The Stubborn Optimist
Proof that behavioural design works — collected from cities, schools, hospitals and markets around the world. Each post is a case study in what changes when someone designs the environment instead of lecturing the people in it.
Here is to the stubborn optimists
Why we focus on what is being built, not what is breaking down.
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How do you design a city where moving is the obvious choice?
Bogotá closes 120 km of roads every Sunday. Two million people show up without a campaign, a fine or a reward.
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How do you design a school children actually want to walk into on Monday?
Vittra Telefonplan removed classrooms entirely. What happened to learning is worth paying attention to.
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How do you design a shop where people buy less, and walk out happier?
Eataly built its reputation on the opposite of every retail instinct. The behavioural design behind it.
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How do you design a building that helps people heal instead of holding them still?
Maggie's Centres gave the building a role in cancer care. Lower anxiety, greater control. Not despite the architecture. Because of it.
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How do you design an organisation where people are engaged without being incentivised into it?
Buurtzorg runs 10,000+ nurses in self-managing teams with no managers. The engagement is not a culture story. It is a design story.
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How do you design an office where people connect without losing their focus?
When two Fortune 500 companies removed their walls, face-to-face interaction fell seventy per cent. The counterintuitive fix: add boundaries, not remove them.
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How do you design a hospital where the body heals faster?
Roger Ulrich's 1984 study found that patients with a window view of trees left hospital a day earlier and needed fewer painkillers. The environment was the treatment.
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How do you design a context where people are healthier without using willpower?
For decades, a Pennsylvania town had strikingly low rates of heart disease despite unhealthy habits. The protection was not inside the people. It lived between them.
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How do you design a neighbourhood out of violence?
Medellín built a cable car into its most dangerous hillside settlements. Violence fell fastest where connection was rebuilt — and the mechanism was collective efficacy, not policing.
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How do you design a city to need less traffic by removing a road?
Seoul demolished a motorway and most of the traffic disappeared rather than relocating. The road had been generating the very demand that filled it.
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How do you design a meeting that hears the doubts before the disaster?
Gary Klein's premortem changes one thing — the tense of the question — and surfaces a third more risks. Honesty without asking anyone to be braver.
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How do you design a city where car use drops without banning cars?
Ghent reorganised its streets so driving through the centre was no longer the shortest route. Car traffic fell 30%. Nobody was forbidden. The journey simply stopped making sense.
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