Applying GRID Impact’s behavioral research and design process with the Sand County Foundation.
My role: As a member of the GRID Impact team, support the design and facilitation of a behavioral design short course with Sand County Foundation staff. Then, test and prototype behavioral design concepts co-created during the short course. Finally, document learnings from the iterative prototyping of behavioral design concepts through a white paper.
Overview
One of our key findings in this work was the extent to which farmers continuously experiment - but privately.
Process
Introduction to behavioral science: Behaviors are hard! Humans are influenced by their context! How might we work with this knowledge to build interventions that work to improve uptake of sustainable agricultural practices with what we know about human behavior?
Work-relevant behavioral diagnosis: Examining a case study relevant to local sustainable agricultural practices, teams worked together to identify behavioral tendencies that may be influencing a local farmers’ behavior.
Design of behaviorally-informed solution: Building on their knowledge of the context, teams worked together to create concepts that make it easier for local farmers to perform implement sustainable agricultural practices.
Prototype + presentation: Teams designed initial concepts that demonstrated their behaviorally-informed intervention, and shared this concept with the group.
Concept iteration: Following the short course, GRID Impact continued its partnership with the Sand County Foundation to iteratively develop a behavioral intervention focused on increasing adoption of sustainable farming practices among local farmers.
This iterative phase involved two rounds of iteration, conducted in partnership with the Sand County Foundation, local farmers, and key stakeholders.
Reflections
Local partnership: Context matters. This work was conducted hand-in-hand with individuals living in the context, intimately familiar with farming practices, drivers of local decisions and actions, and who naturally maintain these local relationships over time.
Diverge-converge: There’s a balance between creativity and feasibility. As we iterated during concept testing, guiding the diverge-to-converge mindset was crucial to identifying the just-right creative and feasible intervention.
Remote learning + research: Originally, this short course and iterative concept refinement was planned to be in-person. During COVID, we were forced to modify our plan, and it worked! Our close partnership with local Sand County Foundation was a key enabler to this successful shift.