Behavioural Design Matters / Jun 6, 2024

This is a newsletter for anyone interested in things related to – human behaviour, customer experience, innovation, design thinking, culture, etc. The links we share below are a collection of links or articles we found inspiring, insightful or thought provoking from these kinds of topics.

1. Dad reinvents playgrounds to be accessible for all (via Priya Sathiyam )

One father in Portland, Oregon is helping design the parks of the future with inclusive playground equipment that makes play accessible to all. While the intention of public playgrounds is to give kids a safe and fun place to play, many children are unable to access all of the equipment because of the way it’s constructed. With most components of standard playgrounds requiring lots of physical activity, children with ability impairments have been left on the sidelines.

So G Cody QJ Goldberg started a nonprofit called Harper’s Playground, an organization dedicated to redesigning parks with inclusive playground equipment, and it’s giving all kids equal access to the playground experience.

2. 1,000 years from now, Lego bricks could be found in the ocean

So, why are there so many LEGOs at sea anyways? Well, kids, being kids, tend to flush them down the toilet. It’s estimated that 2 million bits of LEGO have been lost to the sewage system. There was also the unfortunate LEGO-spill incident of 1997, when nearly 5 million pieces of the toy fell overboard on a container ship.

3. Brooks shows why it's dusting Nike in this powerful new ad starring Jeremy Renner (via Mark Wilson )

After breaking 38 bones from a snowplow accident in 2023 that stopped his heart, Renner is back in a dramatic new campaign for the running shoe company Brooks. And he’s not just living. He’s running.

The spot kicks off Brooks’s first new global campaign in 25 years, which it’s launching after nine consecutive quarters of being the top running shoe brand in the U.S. After overtaking Nike in 2022, the company hasn’t looked back.

4. How actors remember their lines

Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.

5. As temperatures in India break records, ancient Terracotta air coolers are helping fight extreme heat

Nandita Iyer hates chilled water. And yet, when temperatures soared in India this May, with even her home-city of Bengaluru hitting a record high, the cookbook author and food blogger knew she had to do something to stay hydrated. And so she turned to a favourite childhood fixture: the matka – a terracotta pot composed of two different types of clay and designed to act as domestic water cooler in the home.

We at 3 Big Things.Studio have published a toolkit on 'Behavioural Design by Rituals'. You can download the Toolkit and accompanying workbook on how to design and build Rituals from here:

Param, co-founder, Studio 3 Big Things (www.3bigthings.studio)