Project Hacking human behaviour. Program Polytechnic Institute Term Academic Year 2026 Status Accepted Research Area Behaviour Design for "Future Work and Learning" Description We can’t simply ‘technology’ our way to solving every problem. People hold beliefs, feel emotions, and ascribe meanings to things — and these beliefs can make people reject, underuse, or misuse the solutions we engineer for them. (For example: No matter how many tools have been created to reduce screen addition or social media overuse, people still suffer from these.) So, besides technologies and tools, people have regularly hacked+invented interactions, habits, and even rituals to affect behaviour change. We will continue in that tradition, with a focus on hacking human and inventing behaviours to address modern problems like screen addiction, rage-bait, continuous context-switching, etc. Specifically, we will focus on behaviours related to "future work/learning", e.g. try to make students/workers feel less stressed, exhausted, or demotivated (since this is classified as an impact-area within the Polytechnic). Supervisor Shobhan Shah Mentor Type of work required 1. Behaviour design is a well-established field. We will wade into this space as noobs, and start off by grounding ourselves in some existing research. After which, we will dive headfirst into learning-by-making...
2. We will analyse everyday problems to determine when, how, and why instructional or technological solutions are insufficient to solve these problems — describing at least two examples from personal or observed experience.
3. Through hands-on projects, we will understand a "ritual framework" for understanding human behaviour (and learn how we can hack human behaviour as if it was a regular design problem). We will deconstruct existing rituals, and we will design and prototype "hacks" to overcome selected problems.
4. We will justify various components of our "hacks" on the basis of cultural context, technological constraints, and emotional goals.
6. We will test our "hacks" (with oneself and/or actual people), and iteratively improve them.
7. We will communicate our "hacks" to people who may benefit from them: by producing instruction leaflets and demo videos. Websites See examples of some previous courses / student work on similar themes:
- https://setwrite.in/teaching/202307-anant-rituals.html
- https://setwrite.in/teaching/202104-nid-nmd-staging.html Qualifications This project requires someone who is hard-working, imaginative, and happy to make a lot of prototypes (sketches, tangible interactive objects, etc) to try out whether or not they work. So, someone with a reasonable GPA (3.50), and who can show examples of past projects where they have learned new things and made lots of explorations and been quite imaginative = a good candidate! If you are happy to try out lots of creative ideas by play-testing on yourself and on other people, you'll enjoy this project : else, you will suffer, because you can not "think" or "read" or "write" your way to success when it comes to human behaviour design. Credit Hours 0 Weekly Hours 1 (estimated)