Design with Intent

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

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 24, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 22, 2009 ⋅ 4 comments

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)

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 18, 2009 ⋅ 6 comments

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

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 10, 2009 ⋅ One comment

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

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 10, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

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

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 7, 2009 ⋅ 3 comments

“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 [...]

Persuasion for peace

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 8, 2009 ⋅ 6 comments

Influencing individual people’s behaviour often seems to be about mundane or trivial things, such as choosing one type of magazine subscription over another, or using less shower gel in a hotel bathroom.
But if we’re honest, it’s only in aggregate that behaviour change is going to have any real effect on the world outside the [...]

Design for Conversion

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 7, 2009 ⋅ One comment

Design for Conversion: The Mobile Edition – taking place on 11th of December in Amsterdam – looks like a great conference. Organised by Arjan Haring, it’s described as “a mashup of persuasive design, principles of persuasion and evidence based marketing” and brings together user experience design, analytics and online marketing, with a ‘persuasion’ focus.
For [...]

Thoughts on the ‘fun theory’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 3, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

The ‘Piano Staircase’ from Volkswagen’s thefuntheory.com
The Fun Theory (Rolighetsteorin), a competition / campaign / initiative from Volkswagen Sweden – created by DDB Stockholm – has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks from both design-related people and other commentators with an interest in influencing behaviour: it presents a series of [...]

What’s been going on recently

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 13, 2009 ⋅ 2 comments

RSA Design Directions 2009/10
The RSA’s 2009/10 Design Directions competition has been launched, which means up and down the country there are design students and new graduates working on one of the pretty wide selection of briefs. Given the RSA’s aim of ‘removing barriers to social progress’ – with a significant commitment to using design to [...]

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