We are a collective of researchers, strategists, social scientists and designers with deep expertise related to designing for behavior change. We’re able to assemble the right team for the challenge at hand.
Sam Evans
Founder and Decision Designer
Sam is passionate about helping teams design products, services and experiences that change behavior and drive growth by first understanding how their key audiences think, decide and behave.
Sam has more than 20 years of brand-building experience, including several years in Brand Strategy and Innovation at PepsiCo and extensive agency-side experience across major consumer brands like Gatorade, Starbucks and Kimberly-Clark, healthcare organizations like GSK, NorthShore University Healthsystem and Merck; and retailers like Staples, David’s Bridal and BP.
Sam is a passionate evangelist of Behavioral Science and has been trained in Behavior Design by Dr. B.J. Fogg at Stanford University. He founded Action Design Chicago and has served on the leadership team of the Action Design Network, a global non-profit that unites Behavioral Science academics, practitioners and designers dedicated to helping people take positive action in their lives.
Sam earned a BA in Journalism from Washington and Lee University and an MBA in Marketing and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Our advisory board includes a range of Applied Behavioral Science thought leaders, including professors at top academic institutions and Nir Eyal, best-selling author of “Hooked” and “Indistractible.”
Nir Eyal
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Linnea Gandhi
Ruth Schmidt
Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.
Nir co-founded and sold two tech companies since 2003 and was dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” Bloomberg Businessweek wrote, “Nir Eyal is the habits guy. Want to understand how to get app users to come back again and again? Then Eyal is your man.”
He is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
Linnea Gandhi is a career "pracademic", bridging the worlds of academia and industry. Currently a Lecturer and PhD candidate at Wharton, she conducts research on debiasing, nudging, research methods, and behavioral science at scale in field settings. Her work has been published in outlets such as HBR, PNAS and Nature Human Behavior.
Prior, she built a career consulting with companies on applied behavioral science, helping business leaders shape better decisions for their customers, employees, and future selves. Since 2014, she has taught decision science to students across the MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education programs at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Ruth Schmidt is an Associate Professor at the ID at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, where she focuses on the intersection of behavioral economics and HCD by combining strategic design methods and an understanding of latent human needs with behavioral insights to inform solutions concerning human judgment, decision-making, and behavior. Over the past twelve years Ruth's work has focused primarily on integrating behavioral insights into design methodologies and integrating design thinking into behavioral problem-solving in the form of practical applications, the development of new tools and frameworks that are currently lacking, and new theory to contribute new conceptual models.
Ruth was previously a senior leader at Doblin, an innovation consultancy within Deloitte, where she led the development of applied behavioral and design methodologies to help clients develop innovation solutions and embed innovation processes more effectively within their organizations across health care, financial services, education, and civic domains. She has a BA in Art-Semiotics from Brown University and a Masters of Design from the Institute of Design.