Touch – the sustainable transformation.

Context

One of the significant projects during my master studies was the project with AUGE, a non-profit organisation based in Pfaffenhofen. AUGE aimed to make the accountancy industry more sustainable. We proposed to research how we could motivate employees of accountancy agencies to change their habits regarding sustainability.

Challenge

In general, people are creatures of habits and changing them is not easy. In order for us to motivate people to get into a sustainable mindset, we needed to do additional research on habit theories.

Work

Our research was based on the “habits loop” and how people with small actions can drive themselves towards a new mindset. We used a model called “The seven modes of innovations” (Kumar, V. 2013) to structure our research. We ran interviews with employees of the accountancy companies. Based on the outcomes, we designed “empathy maps” to better understand the context and users.

Design

The interviews confirmed us that it would be challenging to change people’s behaviour. To overcome this, we ran a design workshop to ideate and build a final solution. As a result, we created a concept called “The motivation box”. This box included 21 cards that described activities to perform during 21 consecutive days. These were designed to help individuals to change their mindset.

Results

We ran the “motivation box” as a pilot in 3 accountancy companies. The pilot was successful in all three companies. This is why two members of the research -Anne-Sophie Bernard and Lisa Krödel – continued with a start-up based on this project. More information about the company can be found on the website of New Habit.