The days of privileging creativity over science in design thinking are over. The rise of behavioral science and impact evaluation has created a new way for engineering programs and human interactionsa methodology called behavioral design.

Today the design of things that involve human interaction, such as programs, product delivery, and services, is more art than science. Here is how it typically works: We use our creativity to brainstorm a few big ideas, experts decide which one they like, and then investors bet on the winner, often with billions of dollars at stake.

This way of design thinking should be replaced by a superior method that can enable us to innovate with more success and less risk. Specifically, we can use...

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1 Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir, Choice Under Conflict: The Dynamics of Deferred Decision, Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 6, 1992. 2 Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 79, no. 6, 2000. 3 For several examples, see ideas42s June 2016 report Nudging for Success: Using behavioral science to improve the postsecondary student journey, http://www.ideas42.org. 4 D.D. Baals and W.R. Corliss, Wind Tunnels of NASA, Washington D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Branch, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1981. 5 Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, New York: Anchor, 2015. 6 Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, A Fine Is a Price, Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2000. 7 E. Pronin, T. Gilovich, and L. Ross, Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder: Divergent Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others, Psychological Review, vol. 111, no. 3, 2004. 8 This process was previously described briefly by ideas42 Managing Director Saugato Datta and cofounder Sendhil Mullainathan in their paper Behavioral Design: A New Approach to Development Policy, Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 60, no. 1, 2014. 9 For good examples of quick tests, see David A. Asch and Roy Rosin, Innovation as Discipline, Not Fad, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 373, no. 7, 2015. 10 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Econometrica, vol. 47, no. 2, 1979.

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