Apologies for the silence here, but I’m writing up my PhD thesis at present and trying to get as much as possible done before an exciting new project starts in August (which I will tell you about in due course!). I won’t be able to get it all done before then, but am trying to [...]

Design with Intent toolkit 1.0 now online

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 [...]

Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behaviour

Games are great at engaging people for long periods of time, getting them involved, and, if we put it bluntly, influencing people’s behaviour through their very design. Something conspicuously missing from Design with Intent v.0.9 is a satisfactory treatment of the kinds of techniques for influencing user behaviour that can be derived from games and [...]

Why it’s been quiet here

I haven’t blogged for a couple of months, which is not unusual, but I always feel I owe loyal readers an explanation! Primarily, I’ve been so wrapped up in PhD-related work (now in my final year, and desperately trying to get the thing finished by the summer), that most of my writing energy has been [...]

What I didn’t get round to writing about in 2009

A lot of people send me ideas and suggestions for the blog, for which I’m very grateful indeed, but which I don’t always get round to investigating or posting or dealing with in a timely manner. Or sometimes I note them, use them as examples elsewhere, or in conversation with people, but never actually get [...]

What’s happening with the toolkit (Part 2): Interaction design: how you can be part of it

Following on from part 1, here are a few of the ‘new’ design patterns that are going to be in v.0.95 of the Design with Intent toolkit, but for which I don’t yet have very good ‘design’ examples.
Any suggestions, or photos / screenshots would be very much appreciated, whether they’re your own projects, things [...]

What’s happening with the toolkit (Part 1)

It’s 8 months since the Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9 went online and I’ve had incredibly useful feedback from a whole range of people who’ve tried it out on different kinds of briefs and problems. As mentioned a couple of months ago, the toolkit poster PDF (which has 12 ‘headline’ design patterns, compared with the [...]

User-centred design for energy efficiency in buildings: TSB competition

The deadline’s fast approaching (mid-day 17th Dec) for the UK Technology Strategy Board’s ‘User-centred design for energy efficiency in buildings’ competition [PDF] – there’s an introduction from Fionnuala Costello here.
This is an exciting initiative which aims to bring together (in a 5-day ’sandpit’) people from different disciplines and different sectors to address the problems [...]

Through London with the DwI goggles on

As I’ve admitted before, having the idea of ‘design that’s intended to influence behaviour’ on my mind a lot of the time does sometimes lead to seeing everything with that filter in place:
[It's] a kind of conspiracy bias, ascribing to design intent that which is perhaps more likely to be due to situational factors (a [...]

Three quotes from clever people

“Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company [...]