A change is Gonna Come: Designing Campus Interventions to Promote Behavior Change for Sustainable Consumption
In this activity, students worked in small groups of 3-4 members to collaborate with campus stakeholders in order to design, implement, and evaluate interventions to promote more sustainable consumption behaviors among the campus community.
 

By: Jordan King (Arizona State University), Daniel Fischer (Wageningen University), and Katja Brundiers (Arizona State University)

Session type: Multiple sessions, Undergraduate/Graduate level, Small size

Topics:

• Behavior Change Theory

• Interventions

• Food consumption

• Social norms

Introduction to the teaching example:

This activity aims to support students to implement an intervention that addresses issues of sustainable consumption on campus using ideas and methods of behavior change. 

Students prepare, create, implement, and evaluate behavior change interventions that encourage sustainable consumption practices while working in teams with campus stakeholders. Through readings, lectures, and conversations, students first gain knowledge of behavior change theories and intervention strategies. Students also learn about existing initiatives and objectives for sustainable consumption on campus from project collaborators. Following this, the students carry out fieldwork to understand their target audience and potential intervention points. As they craft interventions, they employ dynamic social norms messaging to encourage behavior modification. Through an iterative process involving intervention prototypes and comments from campus stakeholders, classmates, and professors, students establish the details of their intervention and the design rationale for their approach. The interventions are then implemented on campus with the assistance of project collaborators. Following the evaluation of the results of the initiatives, students deliver findings and suggestions to project collaborators and other campus stakeholders.