Trend Watch, February 2018

20 Minute Cities Launch:

Get up on phygital design and #techresilience with this smart cities video discussion series. Check out the latest release, episode 2 ‘The Bench,’ featuring a review of Street Furniture Australia’s prototype Aria Smart Bench with PowerMe Table.

Smart Cities Council Executive Director Adam Beck, and Place Design Group Director Chris Isles have teamed up to film their travels and chats about future change for cities, towns and regions, and how our lives will be affected now, and beyond.

We liked this update of the hierarchy of needs pyramid:

5 biases behind share bike dumping:

We use decision-making shortcuts to abdicate our responsibility for the bikes we leave in dodgy places, writes behavioural researcher Conor Wynn, phD candidate with BehaviourWorks and the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, on the Conversation.

“We see an action that leads to harm as worse than lack of action that leads to harm. We don’t see inaction, such as failing to park a bike in a safe and appropriate spot, as particularly wrong, even though it still leads to damage,” he says.

“So, a user is likely to justify leaving the share bike somewhere dodgy on the basis that they didn’t do anything wrong. What they won’t admit to unfortunately is they exposed the bike to the risk of vandalism. If more share bikes were left in safer places, the incidence of share-bike littering would be likely to fall.”

This, called omission bias, is just one mental tactic that comes into play when choosing where to leave a share bike – Wynn describes five in his article, and he has tips on how to prevent the assets from ending up in rivers and trees, taking these biases into account.

Making it more clear where it’s safe or unsafe to park a bike, making penalties immediate rather than something to worry about later, and sending timely reminders to riders through their app that a penalty is highly likely if they behave in certain ways, could all help to alleviate the problem of share bike litter, he says.

Image: Twitter/DanielRDup