The city of Chester in England was formed in the year 79 as a Roman Fort called Deva Victrix and today the Roman Walls still surround the City. This is only one example of how we are surrounded by physical embodiments of our past but more often than not we don’t understand the stories behind[...]
QUEST TO LEARN.
So you’ve read the introductory article on what is gamification and you’re wondering ‘how does this fit into the real world?’ Well, you might not but here’s an example anyway.
Quest to Learn is an example of trying to apply the lessons from games to the real-world – in this case education.
Mission critical at Quest is[...]
THE GYM REALITY.
It’s such a tired cliché that after the Christmas blow-out everyone joins a gym with the solid determination that they won’t be one of the many who drop out by the time February rolls around. Tired as it may be the statistics from gym memberships show that it is actually true. In fact, if you[...]
Naughty nudges.
It all seems to be about ‘nudges’ at the moment. With the UK Government creating its Behavioural Insight Team, lovingly nicknamed ‘the nudge unit’, and with behavioural economics becoming more and more recognised I seem to stumble into examples everywhere. This one in particular deals with the elephant in the room topic of addiction to[...]
Excuse me, there’s a fly in my…
… urinal.
It seems that a swarm of flies have taken residence in Schiphol Airport’s urinals in Amsterdam. Most unusually one fly has adopted each one of the separate urinals as its final resting place. Upon closer inspection you’ll find that these flies have each been etched onto the porcelain with the purposeful intention of giving[...]
What Type Are You?
This is a great, tongue-in-cheek Christmas message from Pentagram. The ‘type analyst’ asks you four probing questions to decide which typeface most suits your personality. Once you have your result you can compare how many others had the same font.
There’s some lovely subtle elements in here too, especially the configuration of the artist’s hand-model on[...]
Comitting to change…
If you’ve read the post on Priming then you’ll be aware of the power of writing things down in helping to change behaviour, if you haven’t then now’s a good time to shuffle across to the other post. The idea of writing things down to help yourself commit to the idea is not new, at[...]
Something for Christmas…
What do you get that hard to buy for designer interested in psychology at Christmas I hear you ask. Well, OK the thought has probably never crossed your mind but I thought I’d offer some solutions to the problem you never thought you had. So here’s a list of some things that could make a[...]
Learning from magicians…
The first magician I remember was the Great Soprendo who amused the children of the UK with cuban heels, a slightly dodgy catch-line and tricks that normally involved pouring milk into a newspaper. OK, he was no Derren Brown but the world probably wasn’t quite ready for Russian roulette and séances at that time. I[...]
Cruel classical conditioning.
Who would of thought that Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning could be such fun? Well, possibly not so much fun for Bryan!
(Please note that ¡design thinkers! does not endorse shooting people with guns – even in the name of science).