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 [...]

On ‘Design and Behaviour’ this week: Do you own your stuff? And a strange council-run ‘Virtual World for young people’

GPS-aided repo and product-service systems

Ryan Calo of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society brought up the new phenomenon of GPS-aided car repossession and the implications for the concepts of property and privacy:
A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to cars sold to customers with poor credit so as to be able [...]

A year in

It’s nearly a year since I started my PhD, (and coming up to three years since this blog was launched). Last week I had my end-of-year review, and, while I don’t often post about the minutiae of being a research student on the blog, I know that at least a few of you are in [...]

Cross-purposes?

Last week I was at a seminar where a fellow student was outlining some (very interesting) research about how to adapt ‘professional’ products to be usable by a ‘lay’ audience (what functions do you retain, what do you lose, how do you deal with different mental models? and so on)
He repeatedly referred to the importance [...]

Sarah Burwood: Tumble Sums

We’ve covered teaching machines and programmed learning textbooks a few times on the blog, and I’ll admit to a general fascination with analogue computing and similar ideas, ever since reading John Crank’s Mathematics and Industry as a teenager, after finding it in a skip (dumpster) along with a lot of other very interesting books*. It [...]

Design with Intent presentation from Persuasive 2008

Dan Lockton: Design With Intent (Persuasive 2008)
view presentation (tags: environment affordances sustainability lockton)

EDIT: I’ve now added the audio! Thanks everyone for the suggestions on how best to do it; the audio is hosted on this site rather than the Internet Archive as the buffering seemed to stall a bit too much. Let me know if [...]

Seminar, 27th May

I’ll be giving a brief seminar at Brunel on Tuesday 27th May, in advance of presenting at Persuasive 2008 – it’s a bit of a practice/rehearsal, to be honest…

Interaction design and behaviour change

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”).

Apologies for the delay to this service

You’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 [...]