My art is instructional design – the process of helping people learn. People use all types of tricks to help learn and practice good advice. Sayings like “starve a cold, feed a fever… or is it the other way around?” don’t seem to help much.
Singing the “Happy Birthday” song twice while washing your hands is a memorable way to wash a bit longer and is better than nothing but it doesn’t get to the real point. The more recent advice to “wash your hands like you’ve been chopping jalapeños and need to change your contacts” is so much better. If you were in that situation, you wouldn’t even consider singing happy birthday because time is only indirectly related to setting your eyes on fire. You’d scrub hard until you knew your hands were clean. The happy birthday song is abstract – the pain of jalapeños is concrete.
Last night, I was out running errands at the supermarket, post office, pharmacy, etc. Because of the virus, we’ve all being told to give people six feet of space. But six feet of space is abstract and easy to forget. Just before walking into the grocery, someone on the radio suggested giving people six feet of space in lines and aisles by imagining an adult llama standing between you. My logical brain thought it was ridiculous advice because I’ve never met a llama of any age. But once the idea got stuck in my head, it was impossible to get out.
Quite memorable. Quite effective.
The Elements of Simple 