THE CLIMATE CRISIS Finding Solutions
FITBIT FOR THE PLANET If, as Sir David Attenborough said, we know all we need to for dealing with the climate crisis, then why don’t we do it? One problem is that people resist change. A lot of us would literally rather change the entire Earth than change our behaviour. In an interview with FEED last year, this effect was described by John Lawson, executive director of the AWARN Alliance, an organisation working on improved digital media solutions for updating people in major emergencies. “What typically happens is that people delay,” said Lawson. “They call it ‘milling’. They get the alert from some source, and then they freeze – one, in order to get confirmation of some kind, and two, to gather more information before they act.” How do you turn a defensive, fear- based approach into one that incorporates creative problem solving? Katie Patrick is an environmental engineer living in San Francisco. She believes that, in a world where every aspect of our lives is digitised, gamifying the environmental crisis might be the way forward. Patrick calls her model the ‘Fitbit for the planet’ and it’s an apt analogy. Making action measurable and providing immediate feedback is a well-understood path to behavioural change. When a Fitbit user counts their steps throughout the day, they’re much more likely to engage with exercise over the long term, to do more and want to improve. We also see this feedback technique at work when digital public displays at the roadside show the speed of oncoming vehicles – a technique well understood to bring drivers back in line with the posted speed limit. Patrick grew up in Australia, surrounded by nature and a love of crafts and practical creativity. From early on, she was moved by and became actively involved in the
KATIE PATRICK An environmental engineer who wants to gamify our behaviour in order to combat the climate crisis
environmental movement. She went on to get a degree in environmental engineering, which brought together disparate disciplines from water engineering to reducing industrial pollution. She soon found herself searching for a way to make environmentalism a mainstream concern. “I really let go of the whole grungy environmental activist thing,” she recalls. “I completely lost interest in anything that was fringe culture and I got really attracted to this sort of shiny corporate sustainability that was happening in the early 2000s. That was like a whole new world to me. It really was an exciting time because, for the first time ever, corporations were saying ‘Let’s do something for the planet’.” After moving to the Bay Area and engaging with Silicon Valley, she began to see the potential of using new digital tools to tackle environmental issues. “I just kept on doing whatever I thought was creatively interesting and got to thinking about game design and became interested in environmental data and behavioural psychology. I think there is this big missing piece – getting real data and showing it to people in this ‘Fitbit for the planet’ kind of model,” says Patrick. “Water, electricity, carbon intensity, forest cover – there are so many different datas that you can get and none of them are being collected with any good granularity.”
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