Presenter(s): Katie Patrick
Games are a big deal. But can they save the planet?
Since the recent tech startup boom, entrepreneurs have been investing in the art of getting their users to do stuff – triggering a renaissance in the field of behavioral psychology. Designers then took another step, looking to understand why games are so effective at getting their players hooked – and called this new approach gamification. What happens when you put behavioral design, gamification, and technology entrepreneurship together with big environmental causes like climate change, air pollution, and deforestation? Can we change people's environmental behavior using gamification techniques? Can we make saving the world as fun as a game?
"There is a powerful wave of environmental innovation building. We're building a distributed operating system for the planet, an Earth OS. When we show environmental data to humans in a real-time feedback loop, it becomes like game, and really gives them the feeling of agency that makes change happen. The "Fitbit for the Planet" movement holds great opportunity for startups, innovation, and environmental action, yet few people know yet what a big deal it is. I hope my book will help unlock our imagination to make gamified apps and projects that make saving the world the greatest game on Earth."
Katie Patrick is an Australian-American environmental engineer, designer, and author of How to Save the World: How to make changing the world the greatest game ever played. She specializes in applying data-driven, gamification, and behavior-change techniques to environmental problems which she calls “Fitbit for the Planet” design.
Katie is the founder of UrbanCanopy.io, a map-based application that uses satellite imaging of urban heat islands and vegetation cover to encourage urban greening and cooling initiatives. She is also the co-founder of Energy Lollipop, a Chrome extension and outdoor screen project that shows the electric grid's CO2 emissions in real-time.
Katie has been a media spokesperson on environmental issues and has been featured on TV, radio and in magazines including the BBC, Vogue Australia, and ABC. She was CEO of the VC-funded green-lifestyle magazine Green Pages Australia and was appointed environmental brand ambassador by the Ogilvy Earth advertising agency for Volkswagen, Lipton Tea, and Wolfblass Wines. She has served on the board of Australia’s national eco-label, Good Environmental Choice Australia, and won the 2008 Cosmopolitan Woman of the Year Award for entrepreneurship.
After graduating from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology with a B.Eng in Environmental Engineering, she worked as an environmental design engineer for building engineers Lincoln Scott in Sydney Australia on some of the world’s first platinum-LEED-certified commercial buildings.
Katie lives in San Francisco with her young daughter, Anastasia.
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