John Thackara

MicroStimuli: The New Science Of Persuasion

John Thackara — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:01:33 +0000

As a young boy in 1960s Newcastle, it was always a drama in my house when Proctor & Gamble’s advertising whiz kids came to dinner.

My father, as P&G’s Chief Engineer, basically designed factories – but he was also curious about the consumer advertising that these clever ad men (they were all men) were pioneering. (This was not so long after the first ever television commercial was aired, in 1941)

I remember a furious exchange about a tv commercial for Fairy Liquid and its immortal line, “Mummy! Mummy! Why Are Your Hands So Soft” . The ad men at our dinner table pronounced it to be genius. My feminist mother, outraged, said it was completely amoral.

I was reminded of that moment when reading Biju Dominic’s MicroStimuli: The New Science Of Persuasion.

A startling and thought-provoking new book, it challenges a widely held assumption about human behaviour: that we think before we act. The book describes, in contrast, how most decisions are made non-consciously through fast emotion-driven processes that operate beneath awareness. Biju Dominic’s radical approach is to use MicroStimuli, measured in milliseconds, to change our behaviour.

Awareness-action gap.

The promise of MicroStimuli, which grabbed my attention, was of “powerful solutions to the world’s most persistent challenges”.

One challenge in particular has preoccupied me for all my adult life: the dire condition of life on earth. Might MicroStimuli be the solution we need to help us fix the planet’s social and ecological systems?

Along with millions of fellow environmental campaigners, I had long assumed that that providing stronger arguments, and harder evidence, would change how people acted.

That approach failed. Yes, we raised the world’s awareness. But – in the absence of telling people what to do with this terrifying information – we also created widespread fear and anxiety along the way.

Biju Dominic calls this the awareness-action gap – and he has developed MicroStimuli as a way to close it.

Drawing on insights from neuroscience, artificial intelligence, consumer research, and design, MicroStimuli are nonconscious persuasive stimuli—tiny precision triggers – deployed in the final moment, often milliseconds, before an action. They activate the brain’s fastest pathways to influence behaviour.

Because MicroStimuli speak directly to the non-conscious processing system, Biju reckons that they “bypass the logical aspects entirely”.

The context for the book is the global smartphone environment. With smartphones now constantly in our hand, and always connected, the old advertising model of reaching people during predictable moments, like while they watch television in the evening, is now obsolete

We look at our phones 4,500 times a day, usually for just a few moments each time. Ninety nine per cent of smartphone interactions last just a few fleeting moments. But the number of such moments is vast.

In today’s always-on, always-with-you smartphone-filled world, MicroStimuli can “prompt desired behaviours throughout the day”

MicroStimuli for public good

The book contains many admirable examples of MicroStimuli used successfully for public good.

The best-known of these, the Railway Trespassing project, aimed to prevent sixteen deaths per day among pedestrians crossing railway tracks illegally in Mumbai.

Years of effort to halt the carnage had been ineffective. Pedestrian bridges had been added. Warning signs proliferated at accident black spots. But the deaths continued.

Then, after weeks of patient observation, Biju’s team made a life-saving discovery. The human brain finds it hard to judge the incoming speed of a large object, such as a train, correctly.

Based on that insight, simple and inexpensive solutions then proved effective. When a few sleepers were painted yellow at regular intervals, the speed of approaching train could be judged more correctly from a distance. Changing locomotive horn patterns – fast/repetitive or staccato sequences – further increased the alertness of trespassers. Many lives were saved.

MicroStimuli that stop you stepping in front of a train is a public good, of course. The book contains other examples behaviours being changed in a positive way: non-adherence to medication; the health benefits of walking a little more; he need to drink enough water; getting proper sleep; driving more safely.

Biju Dominic is justifiably proud. “Leveraging non-conscious brain processes to shape behavior is the responsible application of modern neuroscience to improve lives around us”.

MicroStimuli for consumption

But a second class of “behavioural problems” addressed by MicroStimuli is less obviously, for me, a problem we need to solve. This is the failure of hundreds of millions of people to click ‘Buy” when shopping online.

Although global brands spend two trillion dollars a year on marketing, millions of consumers, when shopping online, do not make it past the awareness stage and actually click “Buy.” Even when we are aware of a product, and its benefits, a phenomenon called Cart Abandonment runs at a steady 70 per cent.

In 2025, around 18 billion online shopping carts were cruelly abandoned. With twenty to forty per cent of all retail sales now online, this means that transactions worth an astounding seven trillion dollars were begun, but never completed.

These numbers are impressive, but I’m troubled by a question: does it matter?

If Cart Abandonment means you do not buy something online that you may really not have needed – and whose production, sale and use impacts the planet negatively – in what sense is it a ‘problem’?

For the Argentine writer Jorge Alemán Lavigne, rampant overconsumption drives many of our biggest social and ecological problems. “Consumer society has turned us into atomised individuals whose task is not to support each other, but to consume” he writes. “Decades of deregulation and privatisation have cultivated insecurity, individualism and status anxiety – and on a a mass scale”.

Libidinal operators

Around the world, malign political actors are tapping into fears and anxieties fostered by life in consumer society. Lavigne describes these populist leaders as libidinal operators.

With a focus on those who feel powerless, libidinal operators channel the desire for exclusion of the Other. They then offer diverse ways to be nasty, vindictive and cruel towards those the most vulnerable.

To the millions among us who are socially isolated, they offer a sense of belonging, meaning, and self-esteem.

To those who feel fearful, they promise order and security – often by the use of force.

These negative social consequences – fear, insecurity, and isolation – are well known to global brands. After all, they study our states of mind obsessively – in order to sell us things. But despite these dire social consequences, they show no signs deviating from their market-fixated ways. They will continue to create new needs, and increase consumption, to the maximum extent possible.

And the explict promise of MicroStimuli? Help them do so with greater precision, and more effectively, than ever before.

A striking example in the book comes when Biju pitches for work at a major chocolate brand. He describes the three slides he presented to the high-level meeting. “On Slide One, we proposed approaching the problem from a neuroscience perspective. On Slide Two, we explained that chocolate, at its core, is glucose. And when glucose levels drop, our bodies instinctively seek replenishment. On Slide Three, we showed how identifying the moments when gluose dips – the real moments of glucose craving- could unlock the exact digital moments most suited for chocolate persuasion”.

Is an insufficiency of chocolate consumption one of the world’s most persistent behavioural challenges? I’m not convinced.

Does this make MicroStimuli unethical?

The author highlights that quandary when he asks, on the book’s first line: ’Is it ethical to influence someone’s behaviour without their conscious awareness?”

This question is not new. The world of marketing has long had the unconscious in its sights. Seventy years ago, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders dramatically raised public awareness of advertising, consumerism, and media manipulation. A worldwide media studies industry, born at that moment, now produces thousands of papers every year.

But growing public awareness did nothing to slow the industry down. On the contrary: according to Grok, when Hidden Persuaders was published in 1978, global marketing/advertising spend was in the range of $50–80 billion. Today, MicroStimuli is being pitched to an advertising economy that, at up to $2 trillion, is 40 times higher than when Hidden Persuaders came out.

Now you may well complain, at this point, that it’s unfair to blame MicroStimuli for the political dystopias now unfolding around the world. And I would have to agree. The capitalist system is to blame, not a pragmatic marketing technique.

Besides,casting blame is not just unfair, it’s ineffective

Ever since those ad men came to dinner when I was a boy, and I witnessed my mother’s appalled reaction, I’ve been sceptical that ad persons will ever turn down the opportunity to increase sales. Indeed, when I asked a marketing expert recently whether or not MicroStimuli are ethical, he replied, “I don’t know, but do they work?”

My point here? Moralistic finger-pointing does not create positive change. Making demands on business, or telling politicians what they must do, are also ineffective.“You must end this obsession with perpetual growth”. “The government must end our dependency on fossil fuels”.

They’ won’t, because they can’t. We all live within a system – capitalism – whose very essence, its basic operating system, is to stimulate consumption, invent new needs, and extract resources from the earth to meet them.

Changing awareness on its own cannot, and will not, change this system. Critique, without action, is a recipe for anxious introspection and debilitating climate guilt.

How positive change happens

After years of ineffective activism, I made a resolution to stop shouting that we must stop doing something (because it’s bad for life on earth, etc etc) without also, at that same moment, pointing to practical acts of care we can do, instead.

The good news is that millions of living alternatives to consumer society – and the means to change the system – are all around us. These millions of grassroots projects – some new, many more the descendants of historical practices – are the seedlings of a replacement for business-as-usual.

These practices are scattered, and for the most part unseen on the world’s smartphones – but they don’t have to be invented from scratch.

I maintain a collection of case study collections on my website. I have also written about 60 new kinds of jobs that you probably never heard of before, but that people are doing now.

Will these myriad small projects wash away capitalism like some giant green tsunami?

On their own, no, of course not. But they don’t have to.

The main reason we’re in a polycrisis now? An intense global debt-energy system has duly reached limits to growth that scientists have been warning us about for decades. The global system – the energy-intense, extractive, grow-to-infinity capitalist system – is degrading of its own accord. Its running up against biophysical forces that are beyond its or anyone else’s control.

Once all the infrastructures, networks and gadgets of modern life are factored in – the cars, planes, factories, buildings, infrastructure, heating, cooling, lighting, food, water, hospitals, information systems, and their attendant gadgets – well, a New Yorker or Londoner today ‘needs’ about 60 times more energy and resources, per person, than a hunter gatherer did, 10,000 years ago.

And these ‘needs’ are escalating. Think, data centres. Think, airconditioning for the masses.

To put it more personally: you and I use more energy & resources in a single month than our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime – and we’re doing so on a finite planet.

It can’t, and won’t, persist.

Practical acts of care

But back to MicroStimuli and my earnest resolution: “never argue that we should stop doing something without also suggesting practical acts of care we can do, instead“.

Rather than get millions more of us to press “Buy”, could they get us to click a button called “Care”?

Care is the essential activity people have always undertaken to raise and educate their families, cultivate their land, and support each other in times of difficulty. Care is how billions of people with low cash incomes meet daily life needs outside the money economy – through traditional networks of reciprocity and gifts.

Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, ironing, consoling, caring for others, listening, value, in this parallel care economy, arises from relationships – not from transactions, and not from things.

A cooperative care ecosystem does not have to be invented from scratch. Myriad examples, as I have shown here, already exist.

But health, care, and wellbeing – whether social, or ecological – are not something ‘delivered’, like a pizza – or ‘produced’, like a car.

What we can do is use can use well-tried design and marketing methods to enhance caring relationships and platforms Maps of actors and resources; product & service prototypes; system architectures; artful meetings; collaboration formats.

As a start, enabling platforms and practical measures can be designed to support the people who already do the bulk of caring, and will continue to do so – from child care, to dementia support..

Among other possibilities:
Enable people to become active participants in ecological repair, or biodiversity restoration
Enable local communities to share resources, collaborate, and develop new livelihoods.
Transform community participation, optimise engagement, personalise interactions on social networks,.

Nature reconnection

The Spanish theologian Raimon Pannikar explains this moment beautifully: ”A truly just transition will happen when we see nature differently, experience nature differently, and understand our purpose here differently.”

Recent ecological research confirms an important truth: the vitality of ecological and social systems is determined by the quality of social and ecological relationships.

I believe MicrosStimuli at the service of care could enhance the health of those relationships.

In diverse combinations with AI, science, design, and art – MicrosStimuli, can become a medium of experience and learning that can help us realise everything in the living world is connected.

As an example: A new app called Okio – described as “your AI-powered field companion” – connects you with nature experiences, based on location. It’s your AI-powered nature guide for exploring, identifying, and learning about the living world around you.

But re-connection – with nature, and with each other – is not just about words; it’s about encounter and community.

The philosopher and theologian Martin Buber counseled just such activity in his book I and Thou of 1923. “All knowledge is dialogic”, he wrote – but he did not just advocate talk. Conversations needs to be embodied, and situated. At a social level, we need to talk to each other more face to face.

How will MicroStimulii help us reconnect in such a way? That, respectfully, is for you to design.

NOTE

MicroStimulii: the New Science of Persuasion
https://www.linkedin.com/in/biju-dominic-5a08764/

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Cooling Infrastructures are Social as well as Technical

John Thackara — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:52:42 +0000

(I changed the title of this post on 15 August) As a punishing heatwave headed for a fourth week here in France, a familiar cry went up from the country’s exhausted citizens: “The government must do something”.

Such cries let off steam, but a reality check is in order. “The government” – in the form of city planners, policy makers and politicians – has not been inactive. In much of Europe, it has followed expert advice to focus on longer-term solutions such as shade, insulation and cooling centres. In South Asia, too, there is consenus four interventions are practical and effective: urban greening, heatwave early warning systems, cool roofs, and shifting work hours.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/we-survived-the-sun-for-centuries-why-is-it-killing-us-now

Government action to keep us warm dates back 50 years, to the 1970s oil crisis. That’s when European lawmakers first pushed for better housing insulation against cold, and the first meaningful thermal building regulations emerged. But even that work is incomplete, especially for older buildings. And besides: these measures are top-down, expensive – and slow.

The Heating Ventilation and Air Condition (HVAC) industry is especially ill adapted to change. Its army of highly trained technicians install and maintain complex equipment and systems with great efficiciency. Their every action is shaped by regulations and formal certifications. But if we follow the same approach for coolth, an integrated and comprehensive cooling infrastructure will take more decades again to implement.

But is that the modern way to go? Although HVAC has been optimised to keep us warm whilst saving energy – the same insulation works like an oven when outside temperatures soar. And even though HVAC is effective at cooling interiors, the heat it extracts from inside buildings is pumped into the streets outside. Public spaces and streets – where billions of poor people work, and often live – get even hotter as a result.

We do not lack for data in deciding what to do. Environmental monitoring is widespread in the world’s cities, and conversations among academics, environmentalists, architects, health experts, and planners are intense, and ongoing. But among citizens? Less so.

Is now a good moment for us to learn from the majority world? Fewer than 15 per cent of the 3.5 billion people who live in high temperatures regions own an air conditioner. The ways they cope in ‘off-grid’ communities are highly nuanced and involve novel use of communal and publicly available resources

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2026-07-06 airco

A new report called Cooling The Last Mile maps the landscape of low-cost, low-energy space cooling solutions in use, today, in sub‑Saharan Africa and South Asia. https://efficiencyforaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/Cooling-the-Last-Mile-1.pdf

A new report called Cooling The Last Mile maps the landscape of low-cost, low-energy space cooling solutions in use, today, in sub‑Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Covering both passive and active solutions, the 64 page report follows a 36 month interdisciplinary and comparative study called Cool Infrastructures: Life With Heat in the Off Grid City – a collaboration between research institutions in Scotland, Cameroon, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, France, Germany and Singapore.

The research was commissioned to help women and men in low income urban settlements with partial or limited access to electricity. But some of these solutions – from shading with textiles, to evaporative cooling devices, can be deployed simply and quickly by many of us sweltering today in northern cities, too.

Kris de Decker, editor of Low-Tech Magazine, was the first to spot the potential of removable textile layers to keep homes warm in winter, and cool in summer.

The use of window textiles on a building’s exterior – in the form of an awning which blocks solar heat before it enters through the glazing – can result in a significant decrease in energy consumption – even when AC units are also used inside.

Exterior curtains for cooling predates the use of glass windows by at least 2,000 years, de Decker reminds us. In the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, people used textiles not only to shade unglazed windows and doors, but also roofs, facades, courtyards, and entire streets. In Egypt today, textile furnishings known as “toldos” or “sun sails” are made and installed by residents in a bottom-up movement supported by a local industry of expertise and craftsmanship.

A French designer, Martin Fessard, is taking such textiles to a next level with bio-sourced hygrothermal curtains. These curtains made of linen and recycled cotton to better distribute heat within homes.

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Inspired by the fact that we have dressed buildings with textiles for 2,000 years, Martin Fessard is now testing what kind of textiles work best today. Shown left: As warm air drifts over fabrics, it can alter its course. (Design: Maud Harou / Topophile)

Design to the coordination rescue?

Until about now, technology roadmaps for low cost cooling have focused on universal, electrically powered consumer appliances – principally, fans and refrigerators. But is the mass deployment of air conditioning units the only option available.

Cooling design must not only be technically feasible, but also socially just, environmentally friendly, inclusive, and economically viable. As Cooling The Last Mile emphasizes, cooling design needs to balance social justice, technical constraints, and economic factors. To achieve that balance, it needs to to be participatory, context‑sensitive, and inclusive.

In that context, cooling is not just about equipment. It’s also about coordination. A constant effort is needed to to balance the availability of material and technology, understand local micro-climates, accomodate cultural expectations, negotiate withindividual and collective behaviours – and do all that for a fraction of the cost of high-tech cooling.

Finance will be crucial, too, of course. Government officials have important roles to play in the creation inclusive loan and subsidy schemes. But tomorrow’s solutions need to be co‑developed with communities, not imposed on them from outside. They also need to minimise lifecycle emissions and waste, prioritise locally available and regenerative materials, and integrate a combination of passive and active solutions based on local – and imported – knowledge.

Some solutions familiar on one location have potential to be tried in other geographies. The report mentions, the use of mosaics as a radiant barrier in India. And evaporative coolers, now widely available in on‑grid settings in South Asia, have potential for uptake in off‑grid hot‑dry regions, too.

“Tailored, context-specific solutions – aligned with local conditions, infrastructure, financial resources and community needs – are essential” the report states.

Local masons, carpenters, fabricators, and architects need to be trained to integrate passive and active cooling into rural housing, schools, and healthcare facilities.

The value brought by for designers, in this complex space, is probably more to coordinate, than execute.

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The Global Health Information Network has published this Call. It invites people living in contexts of urban poverty to submit practices that meet their needs for cool, heat, food, water and space.

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So you want to start an Ecological Learning Centre?

John Thackara — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:22:09 +0000

Unusual but real-world jobs are now emerging in rural contexts: jobs in food and water systems; building re-use; next-generation hospitality; and so on.
thackara.com/bioregioning-sounds-nice-but-i-need-a-job

Earlier this year, I returned to that theme in the small village of Chedun Town, near Shanghai. Meeting under the umbrella of Design Harvests
44 people came to a workshop called “Designing for life: sounds nice, but where are the jobs?“

A quarter of the group were urban-rural professionals with some kind of design background. I saw on a list of the invited guests that one was a “Rural Learning Centre Principal”. This turned out to be Shuchin Shu, an activist and educator who heads the Yunhe Forest School in Zhonglu village in China’s Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Region.

You can see my interview with Shuchin here: youtu.be/aUyWP8YbOmM

It was part of the webinar series Bioregioning In Practice: gaiaeducation.org/bioregioning-in-practice

Founded by Apple Liu Xuan in 2015, the Yunhe Centre was created to seek a balance between economic development, and ecological restoration, in communities near China’s often fragile preservation areas. yunhecentre.com

The centres – there are now four Yunhe Centres – offer project-based learning that expands the notion of “teacher” beyond a person in a classroom. Students experience the innate connections between Buddhism, ancient land use practices, ecological restoration, ecological economy, and ecological design.

For Shuchin, who holds a master’s degree in Environmental Art & Design, “the villagers and the mountains are our teachers. So, too, are other people, plants and animals, hills and rivers, gardens, community centers – and our own imaginations”.

The Yunhe Centre is run by a core team of seven – but they work with a network of of about 20 teachers, guides, drivers, cooks, and guest house hosts.

“Local relationships are our most important priority” Suchin says. In each village where thet open a centre, the local Party Secretary plays a key role in mobilising the diverse array of people amnd resources needed to support itsactivities.

Interest in the Yunhe approach growing. Shuchin estimates that ten percent of Chinese parents wish their children could have more contact with nature – and that’s a lot of parents.

Yunhe Centers are inspired by the philosophy of the Living Earth – and process-relational thinking. The earth, for them, is a living organism filled with myriad forms of life, of which human beings are a part. They encourage the development of whole persons and whole communities

Links

Yunhe Centre
https://www.yunhecentre.com/

Yunhe Centre Video
https://youtu.be/IK-w4ecS2JM?si=CQgK547VrLg6dJUE

“The villagers and the mountains are are my teachers.”
https://www.openhorizons.org/the-yunhe-center-in-china-nurturing-a-new-generation-of-young-chinese-with-ecological-mindsets-and-practical-skills.html

Ecological education:A Close Look at a Tibetan Forest School
“https://city.cri.cn/20210304/30813540-74e0-9f6f-e699-6df01e9985ce.html

Bioregioning In Practice (Gaia Education)
https://www.gaiaeducation.org/bioregioning-in-practice-2

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Designing for life: sounds nice, but where are the jobs?

John Thackara — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:28:58 +0000

The idea of “designing for life” sounds meaningful – but what do those words mean in practice? And especially important for young people: what jobs are available in that space?
To explore those questions, the 44 people shown above met last week in Chedun Town, a rural area near Shanghai, for Design Harvests – a walking, mapping and bioregioning workshop

mistraurbanfutures.org/design_harvest_design_approach_towards_sustainability.pdf

First launched on Chongming Island near Shanghai in 2008, by Professor Lou Yongqi, Design Harvests is an in-situ exploration of how rural innovation and development can be revitalised by design using an ‘acupuncture approach’.

In last week’s workshop – as part of the launch of Design Harvests III – a quarter of the group were urban-rural professionals with some kind of design background. Their number included a “Rural CEO’’, a “Rural Learning Centre Principal”, a “Rural Project Coordinator” and so on.

My contribution was to talk about unusual but real-world but jobs that are now emerging in rural contexts: jobs in food and water systems, building re-use, agritourism, next-generation hospitality, and the use of AI in social infrastructures. You can see the (one hour) talk here.

Our next step in Design Harvests will furnish our physical hub in Chedun Town with equipment, information, and people. As the interface to a physical-virtual knowledge ecosystem about all things urban-rural, the will help diverse actors in the territory learn from each other.

Then, later in the year, we hope to organise a three-day ‘semi-nomadic festival’. This will feature pop-up events distributed around the territory – for example in a farm, at the market, in a factory, by a river.

Each evening, we will all meet together in a central location; eat together in an informal food festival; and discuss, with each other, what we had seen and experienced that day. On the last day, everyone will share what relationships they planned to establish, or strengthen.

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Dates for 2026 MeetUps in France

John Thackara — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:45:06 +0000

People come to reflect on what designing for life might mean for them. Some are working on a live project, thesis, course, or book. Others want to transform their professional situation, and only do good work. They use a time-out here to figure out how to do that. Whether you come as an individual, or in a team, your stay here combines me-time, you-time, and we-time. Our meetups are for designers of all kinds, ecologists, curators, team leaders, managers, professors, researchers, artists, and writers.

MeetUp 2026

In previous meetups people came projects to do with:

agtech for agroecology (Sweden);
wearable tech for the fragrance industry (UK);
method cards for sustainable design (Spain);
design for soil care (France);
urban ecology dashboard (China);
school for village hosts (Italy);
watershed restoration (Scotland);
starter course on bioregioning (England);
a national digital archive (Netherlands);
social-ecological atlas for a province (Belgium);
post-tourism hospitality (France)

see more at the MeetUp page

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