Behaviour change is a complex task. If only Mother’s around the world wash their hands with soap 200 children who die every day due to diaorrhea could be saved, if only smokers stopped lung cancer fatalities would come down dramatically, if diabetics exercised they would be able to have much better glycemic control. The scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine have been grappling with this problem and came up with a comprehensive overarching model to change maladaptive behavior based on evolutionary biology and other cutting edge approaches to behavior change.  

Could we create branding that represented the intricacy of the scientific model and exuded the body language of elegant, practical and accessible deep science that the BCD team and model embodied. It meant understanding the model in a substantial way and distilling the concepts into a visual shorthand.

There were two key premises of the model. The first premise is that we are driven not by rational persuasion but by emotional drivers that have a basis in our evolution. This was captured in a pyramid that had three further key classifications – drives, environment and interests. Another key premise was the idea that we were essentially protagonists performing a behavior in a particular setting (not just physical setting). The setting was a dominant predictor of behavior.  This inspired the logo. The pyramidal geometry with the silhouetted figure in the centre brought in the scientific and the mysterious aspects of human behavior. We also captured the whole theory into a single infographic.

The BCD framework has been published in the Harvard psychology review and the LSHTM team has officially put it out for use by practitioners in the behavior change space. The logo and the infographic are key branding outputs populating this outreach.

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/bcd#about/