The PopTech Blog

Tomorrow is Obscura Day, coordinated by the team behind Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica,” with interesting events planned in places around the world.

In Brooklyn, New York, for example, you can join expeditions to explore Dead Horse Bay and the “slew of wacky trash from eras past” or go underground and explore the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. Or, drive from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania to sound ringing rocks.

You can find explorations taking place tomorrow around the globe on the full Obscura Day list. (And if you know of a curious place, you can add it to the Atlas.)

So whether you venture like John Priscu beneath Antarctic ice (his PopTech 2008 talk), or closer to your neighborhood, we hope your weekend adventures are full of moments “where the world briefly reveals itself to you,” like the narrator’s encounter with butterflies in this story from Anthony Doerr at PopTech 2009:

At PopTech 2009, artist-programmer Zach Lieberman explained why he thinks “artistic practice is a form of R&D for humanity,” connecting technology, human interactions, and breathing.

Zach stopped by the PopTech Brooklyn office last week to tell us about his recent inspirations (video), and spoke at last weekend’s SxSW Interactive Festival (blog post on his presentation) about the

Do you think, like Zach, that an open mouth (from wonder) is the pathway to someone’s heart?

Editor’s note: this guest post is from Alana Conner, senior editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and co-host of the podcast channel Social Innovation Conversations. The Stanford Graduate School of Business is holding another event April 29th, “Collaboration for the Greater Good: Social and Environmental Responsibility in the Global Supply Chain.” (Registration details.)

Many psychologists, writers and other students of human nature have reached the same conclusion: people are usually too distracted, tired, scared, or just plain lazy to act on their best intentions. But few of these observers suggest how us humans might overcome our less noble tendencies.

Scientists at a recent Stanford Center for Social Innovation conference, however, presented a bevy of tactics for transforming even the most bumbling schlemiel into a model citizen. Called “Small Steps, Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to do the Right Thing,” the event showcased how to use gentle nudges, subtle tweaks, and quiet prompts to summon better behavior.

One of the most overlooked strategies for getting people to be generous, for instance, is actually to ask them, related Frank Flynn of Stanford Graduate School of Business. Flynn discussed his experiments,

showing that one barrier to “the ask” is that people grossly underestimate how often their requests for help will be honored. And if at first you do not succeed, then ask, ask again, he recommended, presenting findings that people who say “no” to an initial ask are more likely to say “yes” to a subsequent one.

You need not even tell people how much to give, noted Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. His findings show that people sometimes donate more when they get to set the amount.

And you need not feel guilty about asking people to help, because you may actually be doing them a favor, suggested Mike Norton of Harvard Business School. His studies reveal that giving people the chance to help others can improve everything from their mood to their dodge-ball game.

Even better than asking people to take the high road is making the high road the easiest one to take, argued Eric Johnson of the Columbia School of Business. When policies and practices turn good behavior into the default option, people tend to act more ethically—or, as Johnson put it, “There’s something very special about doing nothing.”

For example, in countries where people have to take the trouble to opt out of organ donation—a post-death benevolence that many societies value—vastly more people donate their organs than do in countries like the United States, where people have to go out of their way to opt in to organ donation. Likewise, people save more money when their employers automatically enroll them in retirement savings programs and use less energy when florescent bulbs are the only light in town. (For more about defaults, see “Helping the Poor Save More” (.pdf) in the winter 2010 Stanford Social Innovation Review.)

If you must trouble yourself with framing a message, several researchers revealed how simple shifts in wording can spell the difference between vice and virtue. Just mentioning money can throw people off their altruism game, showed Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Her experiments demonstrate that even minor references to cash make people stingier and less sensitive to suffering—even their own. For fundraisers whose job is to ask people for money, Vohs’ findings could inspire dismay. But she has an antidote: First ask people to donate their time, and then ask them to donate their money.

Noah Goldstein of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management similarly showed the power of getting words right.

Public service announcements and other social good campaigns often communicate that everybody pollutes, steals, carouses, or otherwise behaves badly—but you shouldn’t. (“Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” exhorts Smokey Bear.) Yet humans are herd animals; and so despite our claims to uniqueness and independence, we tend to follow the crowd. As a result, campaigns that imply that the crowd is up to no good often backfire: A sign in Arizona’s Petrified Forest reporting that visitors purloin some 14 tons of wood per year, for example, doesn’t deter such theft—it encourages theft.

A better way, said Goldstein, is to convey that most people are doing the right thing—and you should, too. Accordingly, a sign saying that most guests conserved water by reusing their towels (rather than having them laundered) inspires far more towel reuse than does a sign lamenting how many guests waste water.

Pictures and stories that put a human face on an issue can also steer people towards right action, related Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Radiologists read X-rays more accurately when they see a picture of the bones’ owners, Grant showed, and lifeguards work harder after hearing stories about heroic water rescues.

Putting people in the driver’s seat of their own narratives also works wonders, reported Steve Cole of HopeLab, a Redwood City, Calif.-based company that makes health-promoting products for children with chronic diseases. In HopeLab’s first-person shooter video game, Re-Mission, for example, kids recovering from cancer travel through the human body and, with the help of medicines, blast would-be cancer cells out of their paths (audio lecture). The game is clinically proven to help kids take their post-chemotherapy maintenance drugs—a crucial, yet difficult step in their recovery.

Nonprofits too must control their own narratives, warned Jennifer Aaker of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She presented data showing that nonprofits suffer from the stereotype of being warm and caring, but not very competent.

To boost donations and public confidence, nonprofits need to advertise their business acumen.

But perhaps they should do so softly, for the resounding message throughout the conference was this: You need not scream and push when a whisper and a nudge will do. That’s advice that even the most distracted, tired, scared, and even lazy social innovator can get behind.

On Sunday afternoon at the SxSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, moderator Steven Mandzik led a discussion about zero waste, a lifestyle he describes as living without producing trash, focusing on reduction and reuse even before recycling.

The panel included PopTech Fellow Jason Aramburu of re:char, who talked about the challenges of scaling with biomass and why he moved his company from Brooklyn to Austin, and Beth Ferguson, the designer behind “solar pumps” and an advocate for urban solar grid applications:

Also at SxSW Interactive:

- PopTech board member and MTV VP of Public Affairs Jason Rzepka unveiled “Over the Line?”, a place for teens to upload and rate examples of digital use/abuse.

- PopTech 2009 speaker Zach Lieberman presented on his recent work (see our video with him last week on his recent work and inspirations).

- PopTech Social Innovation Faculty member Beth Kanter spoke on the “Crowdsourcing Innovative Social Change” panel (nice summary of the panel’s examples and lessons by frequent PopTech blog contributor Marcia Stepanek).

What was your favorite part of SxSW Interactive?

What would be the social impact of an educational computer that only cost $10?

Last October, I introduced the PopTech community to an organization that is trying to answer that question. Playpower.org is an open-source community that is helping to make educational games available for “radically affordable” computers—including a $10 computer that is already widely available in many developing countries. The 5 minute PopTech talk helps describe the educational potential of open-source learning games—and explains the improbable story of how a computer can be sold for only $10!

Just this past December, I traveled to Hyderabad, India to conduct a two week educational game design workshop for top university students in India.

Image courtesy of Playpower.org.

Using IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit and Playpower’s unique game design curriculum, the students learned to design new educational games to support the needs of low income families in India. In order to make the games engaging and relevant to the target audience, the students created games based on familiar Hindu stories, including the adventures of Hanuman—a deity with immense powers who takes the form of a monkey.

Image courtesy of Playpower.org.

Kishan Patel, an engineering student at DAIICT (The Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Infomation and Communication Technology) followed up on the workshop by founding a working group at his own university. There, he leads a team of students who are working on completing the games. They are also helping to conduct formal field studies, in order to assess whether the games are fun and effective for the groups we are targeting.

Image courtesy of Playpower.org.

To learn more, check out playpower.org.

Also, more specific descriptions of the games and source code are available here.

The games prototyped at the workshop:

Hanuman: Quiz Adventure – Quiz game shows are popular in India and this quiz game challenges the intellectual power of the whole family to help a young Hanuman fly all the way to the sun.

Hanuman: Typing Warrior – Typing is a skill that can help expand economic opportunities. In this game, players use their typing skills to help progress Hanuman through a series of challenges in order to help win a war against the evil Lord Ravena.

Mosquito SWAT Team – Malaria is one of the greatest public health threats in India. In this game, important information about preventing malaria is embedded in an addictive set of mini-games that invariably involve killing lots and lots of mosquitoes.