I Joined the Environmental Behavior Design Hub

I recently joined the Environmental Behavior Design Hub, established in November 2025.

When I checked the community’s Slack workspace, I saw that more than 80 members had already joined. I was delighted to recognize the names of several people I’ve connected with before. It felt like a small but meaningful reunion.

In the past, I’ve had opportunities to engage with the community through participating in BECC Japan, exchanging ideas with its organizers, and even speaking at events. But this time, I sense something different—a vision of sustained collaboration and horizontal expansion. It feels like the beginning of a more continuous and scalable effort.

After attending a recent online informal meetup hosted by the Hub, I reflected on what I personally see as my immediate challenges:

• Lowering the barriers to participation in the Environmental Behavior Design Hub.

• Providing meaningful benefits to those who take the first step to join.

• Systematically organizing and presenting the often chaotic fields of nudges, biases, and behavioral economics.

• Sharing case studies and their backgrounds to create a “path” for those who want to take action.

Ultimately, if we envision the final goal as implementation at the point where each person solves their own challenge, the process might look something like this:

1. Recognize the problem.

2. Decide to take action.

3. Consider possible approaches.

4. Execute.

For now, I want to focus on the very first step: problem recognition.

What prevents people from recognizing a problem in the first place? Several possibilities come to mind:

• They are not in places where information is available.

• They are not present when information becomes available.

• They have not met the people who hold relevant information.

• They do not perceive the situation as a problem at all.

Among these, the most fundamental starting point seems to be the last one: not recognizing it as a problem.

Behind that, we often find familiar reasons:

• “It’s too much trouble to think about.”

• “I don’t want to change the current way of doing things.”

• “It works for now, so why bother changing?”

• “I don’t want to stand out.”

If “It’s too much trouble to think about” is a major barrier to getting started, what countermeasures might work?

Here are a few behavioral insights that come to mind:

• Hang a carrot in front of people. ／ Incentives

• Make painting the fence look fun. ／ Tom Sawyer

• Repeatedly expose people to related information. ／ Mere exposure effect

• Let them choose which problem to tackle first. ／ Foot-in-the-door technique

This is where insights from behavioral economics can truly come alive.

Among these directions, repeatedly communicating that “painting the fence is fun” feels like the most practical step I can take right away.

So, while this is far from a comprehensive strategy, I plan to experiment within our Slack community by combining the “Tom Sawyer effect” with the mere exposure effect—subtly and consistently making engagement feel enjoyable and approachable.

Let’s see where this small nudge might lead.

Environmental Behavior Design Hub