How to Save the World

This episode is the recording of a talk I put together about my thoughts and theories about why creativity is the missing link in saving the world. This talk covers the technical creative process, the positive constrictive imagination, the neuroscience of optimism and creative productivity, and most of all, it makes a powerful and scientifically robust argument why we need a positive vision of a future world in order to solve the world’s biggest problems. Learn more at http://katiepatrick.com

We need to harness our own creativity in order to come up with the epic ideas and innovations that it takes to change the world. In this guided meditation, How to Save the World podcast host, Katie Patrick, takes you through a guided journey into deep relaxation and walks you through somatic emotional discovery techniques that will help you release negative experiences or troubles that could be blocking your creative flow or momentum in your projects. In this meditation, you will practice visualizing the beautiful future world or project of your dreams and you will discover your untapped reservoir of creative power to make that dream happen. When you are connected to the creative energy, you can develop the power to change the world, do your most spectacular work, and discover your meaning and purpose in life. Carve out 34 quiet minutes from your day and see what ideas and inspiration this meditation leads you to. If haven’t already, sign up to katiepatrick.com for more free resources.

Today is the launch of my book How to Save the World on Indiegogo! Click the link here and get your copy.  How to Save the World is a workbook that helps social and environmental change professionals learn how to implement powerful techniques, drawn from behavioral psychology, measurement, design, data, storytelling, visualization, and game design that are proven to have impact.

In this episode of the How to Save the World podcast, I talk with Dan Stokols, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus at the University of California Irvine.  Dan has recently published a book, Social Ecology in the Digital Age, and he talks to us about what the field of *social ecology* is all about. In a world that often compartmentalizes issues into bite-size boxes, Dan illustrates the importance of taking a “systems thinking” view – and urges us to look more deeply at the interdependence of the many systems around us and how the very small, such as a piece of litter, is governed by a larger system of forces. Dan explores the need to look at the human behavioral dimension of environmental issues to truly understand how to solve the planetary challenges we’re facing in the 21st Century. Support the podcast with a small donation at patreon.com/katiepatrick

You can easily see the amount of calories in your peanut butter and your car’s safety rating. But this publicly available data comes from hard-won battles - and the numbers behind many of our most crucial issues in healthcare, environment, and finance are either under lock and key -  or they are simply not even measured. In this month’s podcast episode I interview Harvard University Professor Archon Fung PhD about what happens when we turn important data that is often hidden and contentious into a publicly available resource for the world to see. Read the full transcript here https://bit.ly/2z6dtkO Support the podcast on Patreon http://www.patreon.com/katiepatrick Download free tutorial guides on how to be a world-changing super star at http://katiepatrick.com

Did you know that heat waves kill more people than all the other weather-caused fatalities (like from cyclones, floods etc) put together? Cities around the world are getting baking hot. Extreme heat gets a lot worse when you live in the city, because of all the concrete and asphalt and it’s called an Urban Heat Island. In this episode I speak with the very fun and enthusiastic Jeremy Hoffman PhD from the Science Museum of Virginia about an study he conducted that involved getting volunteer drivers and cyclists to ride around the city in Summer wearing a thermometer. What he got was a map of Virginia’s urban heat island. We talk about the frightening dangers of urban heat islands, but also the exciting opportunity we have to use heat data to catalyze a massive revolution in urban greening. The cities of the future are ours to invent. We can all get to work to plant more urban trees, install more green roofs, and turn old car parks into gardens, and really change the world with easy practical contributions to the built environment. Support the podcast at patreon.com/katiepatrick. Download more free resources at katiepatrick.com

Are the words ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’ helpful or harmful to the quest to reduce society’s ravenous meat consumption? Gregg Sparkman is a PhD student in social psychology at Stanford University who specializes in the study of how to get people to eat less meat. In this interview he takes us through the many fascinating (and often counter intuitive) dynamics of what it takes to get people to measurably reduce their meat intake – and it’s not what you think. We talk about social norms in messaging and in particular his specific field of ‘dynamic norms’ where he proved that simply changing a few words in a message has the proven capacity to double the amount of vegan meal choices. This episode is a rare gem and an absolutely must for anyone trying to influence ethical, plant-based or sustainable eating habits. Gregg explains many crucial psychological concepts often left out of the vegan and vegetarian movement’s attempts to change the world. Support this podcast with a small monthly donation at http://patreon.com/katiepatrick Sign up to http://www.katiepatrick.com for more free resources on design for social change.

Are the word’s ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’ helpful or harmful to the quest to reduce societies ravenous meat consumption? Gregg Sparkman is a PhD student in social psychology at Stanford University who specializes in the study of how to get people to eat less meat. In this interview he takes us through the many fascinating (and […]

It’s easy to talk about saving water, but how do you *actually* get people to make real water reductions that you can measure? Environmentally friendly actions are known by psychologists as one of the most difficult things we try and get people to do. A new technology company called WaterSmart have been developing an app that shows you how much water you use compared to your neighbors – and it works. We talk about technology behind modern water smart meters, what it takes to design for behavior change, and how the water industry’s new immersion in big data is changing how we get people to change for the better. Sign up to http://katiepatrick.com and learn more at http://watersmart.com

Why do some people seem to consider environmental issues deeply, while others glance over our greatest earthly challenges and seem to hardly care? Our capacity for a “systems thinking” mindset can help tell us answer why. Today’s guest, research psychologist and geographer Stephan Lezak, conducted a study that measured people’s tendency towards systems thinking and how this correlated to their environmental values. He found that people who rank higher as systems thinkers substantially consider environmental issues to be more important. In this fascinating conversation we discuss what it takes to the see the grey areas and the vast interconnectedness in a complicated world, the mistakes we make in our reasoning, and how we can build a new generation of systems thinkers in schools and universities today.

Planet Labs has launched nearly 200 very small satellites in the atmosphere that take high resolution images of the earth just about every singe day. Today’s guest Joseph Mascaro is a PhD tropical ecologist. He is the Director of Academic Programs at Planet Labs and has the fascinating role of helping conservation groups and academics use these spectacular images of the earth for good. We talk about how fast-paced agile technology development can be used to support environmental protection, how images help us emotionally connect with issues in a way that plain data tends not, and how (counter to popular environmental belief), going to Mars is essential to protect life on earth. Don’t miss out on this fabulous episode! If you are conservation organization wanting more information on forest cover, ice-cover, fires or anything you can see from the air, check out planet.com  

Where does all your trash really go after you throw it away? Dietmar worked on the MIT Trash Track Project where they attached GPS sensors to hundreds of pieces of garbage and followed it around the country. We talk about the good and bad side of smart cities, the growing trends around data in urban legibility and we explore some significant flaws in the  recycling industry for solving the waste problem. Dietmar has recently authored a book called Waste is Information published by MIT Press and is a consummate intellectual force in the urban data, design, and in particular the complex story behind all the stuff we throw away. Dietmar Offenhuber is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT, a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, and a Dipl. Ing. in Architecture from the Technical University Vienna. Dietmar was Key Researcher at the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and professor in the Interface Culture program of the Art University Linz, Austria. See more of his work here http://offenhuber.net/

In this video I interview Xiaojing April Xu PhD about what it takes to motivate people to do eco-friendly things. It turns out that it’s often not what you think it is. We talk about interesting phenomena like the Value-Action-Gap,The Crowd-Out Effect and wether financial or environmental information is more motivating to get people to change. Xiaojing April Xu conducts post doc research in the behavioral science of energy efficiency at The University of Tennessee.

In this video I talk with Kimberly Hunter, the VP of Communications at one of the Bay Area’s most interesting new environmental data companies http://Aclima.io Aclima is the first company in the world to map out air quality by specific address by attaching air sensors to the Google cars that take images for Google Street View. We discuss the fascinating evolution of electronic sensors that are now starting to cover the world that are telling us information that we never had before. This detailed environmental data is opening up a huge change in the way governments and individuals make decisions . . . and could even lead to a future world where sustainability is fully automated. Interested in having your city’s air pollution mapped? Learn more about Aclima at http://aclima.io.

I got this sense a few years ago, that if people could see the numbers that made up their environmental footprint (such as the litres of water they used in a shower or the number trees felled to make their toilet paper) in an immediate and easy-to-understand way, then this data must, absolutely must, cause the person the use less resources, right? I had such a strong hunch about this connection that it has obsessed me ever since. But there was a glitch. Every time I would google terms like “environmental data”, “showing data” or “measuring environmental footprint”, I just wasn’t finding any academic research on the field, or even anything useful at all. I even spent an afternoon at Stanford University’s library hunting through their environmental psychology section, trying to find literature on this topic. There were many books containing plenty of theories, but nothing specifically on the effect of showing people the numbers. I didn’t work it out for quite some time. But then finally, after reading many papers on environmental psychology, I came across a paper by professor Archon Fung from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He used the terms “disclosure” and “transparency” to explain the phenomenon. Finally! I had found the proper terminology to advance my quest. Then BAM! It was on. What was fascinating, was that this team at Harvard had come to this field through the path of public policy. I had discovered the field from my time working on environmental technology in Silicon Valley. But both disciplines, significantly different and frequently siloed, had reach this same conclusion. It roughly goes like this, We need to make the data issues publicly available, and when we do this, people or organisations naturally, without needing punishment or coercion, improve their scores dramatically. It really makes sense when you think about it. If companies all unanimously disclose the wages paid to both genders, then all those scores can easily be put together and sorted by rank, and then these scores can be publicly distributed. The force of this disclosure of information will drive people in these companies to adjust their operations to get a better score. No one wants to be explicitly pinned as “America’s worst wage gap employer”, and every company will want to do a bit better than they did before. There are big benefits on getting disclosure policies adopted by governments. Data that is free and open to the sunshine, is a quest that is generally perceived favourably, as explained in the Annual Review of Economics, University of Chicago, “Mandatory disclosure of information is among the most ubiquitous and least controversial elements of public policy, often promoted as an attractive alternative to so-called ‘hard’ forms of regulation . . . Disclosure policies have proved highly attractive to legislators and regulators.” Al Gore has also proclaim

Have you ever felt like you had a special kind of skill, or a calling, or some bigger reason for existing on the planet? Have you felt like there is more to life than just working a regular nine to five job? Or being a struggling activist working for a pitifully low salary in a sweet but ineffectual non-profit? Do you get that weird feeling that “there’s gotta to be more to life that this?” I’ve had this feeling forever. I think you probably have it to. I believe this feeling is a calling that is telling you that you are not operating from your creative genius zone, and that you really need to be. Let’s start at the beginning I mean literally.  Let’s start at the beginning of the universe. The universe is expanding. It’s growing more complex. It’s been doing it since The Big Bang. That’s a basic fact of physics. This phenomenon shows itself on our planet in the growing complexity of biological life. Until recently there has been an ever-expanding number of species, ecological niches, and complexity in food chains. Over millions of years, the planet’s life forms have been growing in intelligence. At some point they started to utilize tools. The evolution of tools has grown into what we know today as technology. This story is told beautifully by Kevin Kelly in his truly awesome book, What Technology Wants. Kelly explains the relationship between biological evolution and technological evolution, hypothesising that there are more or less the same process. Humans in particular have been getting better at using tools for quite some time. But it’s not just humans that use technology. Birds, chimpanzees, ants, octopus, and nearly all animals use a tool as their own technology. This is a one-way flow of evolution. We can’t go backwards. We can’t sit still. I see this flow of evolution as a universal law that also governs our own intellectual, creative, and spiritual growth.  That means that for us to fully bloom in our time on the earth, we need to go full-tilt forward with the flow of it. When the world changes, we need to step up to the plate and change with it. This means not taking the easy road or reading the Ikea manual on life. It means making daily choices to dig deeper into our creativity, push harder in our technical pursuits and lean in to our emotional and spiritual development. It means asking the hard questions and taking big leaps. The only way to discover our own enlightenment is to move into our flow of creativity, innovation and technology, not against it. We find our genius zone from within our unique creativity. That’s also where we are going to experience our greatest love and personal fulfillment. It’s (probably) where the money is too. But lolz, that’s not actually what I wanted to write about.  I wanted to write about how to get into your virtuous cycle of creativity. The genius zone I

What can Russian dolls possibly have to do with changing the world? It’s a metaphor that I borrowed from a book called “The Big Leap” by PhD psychologist Gay Hendricks. He used the metaphor of “Russian dolls” to describe the process of digging deeper into oneself, and into the subliminal drivers that guide the real reasons we do things. A bit like the process of asking “Why . . . why . . . why?” To peel away the layers of the onion of our life decisions, or to open up theRussian dolls of our inner selves to find the little one that sits in the very core. As I was recently finishing up my video course “Save the World with Gamification”, I was having to answer the question of what gamification was quite often. Lots of people haven’t ever heard of the word, or they didn’t really understand what it was. Even the gamification experts (in my opinion) struggle to explain why gamification is useful. Hendrick’s metaphor for digging deeper into the self, seemed to also fit beautifully for digging into our strategy for how we change the world. I started to explain gamification as a kind of “motivational wrapping” we can apply to human behavior. If we want humans to do a thing, (like compost more, drive less, or eat less meat) we can go about the process of trying to motivate people in an infinite number of ways. But they don’t all work. Many of the ways we try and change the world totally fail to motivate people to do the thing we want them to do. The other reality is that we can try and motivate people to do things in way that totally *effing nails it, and gets lots of people to do thing we want them to. ​​​​​​ We don’t need to bash our head against a brick wall. We can design a program that gets people to increase their composting rates by 76%, that gets people to exercise 17% more, that cuts pollution levels by 43%. It’s actually pretty doable if you utilize the right principles. Gamification is big piece of the puzzle for supercharging human motivation. In our world of social change, we are motivating people to do more good things, and gamification can help us to help them.

Most of us want to make a positive impact on the world. That’s a good thing, right? When that feeling of wanting to change the world bubbles up inside us, where does it lead us? Does it lead us to become a member of an non-profit? To watch a documentary? Or maybe join a local meetup group? Once you’ve become more deeply engaged with the issue, you might get really involved and start a Youtube channel about the topic. You might volunteer to help promote a protest, or maybe you even start a festival or a conference. But there’s a critical mistake that most people make when considering their involvement in a cause. It’s this, People conflate the effortthey’ve made trying to change the world with the actual measureable impactthey’ve made on the world. It goes something like this, “I’ve been attending events, talking about this issue to everyone I know, posting about it on Facebook. I wrote a blog post about it. I painted a banner for the annual protest. I wear a T-shirt about it and read everything I can on the issue.”This person is very engaged, and as it seems, they are putting in regular hours of work trying to change the world. Let’s not confuse all this effortwith results.​​​​​​ When we’re trying to change the world, all that really matters, is that we make an impact that is measurable in real world numbers. The key question to ask is, “Where is the evidence that your efforts have made a measurable result?”  Ask it of yourself and any social change project you are involved in. During my 20 years of experience with environmental change, (and reading oodles of behavioral psychology books) it struck me that the most basic problem solving framework involves essentially only two principles: measurement and behavior change. All problems are essential made of the real world matter:  matter that is measureable. All solutions require the influence of human beings, which are governed by their ownpsychological behavior. We truly cannot avoid the process of understanding the data about our cause, if we are going to change anything at all. Wecannot avoid the process of understanding the drivers of human behavior, if we are going to change the actions of any human beings. This understanding lead me to coin the term, the “two lenses”approach to social change. The two lenses approach means, 1) Your problem needs to be understood through the lens ofmeasurement or data.   and 2) Your solution needs to be understood through the lens of behavioral psychology.​​​​​​​ If you aren’t already putting these two domains together as the ground zero of your social change strategy, then you have an

Welcome to the “How to Save the World” Podcast! I am so excited! I truly believe that saving the world should be a thrilling adventure, bursting with creativity  –  and of course, the greatest game on earth. Let’s get into the first article of the series “21 Days of Gamification” that I’ve produced to launch my debut video  course called “Save the World with Gamification – How to apply game mechanics to social and environmental causes for the epic win” Why You Should Put Measurement at the Center of your Creative Strategy Here’s the problem: Many people start projects without understanding much about what it is they are trying to change in the world. I mean, they don’t look into the data about their problem. You may have heard the saying, “If you can’t measure it, it probably doesn’t exist.” That’s well and good for scientists, but what does this mean for social-change entrepreneurs, world changers, and designers? Or creative people in general? The brutally honest truth is: if we can’t measure the impact we are having on the world, we probably aren’t having any at all. Let this sink in for a moment: Despite your best intentions, you may very well not be making any meaningful impact on the world. Those big pink words might feel like a splash of cold water in the face, but I assure you that this piece of self-reflection is the darkness before the dawn preceding your breakthrough to epic creative innovation.  Okay, sure . . . but how can the tape measures, scales and sensors of measurement possibly enhance creativity? I mean, wouldn’t measurement stifle or even kill creativity? In the words of folk singer Ani DiFranco, “But then what kind of scale Compares the weight of two beauties The gravity of duties Or the ground speed of joy? Tell me what kind of gauge Can quantify elation? What kind of equation Could I possibly employ?” Well my friend, this is the exciting part. Creativity is actually a technical skill Think about the many people we would consider to be creative: a pianist, a writer, an illustrator, an architect, a fashion designer, an animator, a photographer. Each of these professions requires highly practiced skills that take years of technical training to master. Kevin Kelly explains in his book What Technology Wants  (I love this book!) that technology was originally considered to be a subcategory of the arts, because the artistic pursuits were a kind of technical craft that spawned new inventions (like the sewing machine). Painters, silversmiths, and dressmakers alike were the technology-makers of the time. Creativity and technology have always been mutually dependent sisters.  It is a recent phenomenon whereby technology has branched and grown so much that they have been considered separate trades. The message here: don’t see data or measurement of impact as separate to the creative process. It is part of your trade. About you I can kinda guess that you probably want to apply your creativity to something really meaningful . . .  something that will change the world. Think about the concept of creativity with purpose. In order to make that beautiful feeling that comes from doing me