Mechanics for Changing Habits

After Christmas, New Years and quite a few sick days, we're back and it feels good!

Before Christmas we asked for ideas on how to make people more aware of how they consume, or on solutions that could help people consume less. In the time forward we will put these ideas in context and explore more around that topic.

A lot of you have probably checked out Slavery Footprint already, but for those of you haven't here's a quick description: Slavery Footprint seeks to make you more aware of how your consumption makes a global impact. You enter information about your eating habits and what you own of different things, and you get to find out how many slaves you have. But it doesn't stop by leaving you depressed, you are told what you can do to change it and you are given the means to do so. They have focused on making an app that lets you collect Free World points for taking action. Actions like contacting brands to encourage them to audit their supply chains and spreading information about modern slavery to your friends.

By raising awareness on how our consumption impacts the world and letting you know the naked truth about your spendings we can become more conscious and take action. Awareness is all good, but how can we also change our old habits and live a more conscious life?

Just one idea from the hip; a mobile application that lets you know the impact of a product, how many slaves, what's the CO2 footprint, how many kilometers has it traveled to get into your hands... The data could easily be crowdsourced and managed by the users and "stored" in the barcode of the product. It will give you the information needed to take a conscious choice while still satisfying your shopping needs. The app could also show you how your shopping actions evolve and encourage you to do good.

Slavery Footprint and their Free World app has focused on informing you about the impact your consumption has, and then encouraging you to start new habits. Habits that are about taking responsibility, and about taking action to influence corporations to change their ways and ultimately bring down the number of slaves in the world.

Another way to affect how we consume can be illustrated by the app The Eatery from Massive Health. They have developed a super easy way to help you eat more healthy. You track your food consumption by snapping a photo of everything you eat. Then you rate other people's food while you wait to get your own rating. You get instant feedback as well as development over time so you can track your progress and compete against your previous achievements. The interesting thing is that it actually makes you change. By taking photos of what you eat, it makes you become more conscious of what you eat. You start thinking "what could I make for dinner that would get a good rating?"

This mechanism could easily be used to make you change your shopping habits and reduce mass consumption. You could for example emulate The Eatery: start tracking your buying habits by snapping a picture of what you bought and letting other people rate your buying choice and let you know if it was a splurge or not. The app would track your progress and let you know how you perform compared to the other users. A simple, yet effective way of changing your shopping habits.

These are some thoughts we easily could expand upon and we sure will. Let us know if you got som ideas or thoughts. Unleash your ideas.