When I think of an environmental problem, I usually make an analogy to a shared kitchen problem.
Have you ever shared a kitchen with one or more friends in a dormitory or an apartment?
You know how difficult to keep it clean, right?
Now imagine sharing a "kitchen" with hundreds ..or thousands....or millions.. or billions other people!
It is not difficult to understand why it's difficult to keep the common space clean.. a one-time sloppiness of a single person has very little negative impact on the common space.. and problem has nearly zero immediate negative impact upon that person himself.. but, as we all know, because most people (or households, companies, countries, etc.) think like this...we end up with a dirty kitchen.
Most of us also know that an environmental problem needs to be tackled with both the engineering of new technologies (clean coal, solar cell, energy efficient buildings) and the engineering of human behaviors (don't use plastic bags, turn off light, drive less, etc.). Yet, while we almost always employ scientific approach for the engineering of technologies, I think the use of scientific approach in engineering social behaviors is still lacking. Yes, you may have read here and there about social studies of how to make people turn of light when they don't use..or not throwing trash on the street.. etc. Nonetheless, I think we haven't fully built upon such discoveries and made long-lasting changes in the way we "get people to do the right things" the same way we get machines to do the right thing. You may argue that human behaviors are much more complex than machines behaviors. Still, human behaviors are not fully random.. ask marketing people..they know a lot of about this kind of things.
Most environmental campaigns/clubs I see today are. unfortunately, not so different from those I saw five or ten years ago. They may have more options for communication ..Facebook, twitter, youtube.. however, we are still not very "scientific" about testing what strategies work or not work in changing people behaviors. We still go around..give people info about what to do..and hope that they do it. Can we do better than that? Can we make real and concrete and decisive discoveries..on how to change people behaviors...even on a small issue, say, turning of light when they don't use or not using plastic bags?..Can we also work on spreading that knowledge we discover to other places..other communities.. let them test our working strategies in their context..see if that works and to what extent? Can we iterate though strategies and make them better over time..the way we do for other type of engineering works?
I think it would be really cool if the products of the club are collections of scientifically proved strategies on how to "engineer" environmentally friendly behaviors.
10.50 pm 23 October 2012, Palo Alto CA USA.
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