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Designing for Climate Action at Scale
Behavioral systems design for cities, utilities, schools, and communities.
We build the tools, experiences, and systems that turn environmental goals into measurable human action.
Most climate programs fail at the human layer
Contrary to common belief, offering your community more climate education, appeals to protect nature,and financial incentives can often be the least effective ways to persuade people to change.
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As a sustainability leader, you probably need to persuade your community to change a behavior, adopt a new technology, or help influence local government.
Instead of getting stuck in single-digit adoption like so many green campaigns, we’ll show you how to transform your community engagement using the brain’s five main motivations levers: tracking progress, imitation, comparison, trust, and group identity.
We gather the world's leading behavioral psychologists, gamification designers, and marketing experts to design climate action tools for your cause that sharply tap into your target audience's motivational core.
what we do
We design behavior tools and engagement systems
Hello World Labs is a behavioral systems design lab founded by environmental engineer and action designer Katie Patrick.
Behavior Design
Systems That Scale
Collective Engagement
Environmental change is an emergent property of systems
People do not change from a single message or incentive. Lasting environmental change emerges when systems create the self-perpetuating conditions for sustainable behavior to spread.
Feedback
A system must first become aware of itself before it can change. Feedback loops make progress visible through metrics, dashboards, sensing systems, scoreboards, and real-time environmental data.
Conditions
Behavior emerges from the conditions surrounding it. Design environments, incentives, rewards, social norms, infrastructure, and experiences that make sustainable choices easier and more attractive.
Flow
Every behavior follows a pathway from first contact to completed action. Identify bottlenecks, reduce friction, improve conversion, and create participation funnels that guide people toward meaningful engagement.
Vision
People and communities move toward compelling futures they can see and believe in. Stories, goals, identity, imagination, and shared purpose create direction for collective action.
Connection
Change spreads through human networks. Relationships, social learning, peer influence, community identity, and shared participation allow new behaviors to move from person to person.
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Architecting Systems of Change, Meet our Founder,
Katie Patrick
Starting out an environmental engineering working in commercial green building, Katie is global leader behavior design for sustainability campaigns.
Gathered the world's leading behavioral psychology experts together to launch the world's first Climate Action Design School.
Katie had worked with the world's major organizations including UNEP, US Department of State, Google, NASA.
Gave TEDx talk "Why Creativity (Not Doom) Will Save the World" as a counter-message to the climate doom narrative.
Published her book on measurement-driven behavior design and gamification, now taught in Harvard's graduate programs and is UNEP reccomended reading.
Get Inspired by Katie's vision for a better world
Katie Patrick is a Silicon Valley based environmental engineer, climate action designer, and author of How to Save the World: How to Make Changing the World the Greatest Game We've Ever Played, now taught in Harvard University’s graduate program and top recommended reading material by UNEP.
Katie specializes in designing innovative apps, dashboards, and campaigns that drive environmental action by leveraging insights from behavioral science and game design. Her work combines rigorous research with creative execution to develop solutions that inspire sustainable behaviors and measurable impact.
She regularly studies leading academic research, including The Journal of Environmental Psychology, and interviews experts in the field on her podcast to integrate evidence-based strategies into her designs.
Katie has advised the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Google, the U.S. State Department, the University of California, the European Commission, Dassault Systèmes, the Institute for the Future, Magic Leap, and Stanford University, as well as numerous startups focused on behavior design for environmental action.
Katie is passionate about biophilic design and envisions a future shaped by ecotopian principles. Her thought leadership has been recognized globally; she delivered a TEDx talk in 2020 and spoke at the UN General Assembly in 2021 on the role of creativity, optimism, and imagination in environmental change.
Loved by our global network of environmental innovators.
“Katie has delivered what we in the change movement have needed for a long time—a pragmatic, fun, and smart guide to making your positive impact on the world really happen.
Lumen Energy
Katie has a commendable skill for synthesizing complex engineering concepts and data together with her strong visual design talent. Her insights into behavioral psychology together with her practical, hands-on design and attention to detail were invaluable for us in creating our new software platform.
Filament Games
Engaging and insightful. I walked away inspired and full of new ideas!
I was extremely impressed to see the many ways that data visualization may be brought to bear on environmental and other sorts of information. Strongly recommended.
