Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Feedback Loops for Saving the World with Katie Patrick | Episode 387

 

If you’re struggling to keep people engaged and loyal in your product or business, check out my FREE gamification course to learn how to do just that: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web

Badges won’t cut it. Katie Patrick reveals how focusing on feedback loops, imagination, and measurable actions makes climate programs actually work. Join us to explore how to crush environmental inaction with game-inspired design.

Katie Patrick is an Australian-American environmental engineer and climate action designer. She’s author of the books How to Save the World and Zerowastify and hosts a podcast where she investigates the academic research in environmental psychology.

Katie specializes in the design of getting people to change. She applies gamification and behavioral science in a way that dramatically increases the adoption of environmental programs and has worked with organizations including UNEP, NASA JPL, Stanford University, U.S. State Department, Google, University of California, Magic Leap, and the Institute for the Future.

Katie started UrbanCanopy.io, a map-based application that uses satellite imaging of urban heat islands and vegetation cover to encourage urban greening and cooling initiatives. She is also the co-founder of Energy Lollipop, a Chrome extension and outdoor screen project that shows the electric grid’s CO2 emissions in real time.

She was CEO of the VC-funded green-lifestyle magazine Green Pages Australia and was appointed environmental brand ambassador by the Ogilvy Earth advertising agency for Volkswagen, Lipton Tea and Wolfblass Wines.

She has served on the board of Australia’s national eco label, Good Environmental Choice Australia, and won the Cosmopolitan Woman of the Year Award for entrepreneurship. After graduating from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology with a B.Eng in Environmental Engineering, she worked as an environmental design engineer for building engineers WSP in Sydney on some of the world’s first platinum-LEED-certified commercial buildings.

Katie lives in Silicon Valley with her young daughter, Anastasia.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob (00:00)
Hey, this is Professor Game where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez. I’m a consultant, I’m a coach, and I’m the founder here at Professor Game. And I’m also a professor of gamification and game inspired solutions at IE University, IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University, and other places around the world. And before we dive into the interview, you’re struggling.

with engagement in your business and are looking for to find out how to make your users stay with you. You will find a free community full of resources, quite useful. You can find it for free in the links below in the description. Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. And we have today, Katie Patrick with us. Katie, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Katie Patrick (00:51)
I’m to engage with you right now. I hope so.

Rob (00:54)
Let’s do this. We have Katie Patrick who is an Australian American environmental engineer and climate action designer and she’s the author of books, How to Save the World and Zero Wastify. She also hosts a podcast where she investigates the academic research in environmental psychology. She specializes in the design of getting people to change and applies gamification and behavioral science in a way that dramatically increases the adoption of

specifically environmental programs and has worked organizations including UNEP, NASA, JPL, Stanford University, US State Department, Google, University of California, Magic Leap, the Institute of the Future, and I’m sure many, many more. But Katie, know you do fantastic things all over the place. Is there anything else you’d like to highlight from your intro that we should know before we get into the questions?

Katie Patrick (01:47)
well, I’m a really big advocate for using imagination of the ecotopia of the positive future world. It’s not so much that’s sort of my in my technical bio of doing behavior and gamification design, but I’m a huge advocate of just having a really big positive vision for what the world could be, which usually comes in the format of like eco cities and like plants all over the buildings and car free cities and all that kind of thing. And I’ve done a Ted X talk on that.

And I’m also bringing all of this together to teach it in something called the School of Climate Action Design, which hasn’t launched yet, but that’s been my main focus for the last six months is trying to figure out how to create modules and learnings and just really help teach other people how to implement these very powerful techniques in their own environmental campaigns.

Rob (02:36)
Nice, good stuff. It seems like you have a very, very good focus right now for the past few six months, as you were saying, you know, to spread the word, which I think is always something that is very, very useful, even more so in environmental and climate change actions. So Katie, if we were to shadow you for some time, what would be the things that you do? I don’t know if daily, weekly, monthly, is there, is there a regular day or week for you? What would that look like?

Katie Patrick (03:03)
Probably not. Like I’m one of those people that’s sort of like anti-consistency. Like consistency is like the thing that I’m probably the worst at. I’m one of those creatures that’s really good at like a hardcore like four day or like six week binge on something and then having to go away and ignore the world and have some kind of spiritual revelation and then get inspired and then come back. So no, there is no like structure. But I’m always trying to do

trying to implement the structure. So I’m more sort of go for bursts at things with a different kind of, kind of theme or energy to what I’m doing. most recently, because I’ve been putting together this, school of climate action design, there’s a lot of, systems and procedures and things that are really like the not fun part. Like they’re not actually like designing, the cool stuff that I like to make. So I’ve really been in kind of like the pain cave. So I’ve been getting up at like five o’clock every morning.

Sometimes even four o’clock between four and five in the morning, having a black cup of coffee and just doing whatever is the hardest thing that there is to do, which I think sometimes you have to do. Like as a creative person, you’re in these stages of like big creative inspiration. And then you’re in the stage of actually just like having to get done that you don’t want to do. so I’ve just been like, just, yeah, like just up, like I go to the foyer of my building. I’m there, usually by about five 30 in the morning with a black cup of coffee. And I’m just like, get it done, get it done, get it done.

don’t veer off the path. call it the snail on the rail, like that you’ve got to stay on the rail and if sometimes it feels slow, but you’re going in a straight line. And if people are like gamey designers here, you know what I’m talking about, about how much you want to like drift off and like go on the side quests and do this other cool thing. And that would be really, really fun. So I’ve really been in a state of extreme discipline, being the snail on the rail.

Rob (04:50)
That makes a lot of sense. So Katie, in this realm of, you know, gamification, behavioral design for climate change and for change, actually for changing behaviors, impacting the climate and the environment, is there a story that you can tell us? You don’t need to name any names, any specifics if you don’t want to, but we would rather be there with you in a situation where things just did not go the way you expected them. A micro, mini or super first attempt at learning or fail moment.

where we can take away some of those lessons and of course how that has shaped your current practice perhaps, things that you would do, you’re doing differently now.

Katie Patrick (05:29)
don’t know if I really have an example for where I’ve tried to use a gamification technique and it hasn’t worked because I do find that they all work. The limiting factor is usually the resources and the time that you have to deploy something. Like sometimes people say like, they’ll be like, couldn’t we just like put badges on everything and make it like a game and progress track and like, and I’m like, yeah, if you have a team of five or 10 people and a couple of million dollars budget.

And everybody’s really talented and you really go at it and you iterate, but usually we don’t have like that much resources in environmental stuff. So I think like we can be pretty sure that this stuff works, right? But to answer your question on more of like, say like zooming out in a bit of a longer scope, which is that let’s say I’ve been working in this space for about 20 years. Like I’m a bit over 40 now. So there’s kind of like the decade of my twenties and the decade of my thirties.

The decade of my 20s, I spent completely in environmental storytelling. So I studied environmental engineering and I worked as a green building engineer for a little while. But then I started a media company. And so all I did was create content. I sold ads, I produced magazines, events, videos, website content. And it was all just about trying to tell really positive, interesting, artistic, cool stories about sustainability. And then everything moved like, could have towards the internet. This is the time when it

you know, the app had been invented and social media just started to grow and everything was moving, you know, digital. And that’s where I started going into this habit design, sort of app design. You know, gamification was sort of a concept that came in. So everything sort of moved in that direction, which opened me up to the behavioral science and feedback loops, et cetera. So it was a very different decade. But the big thing that is really sort of at the

core of my work now, of the really big change between my 20s and my 30s, was realizing that education, educational experiences or just experiences don’t create action. It’s called the value action gap or the information deficit hypothesis. And it’s at the core of really what I help environmental organizations with now and where these action design and these gamification tools really help. Because the thing is like,

Most people care about the environment, like 80 % plus of people really do care. They really want to do something. They want to do more. You’re not trying to get people to care more or know more about climate change or the planet. You’re actually just trying to create tools to help get over like kind of like the physical and mental, psychological, sometimes financial barriers. There are all these things that just sort of like take us off the path. And that’s where these tools come in. so

What happens in the environmental movement, what also happened in my journey or my life is that we live in this illusion. It’s kind of like a hypothesis that we have that we don’t realize we have, that if we just educate people about the thing, or if we create an immersive experience with a sort of like a cool sort of like modern language for something, or we just kind of like get people to know about it or care about it. It’s basically we get people to know about it more, we get people to care about it more. Then.

all of these actions will suddenly happen. And that just does not happen. The behavioral science shows over and over and over again that there is just an incredibly weak link. Like it’s almost like the weakest link of all of the other behavioral science tools that you can use is getting people to learn more and care more. And that’s kind of like the big bubble to kind of like, to break, you know, with a pin, what is it called? The big kind of like balloon to pop in the environmental and climate change movement.

is that and to use more behavioral science techniques instead. yeah, my 20s just creating a whole lot of like awesome content. Like I don’t think it did anything. It’s like a decade of work. I mean, I think I probably shifted the culture a bit in Australia during that time, but I don’t have any like tangible evidence to show of like real stuff on the ground that happened, you know, through all of that, all of that work.

Rob (09:30)
And the thing is, you know, as you’re saying, like, even let’s say there was a huge impact if you were not intentionally aiming for that impact or even measuring it probably, like what exactly were you trying to get people to do? And that’s where actual action comes in. It’s hard to even know if you were super successful or not. that’s even a thing that I would definitely take from your story is knowing exactly what you’re aiming for and having way to.

at least kind of measure it. Like sometimes you cannot exactly know what people, don’t know, doing their day to day, so to speak, but you can have a survey, right? And ask people like, are you doing these things or not? It’s self-reported, yes. But at least you get an idea if the self-report changed from, you know, pre and post. I don’t know, like one of the things that at least for me was sort of jumping there is the fact that, you know, one, it’s aiming for the action, but two, it’s then, you know, did the action actually happen?

Katie Patrick (10:29)
Yeah. And during that time, like I was not trying to get anybody to do any action. You know, we just had events, a magazine, a directory, a website with content and videos that were just kind of content, you know, like they weren’t, there was no measurement and there was no action. And this is why in my book, I open up to this, this concept called the two lenses. And I just use these two big camera lenses. And also I interviewed, I’m Jesse Schell. He’s the author of the art of game designer.

the art of game design, a great book on game design. And he talks about exactly the same concept of like, I don’t think he called it like the two lenses. I was kind of borrowing lenses from his book in this analogy, but that like, whatever you do, like if you’re trying to impact like the real world, one lens has to be on action. The other lens has to be on measurement. And if you don’t have those two things, most likely nothing is happening. And that’s kind of like the starting point.

Rob (11:24)
Absolutely, so we’re super, super, super aligned on that one for sure. Katie, let’s actually turn that around. How about some of the awesome work you’ve done, some of the things that have impacted that you know, you’ve measured, et cetera, et cetera. We want to be in one of those projects with you and see what were, I don’t know, the results, maybe some key success factors. I don’t know, call it as you may.

Katie Patrick (11:45)
I think the most immediate result that I’ve gotten, and you’ve got to remember with environment and climate change, you don’t always get an immediate result because some of these things are really sort of multi-year, like big complex systems. But with the Energy Lollipop Chrome extension and Outdoor Lite, that we made a Chrome extension rather than an app, which I think is a better

kind of interface to use and using primarily a real-time feedback loop of the emissions of a single home and color and colored light. And I think colored light is really a really exciting medium for climate because if you think about a traffic light, right, we are so programmed to respond to traffic lights. Color is also unconscious, right? Like you can’t, if you see a color like red, you know, or green,

You can’t unsee that color. There’s no extra level of cognition that needs to go on, whether it’s you see an icon or if you see a word, you really need to kind of think about what it means. So it’s not an instinctually kind of hit you the way that colored light does. so just by using this really simple thing of color, using more than just the traffic light, I had it going from dark red, red, orange, yellow to green, aqua all the way, or turquoise all the way to blue.

Showing people the number as well, although I don’t think really the number was that important. I think it was really like the color and then adding people’s rank and just tracking their progress over time. Within a week, most of the people on it had dropped their CO2 emissions just through their personal home energy use between 40 and 70%, which is really huge compared to the academic research that shows that feedback loops of data like smart meters that show you the data get between about five and 8%.

So you’ll go to somebody in utilities and they’ll say, yeah, smart meters. mean, they sort of work, but you know, we only get like a 3%, a 2 % result. I’m like, think when you, cause I don’t design it very artfully with all of the systems. I think when you go in like with a real like designer mentality, like a game designer or a UI UX designer, and you’re like, okay, I’m going to make this really, really good. You can put together all of the things, you know, you’ve got the color, the number, the social rank, you’ve got the smiley faces, the frowny faces.

designing it really elegantly with all of the features there. We were getting these huge results and they happen really fast. Like we do the onboarding and then I’d look at the charts and I’d be like, holy s***, it’s like gone down by half. Like this person like instantly has like turned off all these things, changed their heater patterns in their house. So it was just really impressive to see how big the impact could be. It was like a 10X impact compared to what the academic research showed, that sort of thing.

works.

Rob (14:43)
That is amazing. from what you were saying, I’m guessing that some of the things that you tapped into that other things don’t tap into was essentially something that is already there. I recently had Jason Rija on the podcast and he was saying that when you design for behavior, you want to find people where they’re at and where their personality is at. And what I’m hearing from you is exactly that. Like you found out, you realized how light has this very direct effect on

subconscious and use that specifically to be able to guide your actions. Would that be one of the things that you would attribute that big success to?

Katie Patrick (15:20)
Yeah, yeah. really think the color was a really big deal. And the way that this was designed, this Chrome extension is that the full background was the color. It wasn’t like white with a little dot. It was like a hundred percent of the background was, you know, this color and it had a slight gradient. So looked kind of nice. So you just couldn’t, when you opened it up, was like, boom, like dark red or boom green. And even though I was the one who actually like designed it.

Even though when I, remember once we finished it and I could look at my own data every day, I think it had been like two weeks before I even remembered the number that was on there. Like I was just looking at the color and the rank and then I was like, yeah, it’s 3.3. yeah, it’s gone up to 3.5. So I really, yeah, the color and also the comparison, you know, the tracking of the progress is this.

Is this big deal. Can I tell you another example that’s, um, have a really profound impact and a complete opposite as different a design methodology as you could come up with. So the energy lollipop was like data and color. That’s it. It really doesn’t do it. It’s data color and comparing you to other people. doesn’t do anything else. Um, so that’s kind of like one like measurement driven style of gamification. This other thing is more experiential. It’s totally qualitative. Um,

also has a profound effect on leading to behavior. And this is getting people to create either through illustration or through words or just on Canva, getting a picture of like a sort of a decrepit urban landscape near them and recreated it into some sort of green ecotopia.

So I do these kind of like, call them like before and after workshops. So is there like, say, like, is there a place near you that you walk by like a street or like a bit of concrete somewhere where you’re just like, that’s so ugly. Like it would be so good if it had plants on it, a parking lot. Is there any way that you hate around where live? What do you live somewhere that’s so beautiful? There’s nothing bad.

Rob (17:22)
I

I have to say not to promote the city I live in, I’m in Madrid, but apparently I’m not sure how that’s measured, but we’re apparently the greenest in terms of having the most surface with trees city in Europe. That was surprised me. I mean, there are plenty of trees. I’m happy with the area we’re at. It has plenty of trees, but there are some areas which are just horrible. I mean, I think that happens in most cities anyway, but yes, there are, are many places that, are pretty horrible.

Katie Patrick (17:52)
So if you went and took a photograph of one of those horrible places, and then you took it into Photoshop or Canva or whatever you like to work with, and you just started drawing over the top, like, it’d be nice to have a tree here and we could put some flowers here and put some grass here, maybe some children play equipment, hammock, little cafe. The act of you doing that creative process, it kind of like trains your brain or activates this sense of agency in you that you could do it.

people have a completely transformative experience just through doing this simple workshop style. And I’ve done this workshop multiple times. People write me back these incredible emails telling me how transformed they were. And I’m just talking, people are literally just dragging and dropping trees in Canva. Like that’s how simple it is. Multiple people have then gone off and they’ve told me that they went and contacted their local city and they got involved in these like,

greenification like action groups, because all cities have them. All cities have collections of volunteers that are involved somehow in like the urban planning. And they went and got involved and they pitched their ideas to these groups. And my board after workshops were just like a cool hangout where we could make some art. did not in any way ask people to then with a call to action, go and ask them to do that. They did that by themselves. And there’s also, there’s a…

few people that do academic research in this where they actually study this, this imagination process, and then they test how it leads to real behaviors in the real world afterwards. And it’s found that when there’s a really marked difference between when you just go and look at pictures of like positive eco futures, it’ll have like a bit of an effect versus if you just look at nothing.

But what really has an effect is when you’re actively drawing or writing, you have to engage with the creative process of the person. And somehow getting people to do it in an exercise, it just activates some switch in the brain of agency. They feel transformed and then they go out in the world and they just start doing it. I don’t think it’s amazing. I want everybody to know that because it’s just like such an easy thing. Like usually we’re like, like let’s have a workshop and let’s just like learn about how bad climate change is. And let’s like learn about this.

Nobody’s asking you to creatively create anything. I’ve never been, I’ve been in this space for 20 years, I’ve never been to anything where I’ve been asked to creatively create anything. And so that’s what everybody’s got to do. You got to ask people to do something with their hands.

Rob (20:21)
I completely agree. In fact, you know, it’s interesting, like we had never met before, right? We had never met in person. We hadn’t talked about any of these things before. It’s funny, like we talked about the two lenses you mentioned before. Now you say this literally in every class I teach where I teach about stuff in gamification. I always want to make sure that they come out with a project, something that they do, that they work on. So then when they’re doing other things, right, they’re able to sort of bring back all this knowledge and actually do stuff.

create some agency as you were saying. I had never thought of it that way though. So that’s, that’s a nice framing. I love it. It’s bringing in some agency.

Katie Patrick (20:57)
And when you think about these two examples I’ve brought up, I mean, they’re using completely different mental mechanisms. know, one is just kind of like tracking progress, kind of feedback loop mechanism. And the other one is using imagination and making an agency. So it’s not like there’s just like one rule of like how to get people to do stuff. They’re really quite, very quite like different in their techniques of what gets people towards the action.

Rob (21:25)
That actually leads very well into the next thing I like to ask, which has to do with process, so to speak, if you have any. When you, like, let’s say somebody comes up to you and says, you know, we have this money to do this campaign or to do this thing to get people into action. Do you guide them through some sort of process? of course, through the same process, you can arrive at very different solutions because the problems are different and the strategies, et cetera, et cetera. But do you have, I don’t know, do you have a process if we came up with you?

for to solve a problem, you have some sort of framework that you go through?

Katie Patrick (21:56)
Yeah, I have like such a framework. Like I have this thing, it’s called my behavior mapping technique. I have actually this little card kit, but I’ll have to move to go and get it. should, I wish I had it here. I could show it in the, in the screen.

Rob (22:11)
We also have an audio version so it’s almost good that you don’t show it because then we’re just commenting on the beautiful

Katie Patrick (22:17)
A

little card kit with physical 97 cards. I have a poster, you know, that you can get printed out or download. So I use a 10 step process. It starts with the feedback loop. So everything is like feedback loop driven. We start with the data. And one thing that environmental people really struggle with is like getting like one single unit. always seem to want to mix like

30 different environmental factors together. So that’s always a bit of a fight. I have to fight to get people to just choose one. And then the second step is, so when you look at the feedback loop, you’ve got a beginning, you’ve got an end, and then we’re tracking progress. So that’s the kind of baseline. That’s the spine, the spine of measurable change we work from. And then

We look at the target audience person. So it’s kind of drawn from like a user story mapping process where you look at your target person, you kind of think, well, they wake up in the morning, who are they? Then what do they do? Right. And then I go to the Q of first contact, you know, I figure out who the person is. And the third step is like first contact, like what medium do you want to like get out to people? And usually just these first three questions take a lot of time because a lot of groups really haven’t thought through like the single measurement target person.

Or often there’s like 10 different sort of target people in a real life system. And then like the first contact, you know, they’re just thinking about their idea and I’m like, well, what is the mechanism? Is it like a conversation in real life? Is it like an email, is it a text message? Are you DMing on LinkedIn? And people are just like, oh my God, I don’t know. I haven’t really, really thought about it. We just kind of like post stuff and like, you know, hope people sort of show up.

So that’s a whole big like first touch point process. And then the queue, like how do you sort of queue the, the behavior in like sort of the real time and place looking at all the nesting of the different data. What I mean by nesting is like, you’ve got like a country’s data, then you’ve got like a county, a state, a city, a neighborhood, a block, an individual, like really trying to look at like all those different kinds of granularities of your data with real time, the geographic granularity.

Figuring out how you’re to track progress, how you’re to make the goal. That’s kind of like the basics of gamification is well, what I see it as tracking progress towards a goal. And there’s so many different creative ways to do that. What is the goal? How are you going to track it? And then the actual action, you know, again, I’m always having to fight for one action. People are, but there’s like 50 actions. like, let’s just do one at a time. Let’s just work out one and then we’ll go to the next one.

Rob (24:54)
Do you to have a

50 action thing that, you know, half of every action kind of gets done or do you want to get one action fully done? the, you know, sometimes I don’t know, I found it to help sometimes when people want to do 20 things, it’s like, well, you don’t get to do any of the 20 or you get to finish one. What’s your choice?

Katie Patrick (25:13)
The amount of resistance we have to that. mean, I have the resistance too. I want to do all the things all the time as well. So I really, I really get it. But somehow it’s easier for me when I’m working on other people’s projects to like push them with my own. I’m just like, no, I have to keep all the things. So getting to just focus on one action at a time and then moving into all of the different behavioral nudges. I mean, there’s about, I put about 25 in my process. So it’s just like, you know, comparison, tracking progress, using color.

There’s so many, I can’t remember them all off the top of my head. Some of the things that are unique to environmental, like something called discontinuity theory, like when people move house, like they’re more likely to change behaviors than when they don’t. know, looking at the time and place, things like compost bins, like if the mouth is wider than another one that’s smaller. So I’ve got all those cataloged and then looking at different ways to creatively enhance that. Like, could it be a public art project? Could you use like AR?

And then the final step, the 10th step is the reward mechanism. That’s very gamification-y, the reward mechanism. It’s like, okay, smiley face. Do you have a character that has like a wink in its eye and gets a free hat? Are you using what casinos use? That, or what’s I can’t remember the name for it.

What’s it called when the casinos have the randomness? Reward prediction error, that’s it. Using reward prediction error to create a randomness in the rewards. So there’s about 20 different reward techniques and that kind of closes the whole feedback loop. So I take them through this process. It usually takes three to six hours to map it all out.

I have a behavior card kit, so if you want to get like the physical kit, and it’s actually quite good because you can sort of lay them all out on a table, like all these 97 cards and just like pick the ones that are going to suit. So at the end, you should probably only have about 10 cards that are going to map out your complete experience or action design experience from beginning to end. And that’s the core of like what I do is really like taking environmental groups or environmental startups through this very detailed sort of fine comb.

process and it just unveils like so much. It unveils so many blind spots. Once people have been through it, they realize they’re like, my God, 70 % of like our thinking was like in a blind spot. And then I’ve just asked them all these questions that they didn’t know. Often very advanced campaigns are just like, we never thought about that. never thought about that. And then I kind of put it into a concept for them.

Rob (27:44)
Brilliant. So Katie, now that you’ve, you know, we’ve had a bit of a chat already, had some of the questions. Do you think there’s somebody that you would be curious to hear on the podcast? Somebody that you say, I’d really like to hear this person. I’d be curious what they say on the podcast. Sort of a featured guest on Professor Game.

Katie Patrick (28:02)
what are you going to ask them about?

Rob (28:06)
I mean, similar questions depending on their background, of course, things like their typical failure, if they have a process, some of their successes, same kinds of things that we tend to ask basically the same questions, of course, always cater to our amazing guests experience.

Katie Patrick (28:23)
Well, yeah, this is a theme I’m hoping to explore in my podcast sometime too, which is cybernetics. You know, the core, really driving into the core feedback loop. I can’t remember the names of the people because I haven’t interviewed them for my podcast, but there’s a few people in the world that specialize like professors in cybernetic theory, you know, just to really drill down into this idea that you have like a feedback loop and a receptor. And I think if…

People who are interested in real world change and interested in using game design for real world change, it has to be about the feedback loop. If it’s not around a feedback loop, it’s just not going to work. It’s not going to do anything in the real world. It has to connect somehow to that. so, yeah, I think like really like it’s fleshing out, how you can understanding that sort of primary principle, this core theory, and then kind of fleshing that out to the…

more external abstractions of basically how you add all the fun gamey bits on top of that. be really cool.

Rob (29:30)
Awesome. That sounds great. And how about of course next to your to how to save the world in zero waste of five books? Is there a book that you recommend the engagers to read? And of course, why?

Katie Patrick (29:41)
You mean out of my two ones or other ones other people have written?

Rob (29:44)
Besides your two books, which obviously we recommend.

Katie Patrick (29:48)
You mean by other people.

not anything that’s sort of around like game design or action design. but I mean, books that have really affected me. think Steven Pinker’s like Better Angels of Our Nature is a really powerful, is a really powerful book because he just so, with such excruciating detail shows how humans have really come out of the dark ages of some pretty nasty, grisly

times of human history and how everything is mostly for the most part getting better. So it’s pretty fundamental, I think, to having a positive outlook on humanity, because it’s very easy to get little bits of social media information, which is designed to capture attention and sort of emotionally like rouse you up and to interpret that as the world is getting worse. I think that’s the knee-jerk reaction most people have. But when you really look at the data, it’s not

Like there’s only a few things in humanity that are getting worse and pretty much everything else, which is a lot of stuff in the everything else bucket is getting better. So that’s a really powerful book. another one called Mastery by Robert Green really goes into the kind of psychological nature of people that have done masterful work. And I think just how grueling and how hard it is, you know, when you’re up against like a really difficult challenge, I think every project, you know, you have those…

It’s really hard in some ways. And if you’re the sort of person who wants to push yourself to do really excellent work, it’s, it’s kind of agonizing, not all the time, but I think a lot of the time. And I really enjoyed that book kind of explaining the real nuances of kind of suffering that you go through when you’re trying to do something creative and get it to that level of like really, really good. There’s a very specific suffering that is in that. And it’s something not many people understand unless you’ve really gone there.

a of time, spent a lot of your time, your life trying to go there. So I found that really sort of kind of affirming and relaxing to hear the stories of all these greats have had what they go through as a kind of like a theme of just like what it takes and it’s the cost of the ticket.

Rob (32:07)
that it’s okay to go through all that suffering.

Katie Patrick (32:09)
I think it’s necessary. think it’s just, it is necessary. It is the process.

Rob (32:15)
Absolutely. And in this world of, you know, whether you want to go for the environmentalist climate action, or you want to go for the gamification side or a combination of those, what would you say is your superpower? That thing that you do particularly well, above most other people, at least.

Katie Patrick (32:32)
Thanks for asking. I’ve got a real thing for being able to just come up with ideas, but not just any ideas, ideas that are really grounded in behavioral science theory. So I can absorb a vast amount of knowledge. Like said, I’m really bad at doing anything consistently, anything that requires structure and calendars and time, not that great. But…

I can like read academic reports. I can learn computer programming. can study different, you know, software like Photoshop or audio editing, whatever software is needed. and look at big tables of data and stuff and just go through it sort of like a freight train and just put it all in my head. So I have almost like multiple brains. Like there’s like the art brain and the data science brain and the engineer brain and the

behavioral scientist brain and the kind of entrepreneur brain and the marketing brain and they’re all in there stuffed. And then I can like cross scan all of them and then like come up with a really cool creative idea. And that’s kind of what I do in my behavior mapping. That’s what I invented this workshop for was to extract this kind of knowledge out of these groups and use it to kind of then kind of like cross calculate through all these different angles and then be able to come up with a really unique concept.

Rob (33:57)
Awesome. That sounds great. Very useful to have, especially in your work and what you’re doing.

Katie Patrick (34:03)
Yeah, and someone else needs to do the take it into the world and do the time management meeting thing, which is kind of where I just kind of like fall off the wagon.

Rob (34:12)
Makes sense, makes sense. You need good partner in crime in that sense for sure.

Katie Patrick (34:17)
Yes, if anyone’s out there, just reach out. If anyone’s like, I love calendars, I love deadlines, just reach out to me. Let’s work together.

Rob (34:26)
Absolutely. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who are more on that side than you would think because when you’re not that kind of person, we think that is the boring thing. It’s like when I, some of the subjects I teach, I understand people say like, oh, but that’s like super boring. So I know these things are really exciting. If you’re the right person for that, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to find it exciting for sure. And Katie, if we asked you, what is your favorite game?

What kind of answer would you give us?

Katie Patrick (34:57)
My favorite game? I don’t know, I don’t really play games, really. So, do I have a favorite game? Because I don’t really play them, which is a very unsatisfying answer.

Rob (35:14)
And now I was gonna ask like, so you’re saying no games in the sense of no sports either, no board games, no, I don’t know, playing with your kids, where your kid, I think you have one kid from your bio. None of that?

Katie Patrick (35:30)
No, not really. Which sounds a little bit weird that I would be so interested in learning game design and sort of it professionally, but then not be a player. No, I’m, I’m an obsessive like learner-holic. Like I love to learn things and make things. Like that’s where I try to spend like 95 % of my mental realm. I’m just, I’m always learning. I’m always reading something. I’m reading an academic paper, a book, listening to a podcast, and then I’m like scribbling down ideas.

And then trying to make stuff either on the computer or in real life. Trying to make it into something. So my kind of like game world is more like learning like game techniques and then like, well, what can I make them? I could, I know I could like create like a sticker chart and I could like put it here and then kids could get involved with it like this and then we could put eyes on it like that. That’s really like the state that I’m in. I’m not really that interested in like playing someone else’s game.

Rob (36:27)
Makes sense.

Katie Patrick (36:28)
Metaphorically

and literally, yeah. Yeah, no.

Rob (36:31)
sure for sure. So Katie, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today. I don’t know if you have any any final words and any any final advice. I don’t know if anything you want to go for. Of course, let us know where we can find out more about you. Definitely your book, your books, and the links that you provide, it will definitely be on the show notes. But is there anything you want to highlight anything else? I don’t know. This is time for you to go wherever you want to go.

Katie Patrick (36:55)
Yeah, sure. I just, I like, you know, people who are interested in this space to really move out of the computer. Like there’s so much real estate in the real world. Like there’s such a sense that you have to like do things on Unity, you know, or make an app. like you can make like a stormwater drain, you know, like can be your creative canvas because, you know, people go and pour paint and oil and stuff down stormwater drains.

So try to do something with that. Use chalk on the street. Use the outdoor faces of buildings. Like I’m really interested in like outdoor screens. I’ve done a lot of different designs of stuff like that for building software. Look at like a window. Like I’ve got a, did an activity for using like thermal stickers, which was actually Jesse Shells, who was the author of Art of Game Design. It was actually his idea. He was on my podcast and he was like, use thermal stickers. And I was like, my God, I never said that before. So I bought them off Amazon, 20 bucks. Thermal.

paper, all different colors of the rainbow, and I cut out circles. And so I tested them all out with the kids so they could like get a feel for like heat moving through a window. Use like thermal photography or something like I’m really into. I’ve got a little thermal camera that I pull out every summer and do stuff with. Like I just made a miniature eco city, like 3D printed it. It was really fun. Like if you just look around with your eyes in the real world, streets, cars, dashboards of cars.

bus shelters, like there’s just so much there. And I think that’s the real, real estate. I mean, that’s the environment. If you are a planet eco-person, like that’s the physical earth that we live in that needs to be affected. And also as a creative person, like that’s our canvas that we want to affect. So I’d really like to see more like Luddite kind of moving away from the computer and into the 3D world. And just, you can do such cool stuff with just stickers and paper and pens.

without needing to design an app. I think people get incredibly limited by just thinking inside of apps and computers and browsers and stuff. What else did you ask me? Final thoughts? That’s one thought.

Rob (39:07)
Or

can we find out more about you and your work, anything you want to guide us to?

Katie Patrick (39:12)
Yeah, I have some really good quality tutorials on these deeper behavioral science theories of how to design stuff up and also how to build eco cities. Also a three-part tutorial on how to build a eco 3D printed eco city. If anybody is interested in that, can sign up at hello world e.com forward slash action tips. Or if you just go to my website, it’s hello world with an E on the end.com.

And there’s a lot of information on there and you can sign up and also learn more about the school for climate action design, school training, six week program and how to learn all of the different behavioral science nudges and gamification specifically for sustainability and environmental programs that’ll be launching in the next few weeks, few months. Like I said, I’m not that great with calendars, so I’m not sure exactly, but you know, in the very close future, the way was opened on the website.

Rob (40:09)
Amazing, amazing. So Katie, once again, thank you very much for taking the time off your calendar of all of these things that you have going on as you were saying, you know, of this stuff that you’re super focused on in the past few months and of the projects that come up, you do very important work. Thanks again for being here, sharing your experience. However, Katie and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey, Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game.

I guess and since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on School. You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there. Join us. It’s a platform called School is for Free and you will find plenty of resources there will be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you.

And of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

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