What is choice architecture?

Choice architecture is a concept in personal epistemology: Place capture tools where you will see and use them without having to remember. The best capture system is one your environment triggers automatically — not one that depends on willpower or recall.

Example: You keep telling yourself to write down ideas when they hit you in the shower. You never do. Then you mount a waterproof notepad on the shower wall. Within a week you've captured six ideas — not because your motivation changed, but because the environment changed. The tool was in the path of the behavior. You didn't need to remember to capture. The environment remembered for you.

This concept is part of Phase 3 (Capture Systems) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for capture systems.