Edit

Discover a new routine

What’s the problem?

While there are seemingly endless resources, research, and tools for building healthier habits, people continue to struggle with a sustained change in behaviour over time. When it comes to health and wellbeing, people tend to struggle with four main areas: control, accountability, personalisation, and reward.

Control:
People usually begin a journey to change behaviour with a fundamental misunderstanding about what it takes to accomplish such a thing. Many of our behaviours are deep-seated and are significantly more challenging to change than perceived. This inevitably leads to what we refer to as a relapse and a feeling of helplessness. To be more specific, people feel that they lack control because they lack awareness and context for their behaviour.

Accountability:
Ultimately, most people accomplish things that they feel accountable for achieving. When it comes to most wellbeing goals, most people don’t have a high enough accountability level to change behaviour in a sustainable way.

Personalisation:
While there are many approaches to creating a new habit, unfortunately, many are generic and don’t consider human beings’ nuances. Things like personality, culture, and life experience make up who we are and how we behave, which is why individuals need a personalised approach to behaviour change.

Reward:
Reward, recognition, and incentives all play an essential role in long-term behaviour change, but all too often, those things come in a delayed manner. The lack of immediate reward causes many people to relapse towards old behaviours much sooner without the motivation to make a new attempt.

The four areas briefly described above came from research conducted with people trying to change addictive behaviour. Specifically, we worked with people trying to quit smoking to understand behaviour change on a more intense level. As one of our research participants said, “I am a single mother of 4, working in the male-dominated world of finance, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was quitting smoking.” While we also worked with leading researchers and experts in behaviour change, it ultimately was the work with these “extreme” users that provided the most insight into Edit’s development.

How ‘Edit’ responds

Edit responds to the above challenges by breaking the traditional behaviour change cycle and forming a new continuous cycle that focuses on action and learning, rather than relapse. We designed Edit as a modular service that provides people with options for engaging in a continuous cycle of action and learning to build healthier habits over time.

Chat, Story, People, Explore:
Edit consists of four main service components: chat, story, people, and explore. Certainly, we believe that the service is most potent when engaging with some combination of all four service components, but Edit also accommodates the person interested in some. These components are driven by enriched tracking that uses multiple sources of data to help users better understand the impact of their daily actions on their well-being.

Chat:
Through the Edit Bot, users can provide context to their actions during the day, ask questions to help customise edits, and receive quick updates on progress.

Story:
Through a feed of insights and accomplishments, users can socially share progress and choose new edits to try based on newly developed insights.

People:
By connecting with people in the Edit Community, users can learn from others who are going through similar journeys—inspiring them to try different edits.

Explore
Through a marketplace of organisations (example: NHS) and individuals, Edit users can discover new edits to try, sell (or gift) their own edits, and begin other behaviour change journeys with confidence.

To illustrate how these features can work together, it is useful to look at them in the context of one person’s journey using the service.

What we
learnt

Although most people are continually thinking about how they can be healthier, they require a drastic event (medical reasons, family reasons, or intense life experiences) to trigger an actual change in long-term behaviour. Through this project, we’ve found that there are some less severe ways that more people can build healthier habits. By understanding the impact of daily actions and creating new and personalised rituals (edits), people are able to build enough resiliency to not only survive a relapse in behaviour, but turn it into a meaningful moment of learning. That is the key to consciously building healthy habits that will increase one’s overall wellbeing.

Find out how studio teams ‘built their prototypes’.

The Value of Behaviour Change
While we discovered the power of enriched tracking and small daily edits in changing behaviour, it is also clear that behaviour change has a variety of value. Of course, it has value to the individual and those people directly in their lives. However, and more interestingly, it has value to society as a whole. Edit ultimately attempts to solve the challenge: how might we connect a person’s actions with an immediate and individualised reward with a more significant impact on society’s overall wellbeing?

By moving habit formation away from generic models to giving people full agency over their wellbeing, as they define it, we can create a massive and highly intelligent database that understands behaviour change on an incredibly granular level at scale. What we do with that is the critical question. Suppose we can leverage this theoretical intelligent database appropriately. In that case, we could create communities centred on wellbeing, which may ultimately improve population health and reduce unnecessary stress on healthcare systems.

Find out how studio teams did a ‘synthesis of the insights and discussed their learnings’.

Our new direction of exploration

The entire premise of Edit is that people have an open and transparent relationship with the idea of behaviour change. Unfortunately, in our culture, a behaviour change is often seen as criticism, failure, or even an embarrassment. As trends around health and wellbeing continue to grow, we wonder how something like Edit could be positioned to shift the societal mindset towards behaviour change fundamentally.

Team

David Freemyer
Rhea Belani

Related to ‘Edit’

Scenarios

Personal control

Devices quantify and measure all aspects of the people’s lives and body amplifying obsessive behaviours. People’s personal identity becomes more based on an idealised virtual version of oneself rather than your existing reality.

Live Services

Edit

Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient. It’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.

Proposition Types

Self-Editors

Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Edit

Discover a new routine

What is the problem?

In the future, we will possibly see a continuation of the integration between people and technology. It may get to the point where we start to see it cross a boundary into our bodies for purposes that go well beyond a medical need. People are already deeply dependent on digital technology to monitor and tune large aspects of their life, but a lot of these services require active input from the user. In the future, we may find more technology around, on and even in us, that monitors everything from gut health to social dynamics. In addition to this model that simply collects massive amounts of data and feeds useful information to people, these technologies may begin to directly intervene in our physical being.

In this context, we can describe two potential issues and their interconnection.

Firstly, if technologies become available, and they enable some people to perform professionally, physically, emotionally or socially at ‘higher’ levels than those without the technology, we may see divisions between people.
- Particularly, those who have access to these augmentations will likely be more privileged or wealthier than those who do not.
- The divide will only continue to grow as augmented people become more employable, earn more money and augment even further. People left out may find themselves trailing or working with inferior augmentations or being forced into using labour based augmentations, and people at the high end may find themselves in a kind of arms race.
Secondly, there may well be issues with the public health response to these devices because the regulatory bodies required to approve or disprove them may simply be built on biomedical ideas of safety and may be limited in their capacity to consider the holistic effects of augmentation.

How Pyro responds

Pyro responds by offering the widest selection of cutting edge products in one environment where all the products have been rapidly and rigorously tested by a large panel of independent experts. In this way, Pyro gives people a complete view of all the products that are available and that can be relied on, ensuring that when they make such a large commitment they are doing so with full confidence and full access to experts and peers for support. People can compete in the world and augment their ambition, safely.

Reliable Reviewing System:
Pyro understands the dilemma people face with these new products and only offers products that have been comprehensively tested by their independent panel of reviewers. The panel of over 1000 reviewers from all demographics overcome the biases of the regulator and give first hand experience of the offerings rather than simply the biomedical impacts of a service. Pyro gives people assurance that they are making the right decision when they commit to a product they may be living with for years to come, but it also gives them that information faster than any other provider so they can always stay ahead of the competition.

Optimised Nutrition:
Pyro has an expanding collection of nutritional support offerings. For instance, ‘Bioview’ is a system consisting of an app and a body-powered camera that sits inside a person’s digestive tract. It analyses the contents of people’s gut, their biome and the overall condition of their system. The information is relayed to their AI system to assess their digestive health at any given moment. ‘BioView’ integrates perfectly with ‘Youtrition’, which is a more holistic service that assesses someone’s genetic predisposition to diseases and constantly monitors their hormones. This data, works in conjunction with it’s semi permanent skin patch, which can deliver the correct complement of vitamins and minerals through the skin. It can also integrate with their personal food services like UberEATS and FoodDirect to administer whatever is needed through people’s food to not only avoid disease but to keep them operating at their optimum all the time!

Deeply mental rest:
Pyro now has two products available that simply optimise the natural brain rejuvenating potential of sleep and meditation. ‘Samsa’ and ‘Spectre’ both use technologies that listen carefully to people’s mental activity as they try to sleep or meditate and delicately reciprocate with corresponding electrical signals, which help them enter rejuvenating sleep and mediation states on a far deeper level far quicker. While it is recommended that people use this to optimise their existing habits, it can also be used for those times when people simply don’t have the time for a full night’s sleep.

Social tools:
‘Relate’ is the first in the range of accessible social augmentations. It is a smart memory and recollection superpower. ‘Relate’ is an add-on to eyewear that has facial recognition, which combines with a conversation decoder and someone’s operating system to remember names and interesting facts as well as any other relevant information about the people they are around. It then gives them prompts the next time they see those people. They are never let down by their memory and can always be at their best.

Find out how we did a ‘backcasting of the value propositions’.

Service visions

Digital Twin

Digital Twin is a tool used to measure real life activities and create a virtual projection of what could happen if you behave outside your routine and patterns.

What we
learnt

We demonstrated Pyro to users who had used technologies and products to improve their physical, mental or professional lives to a large extent and this is what we learned:

Our users’ general responses to this concept and it’s enclosed offerings were a mixture of excitement and curiosity with large amounts of hesitancy and concern.
To them and the people we explore this concept with, the proposition represents a world that they still see as fictional and highly problematic. But when considered as though it were real, people often overcome their aversion and imagine positive contexts in which they would engage with the services.

Emerging areas of interest around this proposition are about:

what is required for people to overcome distrust of new technologies such as this; and,
what they might mean for authenticity or employment.

Find out how we ‘Discussed the implications of the prototypes’.

Scared but willing

One of the most interesting symbols that emerge from this experiment is that most of the participants expressed discomfort with the concepts, but all of them felt that they would try them to some degree. A lot of the hesitations that people describe are as you would expect —They are concerned with permanence, side-effects, losing control by sharing their data, ideas of fairness etc. Some people had strong aversions to some of these concepts. However, even with these strong feelings, they often explained conditions under which it would be acceptable to them. For instance, if friends were doing the same thing, if there were safety assurances or if the pay-offs were high. Ultimately, some users described how their existing aversion would likely fade if the concepts became more accepted by people around them.

In some instances, they gave examples of using other performance enhancing offerings that they had previously held concerns about. This is a clear example of how people’s fears of drastically different futures may only be a temporary obstacle to the emergence of these technologies. Participants seemed frustrated that they can’t manage and control themselves exactly the way they want to in order to be who they want to be. If a service can help them get closer, they may overcome their concerns.

Influence on work

An area of discussion that this proposition rapidly presents is about these augmentations’ implications on work and on employment. People describe how the augmentations may help people progress professionally, but that in competitive industries those people may end up being required to augment themselves in order to maintain and perform or indeed to continue climbing a hierarchy. In turn, this creates a counter presentation to the idea that these products may bring people power and choice. On the other end of the spectrum, the people ‘below the API’, who may not have the means to access augmentations may find themselves less competitive in the job market and could even end up agreeing to be augmented by companies in order to work. In this circumstance, we are forced to examine more closely where the lines should be drawn between ourselves as people and ourselves as employees or as useful assets.

Authenticity and fairness

All participants also described a fear about the degradation of authenticity should these products become more ubiquitous. People described concern about the struggle that may ensue understanding which elements of a person are truly them and which are parts of a service they ascribe to (the same sentiment was expressed with physical capabilities( . There is seemingly a sense of unfairness and exclusivity about the availability of the augmentations that fractures people’s fundamental expectations of everyone they encounter in the world. Would this be diminished if everyone could simultaneously receive the same upgrades? At what point will our technologically enabled capabilities define us as transhuman?

Our new direction of exploration

If this proposition is progressed, the strategic question of relevance to our investigations is more along the lines of:

When trans-humanising products and services are readily available, where will their case be most compelling? How might the public discourse emerge? What might be considered acceptable? And how can people’s happiness be ensured?