Environment
Made You Look! - continued
By Bruce Grierson published Jul 1, 2009
The familiar becomes invisible. That’s why signs on the North Shore feature rhinos and dead bodies
Twenty years on, what can we say about Kambeitz's iconic little fish? Around here at least, most people recognize the yellow salmon and, perhaps consequently, many people know that a storm drain connects to a local stream, Kambeitz believes. It's probably an exaggeration to say that a kid who puts a fish mark by a storm drain becomes an environmentalist for life. But there does appear to be a link between participating in the program and feeling personally invested in the cause, and the outcome. One enterprising group of students in Coquitlam attempted to put some data behind the claims. They applied 500 storm drain markings in residential and industrial areas, and hand-delivered pamphlets explaining them. A year later they returned and queried people. Did they know what the markings meant? And had they changed their behaviour? The respondents overwhelmingly said they did, and they had.
"Before the fish, people would go out into the alley and empty their carpet-cleaning trucks and whatnot," Kambeitz says. "After the fish, not only did they not do that anymore, they started watching their neighbours to make sure they didn't. A concrete place that's washing down its equipment, somebody who's painting the bedroom-people will turn in their neighbours in a heartbeat if they've gone out there and marked a storm drain."
This winter, in keeping with a grim trend in B.C. in recent years, has been marked by the spectre of skiers dying after ducking under out-of-bounds ropes at resorts and riding the backcountry cream into oblivion. How does this happen? Do people not see the signs? Can anything be done to deter them? If ever there were an application for choice architecture, it's this.
Or so it seems to Pascal Haegeli. The Swiss-born Vancouverite is a postdoctoral fellow at SFU's School of Resource and Environmental Management-and is almost uniquely qualified as an expert in avalanches. After starting out in the natural sciences (his PhD is in meteorology-the actual physical mechanics of avalanches), Haegeli now studies the social dimension of avalanche prevention. For the last four years, in a project commissioned by the Canadian Avalanche Centre, the 37-year-old has been systematically studying the habits of back-country skiers and, more recently, out-of-bounds skiers, to help them make better decisions in future. The judgment calls made by skiers on the edge between not-wild and wild are often flawed, Haegeli believes, because of a complex nexus of human foibles. People often just don't behave very rationally here. The landscape that unfolds beyond the ropes of a ski area is a binary place. It is either perfectly, serenely static-apparently safe-or else all hell is raining down: an avalanche.
One approach worth trying, Haegeli believes, is to make the "choice point"-where skiers make the decision to either cowboy on ahead or not-very distinct. And to make the messages themselves emotional, intuitively persuasive. "On the Grouse Grind in the wintertime there are these huge signs that say, basically, you're going to die," Haegeli says. "People seem to ignore them. They don't really relate to the message." Something is wrong with those dire, blared warnings. They don't seem real-at least not real enough to matter in the moment, out there, when the alternative to caution is an exhilarating payoff. But "what if the consequences of actions can be calculated and projected to a person in real time?" That was a question designer and "user experience researcher" Jan Chipchase posed recently on his blog. It sounds high-tech, but in fact "consequence warnings" can be as simple as pictures on signs.
