TIPPME
Also known as: Typology of interventions in proximal physical micro-environments
A standardized classification of ways to change small physical environments — like portion size or product placement — to shift behavior.
What it means
TIPPME is a typology that organizes interventions altering the proximal physical micro-environment into a matrix of six intervention types (availability, position, functionality, presentation, size, and information/labeling) crossed with three spatial foci (the product, the related objects, and the wider environment). Its purpose is to give researchers and designers a reliable, shared vocabulary for specifying and comparing 'choice architecture' changes to food, alcohol, and tobacco settings that had previously been described inconsistently. By standardizing definitions, it enables systematic design, reporting, and synthesis — you can compare 'position' interventions across studies because everyone means the same thing. It is a descriptive classification, not a theory of why such changes work. It matters because much real-world nudging happens through these mundane physical tweaks, and TIPPME makes that diffuse practice precise enough to study and replicate.
Examples
Moving sugary drinks from eye-level to a bottom shelf is, in TIPPME terms, a 'position' intervention focused on the product — a category that can now be compared across many trials.
Serving wine in smaller glasses is a 'size' intervention on the product; naming it that way lets one bar trial be lined up against another that changed bottle size instead.
Swapping half the sandwiches in a canteen fridge for salads is an 'availability' change to the product, while brightening the salad bar's lighting is 'presentation' of the wider environment.
First described in Hollands et al., Nature Human Behaviour (2017).