Persuasion for peace

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

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’

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

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 [...]

Some interesting projects (Part 2)

Following on from Part 1, here are a couple more very interesting student projects linking design and behaviour. This time, both involve providing feedback on the impact or costs of everyday behaviours in order to get people to think.
Tim Holley’s Tio project, developed in response to a brief by Onzo, and described as ‘A Light [...]

Greengaged 2009

Been a little busy round here, continuing for the next week or so, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a post I was invited to write for Greengaged, the fantastic programme of events at the Design Council on sustainability, which took place this week. Thanks to Kate Andrews for the opportunity.
Next week: Design [...]

Design for Persuasion, 1st October, Brussels

On 1st October I’ll be talking about How to influence user behaviour: Design with Intent at the Design for Persuasion event in Brussels, alongside some great speakers including BJ Fogg, Richard Sedley and Christel De Maeyer. There are still some last-minute tickets available. Here’s a video from Christel and one from BJ about the event. [...]

September workshop sessions: invitation

As part of my PhD I’m testing different variants of the Design with Intent toolkit with designers (and design students) to find out how well different configurations work when a designer’s faced with a brief about influencing user behaviour: how useful are the ideas in inspiring solutions, and how well does using it compare to [...]

Some interesting projects (Part 1)

I’ve come across some interesting student projects at various shows and exhibitions this summer, some of which address the relationship between design and people’s behaviour in different situations, and some of which explicitly aim to influence what people do and think. Here’s a selection (Part 2 and Part 3 will follow).

Jasmine Cox’s Displacement Engine (Dundee) [...]

A survey for designers: more books to win

Following last week’s card-sorting exercise (which went really well – thanks to everyone who took part), here’s something a bit more open-ended and ongoing.
I’m trying to find out how designers and design teams (in-house or consultancies) who’ve worked on influencing user behaviour think about what they’ve done – which techniques and patterns do people recognise [...]