New Action Design Boston Series
The past few months we’ve been listening to the conversations our Action Design Boston members have been during our Open Project Nights.
We’ve had a lot of conversations of people trying to incorporate a lot of the concepts and practices integral to the fields Action Design focuses on: behavioral economics, design, and psychology for advocacy and positive change.
We’re excited to launch an ongoing series of events focused on best practices and tips to facilitating different techniques. Our first session will be with Action Design Boston member, and behavior change designer at Mad*Pow, Aidan Hudson-Lapore.
Our first session is:
Let’s Review: Incorporating Scientific Evidence into the Design Process
Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash
Ethnographic research. Usability studies. Competitive analysis. User interviews. Participatory workshops. Designers use many tools to understand users, stakeholders, and the competitive landscape. Unfortunately, published scientific research often gets left out of the design process. As designers, we have the power to fold in the latest evidence about what works into our projects in health, education, finance, and other social impact projects to bridge the gap between theory and implementation.
In this session, you’ll learn the when, why, and how of a scientific literature review, as well as how to synthesize findings and integrate them with traditional design research methods to inform concept development.
Space is limited! RSVP with Action Design Boston.
About our speaker
Aidan Hudson-Lapore is a behavior change designer at Mad*Pow, where she works with clients in healthcare to design empirically supported-behavior change interventions. She is a graduate of the Brown|RISD Dual-Degree program, where she received a B.F.A. in industrial design and a B.A. in cognitive science. In addition to promoting health and wellbeing, Aidan is interested in ways to productively apply design to issues of ethics, climate change, sustainability, and effective communication, and civic engagement.
What is Action Design?
We sit at the intersection of behavioral economics, design, and psychology for advocacy and positive change. We focus on exposing our members to cutting-edge tools, research, and practitioners in each of these areas so they can apply the latest learning in action design in their respective fields.
Want to learn more about these fields? Check out our resource list.
We explore anything that allows us to make large-scale, positive impact on people's behavior. We discuss the emerging efforts of many industries to improve the behaviors of people through products, services, programs, and policy.
Whether the goal is to help people save more money, get in shape, cut down on electricity usage, or learn a new language, the idea is the same: How can we use research in behavioral economics, psychology, and design to explicitly improve human behaviors, as well as improving overall engagement in any product, service, or program, or policy?
We touch many different subjects: persuasive technology, choice architecture, emotional design, cognitive design, positive psychology, marketing, gameful design, game thinking, copywriting, funnel-optimization, social work, persuasive psychology, behaviorism, cognitive behavioral therapy, and many other related topics.
Our methods include presentations, discussions, screenings, guest speakers, hack-a-thons, and more.
We’re part of the greater Action Design Network (http://www.action-design.org), a non-profit organization with groups across the US, Canada, and the UK with over 10,000 members and counting.