Habits

"The unsexy and unappealing truth is, behavior change is hard, because we are creatures of habit."

–Christine Whelan 

In a Washington Post article, Sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison gave some suggestions on how to build good habits, which can be tricky since human behavior is difficult to change. 

Something I found interesting in this article right away, was that Whelan stated that the first step in building a good habit is to consider what you wont be able to do once the habit is in place. For Example, In Whelan's case, she said she wanted to reach out to more friends this year, which means she will have to do less paid work in order to make time, as well as get less sleep. I think this is an aspect of habit making that people tend to forget about, because new behaviors will take up more time from the day, and you may have to cut back in certain areas of your life in order to make time for the new behavior. 

Another thing that Whelan pointed out is that people make laundry-lists of things in their life that they want to change (i.e. going to the gym more, meditating, making a budget, eating more kale, taking vitamins, creating more boundaries around work time, etc.) but changing all these behaviors at once will set you up for failure. Whelan suggests taking these behavior changes one at a time, focusing on the one habit you want to change first, and then once that habit is in place, working your way down the list. 

In this article, Whelan also presents the acronym "SMART" for creating goals for habit/behavior changes:

Specific

Measurable

Reward (for sticking to it)

Trackable progress

These are all ways to make sure that your habit changes are successful, and Whelan says that another way to ensure this is by making sure you have a community, because you are more likely to succeed in behavior changes if you do not have to go at it alone. Contrary to popular belief regarding how long it takes to make a habit (21 days), Christine Whelan says that in reality its more like 90 days, because breaking the habit change down into smaller steps and stretching it out will make it easier to automate the behavior. 

Process for Project Two

Facilitate Play

For this project, we were required to collaborate in a group to design a game that could be easily understood through the instructions provided without any help from us, the game creators. 

My team created a game called "Song Smith," in which players would have to change the lyrics of a well known song to fit a topic that they dealt. This took a lot of brainstorming on our part, and we all worked together in order to come up with songs to use in the game, as well as topics and descriptions that would be fun or funny to sing about. 

Coming up with the name of our game ended up being my responsibility, and "song smith" ended up being a play on "wordsmith," which the rest of the team thought was pretty clever. 

Grace designed the perfect logo, which used word bubbles that housed our title and looked like a cute little conversation or, in our case, people singing to one another.

Laser cutting the box with our logo ended up being a bit of a challenge, as most of our group was out of town during the break. Sam ended up taking the box to the laser cutter, which was set too deep and burned through the original lid of the box. Since most of us were out of town, Sam had to think quickly on her feet of a way to fix the box. She ended up using a separate piece of birch, laser cutting the logo into that, and then fastening that piece onto the top of our wooden box with wood glue and sanding the edges so it was flush with the box. 

Our visual representation of how to play the game ended up being a collaboration between Jennifer and I. We decided early on that we wanted icons of ourselves to be included in the instructions of how to play the game, so I created these icons (seen above). Jennifer then applied these icons to an instruction sheet that fit into the bottom of the box.

Jenny came up with the design for the cards. We wanted them to be simplistic, so she referenced the designs for other card games like Apples to Apples. It was important that she used the logo on these cards as well, which she applied to the back of the cards in different colors. 

All of these elements were tied together by our color scheme of Pantone's 2016 colors of the year: Serenity and Rose Quartz.