It’s been a long time coming, but a year after v.0.9, the new Design with Intent toolkit, DwI v.1.0, is ready. Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.

The cards (Download them here)
The intention is that the cards are useful at the idea generation stage of the design process, helping designers, clients and – perhaps most importantly – potential users themselves explore behaviour change concepts from a number of disciplines, and think about how they might relate to the problem at hand. Judging by the impact of earlier iterations, the cards could also be useful in stakeholder workshops, and design / technology / computer science education.

Each gambit is phrased as a question, as used in Nedra Weinreich’s worksheet based on DwI v.0.9, in the hope that the cards can actively provoke innovative behaviour change design ideas, while the new accompanying Design with Intent wiki can, in time, act as a kind of ‘further reading’ resource.

You can download the card deck, either the whole thing (ISBN 978-0-9565421-1-3) or individual sections, free of charge, but bear in mind this initial version is still something of a draft (with some typos and a few ugly alignment errors) and there are a few extra introductory cards which will be added over the next couple of weeks. So do come back and get the updated version when it’s available.

Printed card decks (ISBN 978-0-9565421-0-6) will be available for mail order very soon, too: these will be sold at a price which just covers my costs (around £20-25 plus postage). If you’re going to UX London or Persuasive 2010 I hope to have some packs with me, so do let me know if you’d like me to reserve one for you. This isn’t a commercial venture: it’s part of my PhD and the more people who use the cards, the better (from my point of view). I will try to produce some alternative formats such as posters and worksheets, too, since I know cards aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

The wiki
The wiki is inspired partly by Crumlish & Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces, a great book (and a neat companion to Jenifer Tidwell’s incredible Designing Interfaces, also from O’Reilly) with a companion wiki which acts as an evolving, referenceable container for new examples, tips on implementation, data on effectiveness, and so on, as they come to light, as well as new patterns, new ways of grouping them and new uses for this kind of approach.

At present, the wiki is pretty basic and while I get to grips with the nuances of Mediawiki (and, of course, writing up my PhD thesis!) it’s not open for general editing, but it will be in due course. I hope over time it will prove to be a valuable resource for people working in design for behaviour change, design for sustainable behaviour, persuasive technology, behavioural economics and other related areas. There are also a number of linked pages which I haven’t written yet, but by putting them in as red links, they’re a constant reminder for me to do them!

Your feedback
Your comments are incredibly important to this project. I’ll be putting a survey online very soon, but in the meantime, if you have any reactions, please do get in touch (dan@danlockton.co.uk). I’m aware that I haven’t yet replied to everyone who took part in the earlier survey, for which I apologise.

The blog
In the light of the new wiki, and coming towards the end of my PhD, the blog will change a bit during the summer – nothing will be lost, but I intend to incorporate a lot of the examples into the wiki, preserving people’s comments. The various domain names and redirects need a bit of htaccess fun to sort out too! For the moment, though, it’ll stay as chaotic as it is.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped with the development of Design with Intent so far: I hope the wait for these cards has been worth it!