Culdesac is launching the first ever car-free city in the U.S.
Our team worked with Culdesac on the design of their multi-mobility offering. We led a half-day solution sprint, with the goal of designing a model that could encourage people to give up their car and try a car-free life.
We taught the team about core psychological biases that would keep people in their car (norms and mental models) and then prototyped benefits and features that could entice people to give their car up!
Our work centered around changing people’s mental model around cars.
Living without a car brings people freedom (no car payment, parking tickets or repairs!) However, car commercials tell us otherwise.
They brag about how cars represents ownership, adulthood and freedom. To combat this norm, we worked with Culdesac to make the benefits of a car-free life more concrete and visceral and the losses that come with car ownership more concrete and visceral.
We helped to integrate this idea into their onboarding experience for new tenants, including how to display rental fees and the cost and benefits of living at Culdesac car-free.
Keywords: Behavioral economics, behavioral design, cities, urban planning