Why Art Anyway?

Here at Refuse Refuse! we see the arts as being crucially positioned to influence culture in a way that mere ‘knowledge dissemination’ can only dream of.

The fact that the arts are often experienced socially (picture going to a film and picking it apart with your friends) and that the themes they talk about often resonate with issues close to our hearts, make them useful in the world of behaviour change, where targeting both the social and the personal are key.

Installation and promenade theatre also have the added advantages of being ‘hands on’, allowing audiences to get right up to the action and experience it in their own way. This interactive approach to behaviour change builds on the maxim, ‘show, don’t preach’, a statement concisely elucidated in the RSA’s Great Recovery Project back in 2016.

This method has been growing in recognition, and has been capitalised on in the fantastic work done over the years by professionals from an array of disciplines and countries seeking to encourage beneficial behaviours.

Cooking in Vietnam

‘Old habits die hard; new ones, even when they hold obvious advantages, are hard to cultivate.’ (Singhal et al. 2009)

In the field of nutrition in the 1990s, Jerry and Monique Sternin, of Save the Children started working on a large-scale program to combat childhood malnutrition in Vietnam, a country where two thirds of all children under the age of five were malnourished at the time. In their work they found that an effective way to encourage very poor parents to feeding their children more effectively was to ‘act their way into a new way of thinking’ in response to what they saw as ‘natural human immune system rejection’ response to being told what to do.

‘A thousand hearings isn’t worth one seeing, and a thousand seeings isn’t worth one doing.’ (Singhal et al. 2009)

This involved inviting locals to shared meals, in which parents were encouraged to bring, and cook communally with commonly available foods, high in protein, iron and calcium, while being taught recipes of how to cook them etc.

The results of this two year pilot project was a decrease in childhood malnutrition by an incredible 85 percent in the communities where the approach was implemented.

Radio Plays in Burundi

Refuse Refuse! was also inspired by the Population Media Center who create serialised radio programmes worldwide, in which issues such as women’s education and sexual health are woven into radio dramas which model and explore different behaviours. Their approach draws from Social Learning Theory to demonstrate how people learn from role models. In doing so, they broaden the behavioural choices available to their audience, showing a large range of choices and realistic consequences associated with behavioural decision making.

The work of Refuse Refuse!

The Refuse Refuse! idea to make interactive street installations feeds into and builds on the philosophies of organisations such as these.

We hope that by being interactive, empathetic, non judgemental and by showing the outcomes of behavioural decisions we can get people to think in different ways about the environmental challenges at hand, and hopefully change behaviour accordingly.

Moreover by using street installations we hope that the work will be accessible, quick, and fun to engage with on the fly. We will go to our audience – we would not expect them to come to us. Moreover we would like the work to be able to be experienced for free, to dispel any notions of exclusivity further.

Sources:

Singhal, A., Sternin, J., Durá, L. (2009) Combating Malnutrition in the Land of a Thousand Rice Fields, Positive Deviance Initiative (1) Available from:

http://www.positivedeviance.org/pdf/wisdom%20series/PDVietnam07112010.pdf

(2017) Population Media Center [online] Available from: https://www.populationmedia.org/