Ethics, Harvard and founder of Creative Commons, speaking at the launch of Historypin.
Digital technology and the internet has been at the core of many of We Are What We Do’s projects, facilitating, sharing, enabling, inspiring and connecting.
In this talk we explore why it was important to us that we could make a group of 16 year-old boys gasp in amazement at one of our historical content mash ups on Historypin.com, how we are digitising, conserving and opening up global archives for everyone to enjoy, learn from and improve, how we are using linked and open data to democratise the content of the web, how our Action Tracker is enabling schools and communities to link together to collaborate and effect social change, and why we are undertaking digital inclusion work: exploring the social, economic and cultural reasons of getting the 9.2 million people in the UK alone that are currently offline, on via our free webtool Internet Buttons.
Designing and delivering global projects with corporate partners whilst maintaining a not-for-profit ethos
We have a long history of collaboration with major corporate organisations, including Google, Sainsbury’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola. Beyond the high-profile, public-facing partnerships, we have helped many other companies design and implement their own internal programmes.
Our methods are informed not only by time spent working on the ground in communities, but also by what social psychology and behavioural economics tells us about what really motivates us. Out of this come products, tools and services that people want or need and which, incidentally, but genuinely, affect social issues and build social capital. The powerful combination of these insights and experiences, along with our technical and design expertise, gives us the ability to create strong, sustainable solutions which make a real and tangible difference.
Nick’s own experience of working on the ground in communities, and nationally on social marketing campaigns, means that all of our work has a local and community focus, ensuring that high-profile global projects are delivered by the people and partners who can apply them best. In this talk, Nick shares his insights into this unique approach.
The future of history — mapping in the 4th dimension
Behind our Historypin project, there is a vision of a different way of approaching historical content and the collection of social history.
Historical content, like old photos, films and recordings, has always played a crucial role in bringing history to life. But, it has huge untapped potential to do so much more.
The future of exploring historical content will be much more interactive, creative and challenging. It will also be participatory. History isn’t static — it is being added to constantly, not just as we learn more about our past, but as each day passes — and this is how it should be experienced.
Historypin is an example of one of these new digital tools, which breathes life into historical content, allowing it to be added to, mashed up, layered with other content, enriched with stories and readjusted as more people share what they know about it. Through Historypin and other projects like it, people can use the technology they know so well to wander through the history that is new to them, exploring it in the context of their own world and their own experiences and adding to it as a participant, rather than just a witness.
For a social organisation like us, Historypin has so many positive behaviours built in — drawing young people to reach across generations, increasing digital inclusion and generating social capital in communities.
This talk would lay out a more technological vision, using Historypin as an example.
Overcoming the intergenerational divide
The erosion of networks and relationships between those of different generations has been at the centre of much of our research and work over the years.
We have employed this knowledge to design and create a number of our projects, including Historypin, The Great Recipe Archive, Tweet Towel, and Internet Buttons. By combining our technical and design expertise with our insights into the nature of intergenerational issues, we have been able to create projects which encourage and enable interaction between generations and help build resilience into future social connections.
In this talk, Nick will highlight some of our findings and share his knowledge of how to effectively approach and tackle intergenerational issues.