Origins

Habits for a Better World began as a meeting of minds. Our co-founders, Karel Vredenburg, an experienced design and research executive, and Carly Williams, an accomplished filmmaker and producer, met over lunch and discovered a shared belief that a new approach was needed to make a real difference to make a better world.

In an era where global challenges like climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human illness, and biodiversity loss continue to escalate, they realized that there is a pressing need for swift and effective action. Despite the availability of solutions to combat these issues, progress remains frustratingly slow. At the same time, new challenges are emerging, such as the rapid, often unchecked adoption, misapplication, and misuse of artificial intelligence, and the erosion of humanity in our workplaces.

They asked, “Why is transformative change not occurring at the pace required?” and “What barriers are preventing us from securing a sustainable, ethical, and equitable future for people, the planet, and the dignity of work?”

Building on their prior projects including Karel’s Covid19 Design Challenge and Future of Design Education, Carly’s filmography focused on taste and sustainability, and their first collaboration together designing and running a Biodiversity Design Toolkit workshop as part of DesignTO at OCAD University, the idea for Habits for a Better World began to take shape.

They reasoned that what was required was a research-based approach (using UX research methods) to meet people where they are and determine the reasons why change isn’t happening rapidly enough at both an individual and systems level, a design-based approach (using UX design methods) to ideate ways to address the inhibitors that are discovered, and then a media-based approach to get those ideas out in the world through social media outreach and a documentary.

Forming the Team

They posted an invitation on LinkedIn for others to join them and were shocked that 57K people viewed the post and some 450 people applied. It was clear that a large number of people also felt the desire to use their creative skills to improve the world and believed in our founders’ vision for how to accomplish that.

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Doing the Research

The project was officially kicked off through a series of Zoom calls that established the approach, teams, and shared ways of working as well as a workshopping session where members of the team identified which of the challenges they personally had the most interest in and passionate for. That led the formation of teams with people with similar interests.

From there, the work moved into Research & Design. Teams began with desk research, reviewing existing literature to determine which behaviors had the greatest potential impact based on empirical knowledge. This was complemented by self-introspection, where team members reflected on how closely their own habits aligned with the research, which was followed by teams carrying out of external research themselves, including interviews, surveys, and other study methods to determine the key blockers preventing people from adopting the desired behaviors as well as the misinformation and disinformation that prevented them from doing so.

The teams then synthesized the research results and created ideation storyboards of how we might use the data to inspire change through habit-informed interventions.

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Building the Foundation

We then created a number of what we called Foundational Teams including ones focused on Branding to establish an engaging and consistent visual appearance, Social Media to inspire people to make changes and to join our Habits Challenges, the redesign of this website to be the hub for people to come to that included a AI assistant that could answer questions and make suggestions based on trusted research-based insights, a digital community to provide person-to-person support through a behavior change, UX Research and Impact to assess progress and effectiveness, Project Management to keep everything moving smoothly, an In-person Activation Team to augment the digital experiences with on-site ones, and a Film team to plan and executive the filming of the documentary.

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