Why we act differently when we're on the move

you can't poster your way to empathy.

the original characters were polite and helpful, and always the same. as public life grew more fraught, etiquette started to seem like the wrong frame. could they hold more than instructions?

most weeks it was just me.

this was 2021, in the middle of covid, at an office of four. i ran most of it on my own, with my team stepping in when they could. it wasn't ideal, and it was a real crunch, but it meant i owned every stage from the brief to the share-back.

1. week 1 to 2
   Brief & desk reviewwent through the existing characters, past campaigns and what lta wanted the thoughtful bunch to do next, then turned that into research objectives we agreed on before anything went into the field.
2. week 2 to 4
   Screeners & recruitmentwrote screeners for a mix of commuters across ages, routes, travel times and how often they took public transport, and briefed our recruitment vendor to find diary participants against them.
3. week 3 to 4
   Diary designbuilt the diary tasks and prompts so people could log feelings as well as journeys, and piloted them before launch.
4. month 2
   Diary studiescommuters logged their journeys over several weeks. we checked entries as they came in and followed up where something was worth digging into.
5. month 2 to 3
   Questionnaire designused what came out of the diaries to write the survey, tested the wording and flow, and set quotas so the sample reflected singapore's commuters.
6. month 3
   Survey & semiotic readran the survey with 1,000 people on which characters they remembered, which felt dated and who they related to. alongside it, we read each character's posture, expression and gesture for what they were asking of people without saying it.
7. month 4
   Analysis & share-backbrought the three strands together, checked the qualitative themes against the survey numbers, and presented the findings to lta.

we went past what people were doing to how they felt.

etiquette works better when people feel it.

the characters that made people pause or smile weren't the ones giving instructions. emotion resonated more than rules. characters with a richer inner life seemed more believable, and small shifts like a softer expression or a shared glance made etiquette feel communal instead of enforced.

the thoughtful bunch got a bit more soul.

lta moved the characters on from static mascots. it was a modest redesign, and a lesson in how an institution can meet the public with warmth as well as policy.