This week we talk to Leidy Klotz about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.
Leidy Klotz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Business. His wide-ranging, prolific, and highly-awarded research is filling in unexplored overlaps between design and behavioral science. Nationally recognized as one of 40-under-40 professors who inspire, Leidy has taught thousands of students, including 21 Ph.D. advisees, whose designing and teaching shapes the world. He founded and directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which brings together scholars, funders, media, and practitioners to advance behavioral science for design.
We discuss the human cognitive bias to try and solve a problem by adding new elements rather than by subtracting pieces from the problem; how deeply-rooted and pernicious this is in both our evolution and our economics, and how it has contributed to the complex and compounding crises in which we find ourselves today; the implications of subtraction thinking for civil engineering, governance and collective behavior; how to communicate a subtraction strategy as a net positive without setting off people’s loss aversion alarms; whether it’s possible to “subtract” systemic racism and other structural inequalities; and in what ways the evolution of the technosphere will make for future humans both more and less than we are…
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Related Reading & Notes:
Edward Tufte - PowerPoint is Evil
https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HO_SNOW_2014_PowerPoint-Is-Evil.pdf
NPR - To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over
Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent A. A. Jansen - The evolution of syntactic communication
https://www.nature.com/articles/35006635
Things:
optimization
satisficing
complex systems
traffic
cognition
interoperability
daylighting
science communication
persuasion
Parkinson’s Law
Jevons’ Paradox
hoarding
decluttering
pollution
The Anthropocene
urban design
landscape architecture
entropy
defund the police
information design
the non-euclidean curved attention landscape
People:
Joseph Leidy
Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live by
Brian Eno / The Long Now Foundation
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
Systems researcher Tim Clancy
Kate Orff’s Toward an Urban Ecology: SCAPE / Landscape
Marie Kondo
Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World
Rajiv Sethi & Brendan Flaherty’s Shadow of Doubt
Hunter Maats
Ann Blair
Herbert Simon
Kirell Benzi
Richard Doyle’s Darwin’s Pharmacy
Chris Ryan’s Civilized To Death
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow
Michael Phillips
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169 - Leidy Klotz on Design, Behavior, and When to Subtract