Swarm // Product Design, Engineering, Branding // Salt Lake City, Utah

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Behavioral design

Today I had the extreme misfortune of having to sit through some dysfunctional corporate board meetings. Thankfully, the wireless signal was strong, and I was able to catch up on some of my blog reading. I was looking at the last few days of Gizmodo's posts, and came across the brilliant winner of a Volkswagen design contest. Volkswagen called the contest their "Fun Theory" series. The point of the theory, according to Kyle VanHemert, is that "people will do the right thing if you make the right thing fun to do."

The winning entry was brilliantly simple- set up a traffic camera that sends tickets to speeders, and puts law keepers in a contest to win that money. Basically, by driving the speed limit, you are entered into a lottery to win the revenue from the tickets sent to speeders. As VanHemert so eloquently states, "automatic auto-karma."