Behavioural Design

An introductory 6-week online course to learn and apply core principles of behavioural design, to enable you to apply behavioural science principles to your design process, and design interventions to influence behaviour.

Blending the rigour of science with the empathy of design

Behavioural Designers combine psychology, design, technology, and creative methods to find out why people do the things they do and to figure out through experimentation how to activate them to change their behaviour. In this course you’ll get an introduction to the field and how you can level up your practice using Behavioural Design techniques.

During this course you will be guided by behavioural science experts and course facilitators and you will get hands-on working with your own behavioural cases. Learn some of the tools and techniques of Behaviour Design – a practice that is emerging into the mainstream of innovation.

6 core modules

Introducing Behavioural Design

An introduction to the field of Behavioural Design and the benefits of integrating the principles and practices into your projects.

Understanding Unconscious Bias

Discover common Unconscious Biases that drive behaviour in both you, as well as your customers and colleagues. You’ll be introduced to why we have biases, 3 of the most influential ones and have a chance to reflect on biases that you might have experienced.

Behavioural Definition

Working on your own case, you will define the behaviour you want to influence or change within your organisation or with your customers. You will work on this case for the rest of the course.

Behavioural Diagnosis

In this module you’ll assess the influences on your desired behaviour. It includes consideration of individual, social and environmental factors that may either impede or facilitate behaviour.

Behavioural Design

In this penultimate module, you’ll spend time using ideation techniques to design interventions that activate or influence the desired behaviour you identified from module 3. You’ll use behavioural theories, biases and effects to generate these ideas.

Behavioural Science for Storytelling

We know stories sell ideas, dreams and visions; but what more can we do to connect with our audience? In this module we’ll introduce you to the cognitive biases that have an impact on selling and buying and help you create successful, creative and impactful stories.

What you will learn

By the time you finish this course, you should have acquired knowledge and skills that you’ll be able to use immediately in your workplace or add to your CV.

How you will learn

The Hyper Island approach is different from a traditional online course. We combine hands-on learning in your workplace with a fast-paced, social virtual environment to create a powerful experience that truly pays off.

Learning kit

Each week, a summary overview and provocation will be shared to get your brain thinking and reflecting on brands, strategy, and storytelling. A few resources to support that activity will be made available, but not too many. A more thorough reading list will be provided at the end of the course, with the focus being on the here and now and what you can sustainability commit to each week.

Live sessions, interactive workshops and hands-on tasks

Every Monday over the course of 6 weeks, at 14:00 GMT, a live interactive session takes place to support learning, reflection, creating, and networking. Sessions are multifaceted and social – ensuring all learners get a chance to lean-in. We use the time together each week to go deep, get hands-on, and create the artifacts, strategies, and thinking that help directly with your most current and pressing brand challenge. The sessions will be hosted by course facilitators and leading thinkers and doers in the branding and storytelling landscape. And of course, we will learn and create on the latest and most applicable digital collaboration tools.

Peer learning and perspective

We find that much of the learning comes through interactions and discussion from your peers on the course. As part of your journey, each of the live sessions will feature time in the program to connect, share, and learn from each other. We are always blown away by the experience and expertise from learners in our course and we work to amplify that for you.

Reading list

Content informs discussion, inspires actions, and gives a chance to explore new territories. An extended list of resources with the books, articles, podcasts, and videos to go deeper will of course be provided. However, we don’t wish for you to become trapped in just “content”, learning is about the balance between what we consume and what we do (and learn from).

Time commitment

This course is designed to be flexible to your schedule. The time commitment is individual, however, you are expected to spend approximately 4 hours per week total—including participation—in each of the live sessions as well as your learning and doing outside of sessions.

• Understand how unconscious biases drive behaviour and some methods to override them in yourself and others;
• Understand the theory and practice of behavioural design; from definition and diagnosis to intervention design and iteration;
• Get to know case studies of how behaviour design has been successfully (and not successfully) implemented;
• Ability to design and lead behavioural design processes in your organisation.
• Elevate your storytelling and pitching by applying some tried and tested cognitive tips.