Behaviour-Centred Design

Background

Behaviour change has recently come to be recognized as an important objective of public policy, marketing, education, business management (leadership), health promotion, website design (to improve the ‘user experience’), city planning (to remove physical barriers) and self-help efforts (e.g., financial goal achievement). It is being heralded as a policy cure-all in the halls of government, as a way to improve student learning and behaviour in schools, or to make marketing more scientific, and as a necessary lynch-pin of successful programs in public health.

However, changing some important behaviours turns out to be hard to do – either for yourself (through self-help efforts), or in others (e.g., through a public health program). In marketing, for example, there's a widely quoted saying (attributed to the American retailer John Wanamaker), that half the money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is no one knows which half.

Similarly, the experience of most people with ‘self-help’ programs confirms that it is difficult to change your own lifestyle. People hear medical advice about what will make them healthy, and set personal goals to exercise several times a week, eat a nutritious diet, stay slim, get eight hours of sleep, keep up with medical screenings for blood pressure and cholesterol, stop smoking or limit alcohol intake, but chatrooms are full of people who have failed to satisfy their own goals in these regards.

Given this situation, it would be desirable to develop an approach to behavior change based in more fundamental science than the cognitive psychology on which the current approaches in health psychology, social marketing and behavioural economics are based. We have therefore developed a new approach based in evolutionary biology and ecological psychology called Behaviour-Centred Design (or BCD for short) – which guides our work on changing target behaviours, primarily in the developing world.

Resources

• A general introduction can be found in this peer-reviewed paper.
• A recent book-length treatment is available here.
• A website devoted to the BCD approach can be found here. The website includes a link to our Guide to Behaviour Centred Design (available as a pdf from that page), which includes both theory and a step-by-step description of the BCD program development process. The page also includes a description to several recent projects that have successfully changed a variety of behaviours using the BCD approach in developing countries around the world.
• Tools for using the approach to develop projects or programs dealing with a wide variety of behaviour change problems are being developed at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As such tools become sufficiently robust, they will be made available here for general use by practitioners anywhere.
• Students at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine can participate in a short-course presentation of this approach by taking the Tropical and Environmental Health module at the School.