5 graduate students from diverse departments of the University of Tokyo formed UTokyo Nudge Unit in 2015 to develop healthy eating promotion program based on behavioral economics, which U.K, and U.S. governments had started using as new initiatives. With wide range of domains from rational choice, prospect theory, bounded rationality, time discounting and present bias, and social norm, the Unit needed to determine what perspectives of behavioral economics are relevant to healthy eating promotion and what hypothesis it can insist to design better decisions of eating. The Unit needed an effective and doable framework of team discussions starting from the objectives of the studies and ending up with practical questionnaire questions.

The Unit also needed to design how to conduct intervention experiments for eating behavioral change, while there were no classic methods of such experiments. The Unit also required a framework to determine the experimental design.
The Unit used Issue-Based Technique and prototyping respectively, having plan-based meetings to discuss and determine logical diagrams and experiment planning.