2013 | Architectures | Dan Lockton

Making it easy

21-03-2013

Articles, Behaviour change, Design, Design with Intent, Environmental, Site Announcements, Sustainability

I have a blog post up at Guardian Sustainable Business, looking essentially at what’s been referred to here previously as ‘enabling‘ behaviour change, specifically in the context of sustainability.

It’s only a short article, and barely scratches the surface of the subject, but I hope it adds a useful contribution to the Guardian’s sustainable living strand, much of which seems to focus on ‘selling sustainability to consumers’ rather than actually trying to understand the nuances of why people use energy and create waste in the ways that they do in everyday life. Hence, you’d be right to surmise that I’m not entirely comfortable with the “…green behaviour…” bit of the title: it introduces particular connotations that are not really what the article is about.

The article was commissioned by Autodesk, whose Sustainability Workshop team offer some excellent resources for designers and students — e.g. these videos on life-cycle perspectives and other concepts relevant to product designers. Last year the team ran a Design with Intent workshop.

Designers, literature, abstracts and Concretes

By: Dan

09-02-2013

Trinity College Dublin Library, by A little coffee with my cream and sugar on Flickr

Last week, I put a quick survey online asking how actual designers make use of academic literature.

It provoked some interesting discussion on Twitter as well as two great blog posts from Dr Nicola Combe and Clearleft’s Andy Budd exploring different aspects of the question: ways to get access to academic research, and the frustrations of the relationship between design practice and academia. Comments on Andy’s article from Vicky Teinaki and Sebastian Deterding helped draw out some of the issues in more detail (and highlighted some of the differences between fields). Kevin Couling has also blogged from the perspective of an engineer, drawing on Nicola’s post. Steven Shorrock pointed to his work with Amy Chung and Ann Williamson addressing similar issues, much more rigorously, within human factors and ergonomics [PDF]. Someone also reminded me that I’d already blogged about related issues back in 2007.

As of now, about 50 people have filled in the survey, a mixture of digital, physical and service design practitioners: thank you everyone, and thanks too to people who emailed comments in addition.

Here’s the full spreadsheet of survey responses (Google Docs) so far. I’ve had some good suggestions for other places to publicise it, so I’ll do this in due course to get a wider scope of practitioners’ opinions.

How do actual designers use academic literature?

By: Dan

01-02-2013

The whole point of doing research is to extract reliable knowledge from either the natural or artificial world, and to make that knowledge available to others in re-usable form.

Nigel Cross, ‘Design Research: A Disciplined Conversation’, Design Issues 15(2), 1999, p.9 [PDF link]

>>>Link to a very quick survey

It’s incredibly sad that it took Aaron Swartz’s death, but the issue of open access to academic literature has been dramatically brought to the fore again, coincident with interesting practical developments, some ‘official’ and some less so. The movement towards open access is not going to stop, and in some academic disciplines will leave the ‘landscape’ of journals and publication methods very different.

Code as control

By: Dan

29-01-2013

Black box, Control, Design with Intent, Digital rights, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Interaction design, Law, Political design, Technology policy

'You removed the card!'

In the earlier days of this blog, many of the posts were about code, in the Lawrence Lessig sense: the idea that the structure of software and the internet and the rules designed into these systems don’t just parallel the law (in a legal sense) in influencing and restricting public behaviour, but are qualitatively different, enabling distinct forms of affordance and constraint. Designers (and developers) — or in many cases those overseeing the process — in this sense potentially wield a lot of (political) power.

Report: Most people just trying to get by

By: Dan

23-01-2013

Behaviour change, Choice Architecture, Design attitudes, Design with Intent, Heuristics, Interaction design, Sustainability, User experience

Cubicles (image by Michael Lokner, used under CC licence)

Most people, for most of their day, are trying to get by. Every day is essentially a series of problems, some minor, some major, some requiring more thought than others. Some we care a lot about; some we wish we didn’t have to. Some are welcome; some we even bring on ourselves because we enjoy solving them; others are deeply unwelcome. Some we care about initially, but then find we no longer do; some we don’t care about to start with, but they become important to us over time.