Very interesting discussion going on right now on the IxDA forums on designing for behavioural change - specifically with a sustainability emphasis - but unfortunately, Brunel University blocks the site (due to Websense), so I can only read/post via e-mail or at home (requests for unblocking “may take up to a week”).
Interaction design and behaviour change
Published May 2nd, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Blogosphere, Brunel, Censorship, Design, Interaction design and Signal blocking. 0 CommentsApologies for the delay to this service
Published April 22nd, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Battery vehicles, Blogosphere, Bond Minicar, Brunel, Design, Electric vehicles, Internet economics, PhD, Software and Vague rhetoric. 4 CommentsYou’re owed an apology, dear reader, for the 2-month hiatus with the blog. It’s down to a variety of reasons compounding each other, and alternately forcing me to prioritise other pressing problems, then when I tried seizing the initiative again, frustrating me with technical issues and actually preventing posting. You probably never noticed it, due to the nature of the exploit, but this blog was drawn into this nightmare of invisible insertion of hundreds of spam links into the header and footer, incorporating the URLs of dozens of other similarly attacked Wordpress blogs, redirecting to the spammers’ intended destination.
Continue reading ‘Apologies for the delay to this service’
Making users more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour
Published April 21st, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Articles, Brunel, Design, Design engineering, Designers, DwI Method, Engineering, Engineering design, Environmental, Good design, PhD, Product design, Sustainability, Technology and Technology policy. 2 Comments
I’m pleased to say that a paper I wrote earlier this year has been accepted by the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, a new journal based at Loughborough University. The publishers (Taylor & Francis) allow authors to post a preprint* version online, so here it is.
Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour [PDF, 160kb] is a brief review of approaches to designing products and systems which could shape or change users’ behaviour in an environmentally friendly way; if you’ve followed this blog, there’s probably little new in it, but it’s (hopefully) a useful summary. (At present that PDF is hosted on this website, but once Brunel allows me access to deposit papers in its institutional repository, BURA, I’ll change the above link. UPDATED: Changed link 2nd May)
Abstract: User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’.
Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energy or other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.
Keywords: ecodesign; sustainability; managing use; managing consumption;
behaviour change; sustainable innovation; persuasive technology
Until it appears in the journal (probably towards the end of 2008) I’m not sure what the guidance is on referencing, but something like Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. (2008) ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’, To appear in: International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (forthcoming) is probably about right.
*Required disclaimer:
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. © 2008 Taylor & Francis; International Journal of Sustainable Engineering is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/
Persuasive 2008
Published February 12th, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Articles, Brunel, DwI Method, Interaction design, PhD and Site Announcements. 2 Comments
I’m pleased to say that I’ll be presenting a short paper, Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context* at Persuasive 2008, the 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology, taking place from June 4th-6th in Oulu, Finland.
The paper’s a (very) brief introductory review of some of the different approaches to ‘Design with Intent‘ from various disciplines, many of which have been discussed to some extent on this website, with an attempt to relate them to persuasive technology, the field started by Stanford’s B J Fogg and his team and now rapidly developing worldwide at the intersection of interaction design and behaviour change. (The paper doesn’t get as far as the DwI Method on which I’m currently working and hoping to test in the next few months.)
This is my first stab at a conference paper, and I’m incredibly excited (and lucky) to have had it accepted; there are a lot of very helpful comments and suggested revisions from the reviewers which I will endeavour to incorporate. I’m not sure what the conference organisers’ position is on making the paper available here; certainly authors from previous Persuasive conferences have put papers on their own websites after the conference, so I expect I will do the same. The proceedings will be available as part of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
Many thanks to everyone who’s helped with my research via this site, suggesting angles to investigate and helping to clarify my thinking in this area, and to my PhD supervisors at Brunel, Professors David Harrison and Neville Stanton, for their help and support.
*Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context’.
Abstract: Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.
UPDATE (21 April): Following the precedent of some other Persuasive authors, I’ve uploaded a preprint version of the paper here: Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context [PDF, 169kb]. As required to be stated, this is a self-archived preprint version of the paper, to be presented at Persuasive 2008, June 4-6, Oulu, Finland, and published in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2008, LNCS 5033, pp. 274 – 278, 2008.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
News from Runnymede
Published October 20th, 2007 in Architecture, Brunel, Built Environment, Fulminate and Runnymede. 3 Comments
All sketches from John Thompson & Partners’ ‘Runnymede Campus Community Planning Broadsheet’ and photographs of the public presentation. Apologies for the variations in image quality and colour balance.
This post’s overdue but I wanted to have some real news (and images) rather than pure speculation.
