Encouraging Elegant Solutions by Applying Choice Architecture to Infrastructure Project Delivery

Meeting our national infrastructure challenges will require that we answer the question posed by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE): "How can we make our processes more effective, more quality conscious, more flexible, simpler, and less expensive?" In this paper, we share one approach to identify solutions meeting the "simpler" characteristic of NAE's question. Through an interdisciplinary literature review, we characterize "elegant" solutions—those that meet user needs with minimal complexity. Whereas elegance can appear simple in hindsight, it represents a deeper understanding of the actual problem. As with other project outcomes, elegance is dependent on infrastructure project delivery processes: an owner who contracts with a designer to provide a reduction in traffic is encouraging a more elegant solution than an owner who specifies that the designer must add an additional lane. Behavioral scientists have developed choice architecture theory, which is being applied to improve decision processes in fields from medicine to law to finance. We believe choice architecture also could be used to arrange infrastructure delivery processes to encourage elegance. We describe our reasoning by connecting behavioral science theory and common infrastructure project delivery scenarios. We hope this paper begins a discussion to identify and motivate future research in this area.