Unit 4: Design and Potential Interventions

In the design step, you develop potential interventions to change behavior.

Doing design as part of the SIDE™️ method may feel somewhat familiar if you’ve ever done design thinking or any kind of brainstorming workshop. The key difference is the focus on pressures discovered in-situ and on connecting designs to those pressures.

Transferring insights from one context to another is risky. Just because something worked in one environment doesn’t mean it will in another. And it can be hard to know if something really worked if you didn’t do it yourself; because of strong promoting pressures to publish in academia, an increasing number of studies are being retracted because of falsification. By focusing on pressures derived from the insights phase, you avoid having to rely on work you can’t verify.

And when we design, we want to make sure that every potential intervention is clearly connected to the pressures we discovered. This is very different from epiphany-based design, where people simply brainstorm potential interventions and then select one (often based on who suggested it or the novelty of the idea), disconnected from prior research. If we test an epiphany-based intervention, we only know whether it worked or didn’t, not why. And the why is very important, because it is what allows iteration.

By connecting our designs clearly to pressures, every success or failure tells us something about the underlying pressure. Pressure-based design creates a chain of evidence and if something doesn’t work, you’re able to go back and find out why.