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 do this – the briefs are themed around design for social benefit, addressing issues ranging from helping an ageing workforce to helping new architecture graduates apply their skills in other contexts.

A couple of the briefs are explicitly about design for behaviour change, and thanks to working with Jamie Young of the RSA’s Design & Behaviour project on some ideas for briefs earlier this year, the Design with Intent toolkit is explicitly referenced as a ‘resource’ for the Independence Days brief on ‘reinventing assistive technology’ (sponsored by the Technology Strategy Board) and A matter of life…, a brief about improving patient compliance with taking prescribed medication (sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline). Both of these are very noble causes and I hope the Design with Intent patterns are useful inspiration in some small way; I look forward to seeing some of the results!

Design Approach worksheet

Nedra Kline Weinreich, author of Hands-on Social Marketing, has created a fantastic Design Approach for Behaviour Change worksheet based on the 12 design patterns from my Design with Intent toolkit poster.

By re-framing each of the patterns as a question – e.g. “How can you provide a cue to action at the appropriate time?” for kairos (discussed by BJ Fogg in his original book, Persuasive Technology) – Nedra turns the patterns more directly into cues for action themselves for a design team to brainstorm or think about. After working through the questions, asking each of them about the behaviour problem you’re working on, you pretty much end up with a set of possible solutions: this is a very clever way to structure the idea generation process. (As such I’ve added a link to Nedra’s worksheet to the DwI intro page of this site.)

Inspired by Nedra’s thinking, the next version of the DwI toolkit, which I’m putting together at present, will have a question element to each of the patterns.

Design for Persuasion conference, Brussels

At the beginning of October I was honoured to be invited to speak at Design for Persuasion, a new conference taking place at the impressive Belgacom Surfhouse in Brussels, organised (very well) by Christel de Maeyer and BJ Fogg.

The event was mainly directed towards ‘new media’ persuasion and design, focusing on practical applications rather than academic studies, and featured some great presentations from people such as Richard Sedley (who kindly took the above photo for me!), Amy Shuen, Bart de Waele (whose excellent ‘Addictive Websites’ slides you can see here), and other expert practitioners. Many of the presentations are on Slideshare; there are also some very nice photos on Flickr from Katrien Degreef.

Here’s my presentation (below) with a transcript here and image credits here. The handout (picture above right) I refer to is here [PDF].

Many thanks to Christel and BJ for organising this, and to the great people I talked to, including Nynke, Marijn and Arjan.

A pleasing statistic

Thanks to readers of this blog, the DwI toolkit v.0.9 poster [PDF] I originally posted back in April is at time of writing, the most-downloaded document ever from Brunel University’s institutional repository, BURA. (Much, much more than any of our other papers, too!)

With 28,000 downloads since it went on BURA, plus another 5,000 or so directly from the blog before I changed where the link pointed, and probably a few directly from Google Books (as well as a handful of at-cost sales of the physical printed poster) it gives me an incredibly warm feeling to think that so many people all over the world have found it interesting enough to read (and hopefully – in at least some cases! – use) it. Please do let me know (in the comments, or by email) if you’ve found it useful (or useless), what problems you’ve applied it to, how you think it could be improved, and so on, or have a go at the survey.

The next version (v.0.95) will take a different form (cards – which some of you will have tried out in a couple of workshops) and include some new patterns, as well as ‘question’ phrasing as mentioned above. I hope to have this available to download (or buy as a card deck) by the end of 2009.

Thanks again for making the DwI toolkit a success!

Things which slipped by without me writing about them much here

The last few months have been very busy for me as I rush to progress the PhD in sufficient depth and breadth while still doing other things, and I’m aware that I haven’t talked much about all this on the blog. I’ve been to the DiGRA conference and had great discussions with Ian Bogost and Sebastian Deterding; I’ve been to dConstruct and talked to Adam Greenfield; been to Greengaged and blogged about it for the site; been to a conference on Naturalistic Decision-Making and got some incisive advice from Gary Klein himself; and am about to present this paper [PDF] at Sustainable Innovation ’09. With the help of some great participants (including Frankie who interviewed me here!) I’ve also managed to complete a series of Design with Intent workshops in which we’ve addressed a range of behaviour change briefs. The results of these workshops will be reported on here at some point soon, I promise!

So, stay tuned: as winter approaches, and sitting in front of a warm, glowing rectangle becomes more appealing, I will endeavour to blog more often and about more real examples of design with intent in the wild, a bit more like the blog used to be. Thanks for sticking with me.

Tim Holley’s Tio project, developed in response to a brief by Onzo, and described as ‘A Light Switch to Help Children Save Energy’ – deservedly won the HSBC Sustainability Prize at the Made in Brunel show:

“Children play a key role in reducing energy consumption due to the fact that they will be among the key decision-makers in the next 30 years. A simple way to engage and educate them is to concentrate on lighting, which accounts for up to 15% of electricity use in the home. The target market for Tio is 7-11 year-olds. This coincides with a period in primary education during which children begin to learn about the environment, energy and the effects that humans are having on the world. Tio [...]allow[s] children to demonstrate their knowledge of energy conservation to their family and encourage their role as ‘energy champions’ of the home. Tio has the potential to reduce lighting-use by up to 25%, resulting in an energy saving of up to 11% over a five year period…

The wall-mounted light switch[...] controls the lighting in the child’s room. Tio is soft and tactile, thus encourages user interaction. The character of ‘Tio’ displayed on the light switch encourages children to turn their lights off: Tio is happy when the lights have only been on for a short period of time. The longer they are left on, the angrier he becomes. This acts as an emotional reminder to turn the lights off…

The recommended ‘lights-on time’ is influenced by the child’s age, their daily activities and the time of day. [...] Information (‘lights-on’ time) is sent wirelessly from the wall switch to a computer. The computer programme allows the child to track their lighting-use performance over an extended period of time. The child takes care of a ‘virtual tree’ by moderating their lighting-use performance. This engages children to make a personal contribution to reducing energy consumption.”

There are some clever ideas in there, including pester-power (“Make sure your parents turn off their lights too”) and, from a Design with Intent toolkit point of view, some of the patterns you might be able to identify include affective engagement, self-monitoring, material properties and metaphors. There’s some neat product detailing too, such as the way Tio’s expressions are formed by different patterns of LEDs being illuminated under the translucent case.

Tim was a very useful and insightful tester of an earlier version of the Design with Intent toolkit back in autumn 2008 (as part of the pilot study reported in this co-authored paper [direct PDF link]) so it’s great to see his project get such recognition. He’s now working for Onzo in product R&D strategy and has some exciting and ambitious plans for the future: as a very talented young designer bringing together creative user-centred design and technology expertise with an eye for business strategy, I’m sure Tim will go far.

Across London at Goldsmiths, Alexander Kirchmann’s ‘Lehman’s Inheritance’ project aims “to create and design products, that can help an individual to manage the [economic] crisis” such as this pint glass with cost markings (right). As Alexander puts it, “my products are the inheritance of the crash… By exposing people to their spending and also to their earnings my design is saving the owner money.”

This is an incredibly simple project (at least the example that’s illustrated – I’d be interested to know what other products Alexander modified / created). But the impact of exposing costs in this way – self-monitoring without any special equipment – could be very effective. In some of the recent workshops I’ve run with designers and students, similarly low-tech feedback concepts have been suggested for problems such as reducing water wastage (sinks with scales marked on them) and reducing overfilling of electric kettles.

More projects coming up in Part 3.

Images from the websites linked.

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 to track them down more easily in the event of repossession.

…this practice also relates to an emerging phenomenon wherein sold property remains oddly connected to the seller as though it were merely leased. Whereas once we purchased an album and did with it as we please, today we need to register (up to five) devices in order to play our songs.

…and Kingston University’s Rosie Hornbuckle linked this to the concept of product-service systems:

This puts a whole new slant on product-service-systems, a current (and popular) sustainability methodology whereby people are weaned off the concept of owning products, instead they lease them off the manufacturer who is then responsible for take-back, repair, recycling or disposal. So in that scenario it’s quite likely that a manufacturer will want to keep tabs on their equipment/material, will this bring up privacy issues or is it simply the case that if it’s done overtly (and not in the negative frame of potential repossession), the customer knows about it and agrees, it’s ok? Or will it be a long time before people can overcome the perceived encroachment on their liberty that not owning might bring?

It reminds me of something Bill Thompson suggested to me once, that (paraphrasing) the idea that we ‘own’ the technology we use might well turn out to be a short phase in overall human history. That could perhaps be ‘good’ in contexts where sharing/renting/pooling things allows much greater efficiency and brings benefits for users. Nevertheless, as the repossession example (and DRM, etc, in general) show, the tendency in practice is often to use these methods to exert increasing dominance over users, erode assumed rights, and extract more value from people who no longer have control of the things they use.

See the whole thread so far (and join in!)

Above image of GPS trails (unrelated to the story, but a cool picture) from cmpalmer’s Flickr

The Mosquito, and plans for an odd ‘walk-in virtual world’

Rosie discussed the Mosquito (above image: an example outside a McDonald’s opposite Windsor Castle*) and asked “could we use our design skills and knowledge to influence these sorts of behaviours with a less aggressive and longer-term approach?” while Adrian Short summed up the issue pretty well:

There are a lot of problems in principle and in practice with these devices, but the core problem for me is that they tend to be directed at users rather than uses (i.e. people by identity, not behaviour) and are entirely arbitrary. The street outside a shop is public space and the shop owners have no more right than anyone else to dictate who goes there.

In as much as these things work (which is highly disputed), they are never going to encourage a meaningful debate about norms of behaviour among users of a space. This approach is not so much negotiation as warfare.

Sutton’s Rosehill steps (which Adrian let me know about originally) were also discussed and Adrian brought us the story of something very odd: a ‘virtual world to teach good behaviour to young people’:

Half a mile away, the same council is proposing to spend at least £4 million on a facility that will include a high-tech virtual street environment, a “street simulator” if you like, to teach safety and good behaviour to some of the same young people.
…
“Part movie-set, part theme park, the learning complex will be the first of its kind in the UK and will also house an indoor street with shop fronts, pavements and a road. The idea is to give young people the confidence to make the best of their lives and have a positive impact on their peers and their local community.”

I don’t really know what to make of that. I actually woke up this morning thinking about it assuming that it was a dream I’d been having, then realised where I’d read about it. It sounds like a mish-mash of Scaramanga’s Fun House from The Man With The Golden Gun and the Ludovico Centre** from A Clockwork Orange.

See the whole thread here.

*This particular McDonald’s, with the Mosquito going every evening and clearly audible to me and my girlfriend (both mid-20s) also features a vicious array of anti-sit spikes (below) which rather negate the ‘welcoming’ efforts made with the flowerbed.

**I actually gave a talk about my research to Environmentally Sensitive Design students in this building a couple of weeks ago: it’s Brunel’s main Lecture Centre.

Certainly when I was deciding whether a not a PhD was the ‘right’ thing to do after a couple of years of pretty diverse peripatetic freelancing, the efforts of other bloggers – especially this article by Tom Coates (and the appended comments) – and Rich Watts’ blog, were very helpful and gave me some great, and sometimes sobering, insights. More recently, these posts by the polymathic Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker have given well-justified discourse on moving on from academia, even more pertinent because of their design/art-technology emphasis. (The ‘disciplinarity boundaries’ issue, which vexes me so much, has been addressed in this context by Julian more than once; Roberto Greco has a comprehensive review of more thinking on this issue, too).

Anyway, here’s (mildly edited to remove some commercial and personal information) the report I prepared, rather hurriedly, on what’s been accomplished in the first year, and what’s still to come:

Dan Lockton, Cleaner Electronics Research Group
Start date: September 2007
Design for Sustainable Behaviour
Review, end of Year 1, August 2008

Summary: Design can be used to influence users’ behaviour.

By applying techniques from a variety of fields, it’s possible to design systems which help users to reduce the environmental impact of using them: effectively, making users more efficient by designing for behaviour change.

This project aims to develop and test a method for assisting designers to create behaviour-changing products and services in this area, and then run user trials with prototypes, to determine which approaches are actually most effective at changing users’ behaviour, and reducing energy or other resource use.

Background

As part of my Master’s degree, I researched the concept of architectures of control, ways in which systems have been designed to influence users to interact with them in certain ways, often coercively, to match political or corporate agendas [1]. Subsequently, alongside working as a freelance designer/engineer/researcher, I continued to develop this research independently, primarily via a blog [2] which has gained a fairly diverse audience across the design, technology, media and social science fields.

The scope gradually broadened, becoming more positive in the process, to encompass what I’ve since termed design with intent – strategic design intended to influence user behaviour, including helping users achieve their own goals as well as those of society. This last point is important, since many social problems – particularly environmental ones – can be seen as a result of user behaviour.

It was with this background that I discussed the possibility of a PhD investigating ‘Reducing the environmental impact of products by using design to change user behaviour’ (or, more succinctly, design for sustainable behaviour) with David Harrison, and was pleased to return to Brunel Design as part of the Cleaner Electronics Research Group, with funding from the Ormsby Trust, in September 2007.

Research phase 1a: Literature and practice review

The first phase of the PhD involved investigating, comparing and characterising ‘design with intent’ techniques via examples from a wide range of fields, including human-computer interaction, manufacturing engineering and urban planning as well as product design.

Many practitioners and theorists have touched on aspects of this area from different directions without describing its full extent, and indeed, to understand this, I’ve had to acquire at least some working knowledge of concepts from a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, ecological and social psychology, behavioural economics, human-computer interaction, communication studies, science & technology studies, rhetoric, information architecture, semiotics, security engineering and quality management, alongside a deeper education in the principles of interaction design and ergonomics, to which I’d only tangentially been exposed as an undergraduate design student.

The output of this phase of the research was the paper ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ [3] (see below).

Research phase 1b: Initial development of the Design with Intent method

The intention of the review of techniques is to enable the development of a ‘suggestion engine’ –the Design with Intent method – for designers working in sustainable and environmentally sensitive design, integrating ideas from different fields to assist the selection and application of design techniques which influence user behaviour. The method itself can be applied to many social problems in which the design of systems (products, services, environments) affects user behaviour, but the focus of the testing will be (at least for this PhD!) on applying it to issues where user behaviour, particularly with energy-using products, affects the environment significantly.

The reasoning behind this, and discussion of its applicability to environmental problems, resulted in the paper ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ [4] (see below).

The approach taken is that certain target behaviours can be identified, and described in the abstract, with different design techniques being applicable to each one. A user behaviour ‘problem’ described in terms of one or more of the target behaviours will, using the suggestion engine, result in the designer being presented with a number of relevant techniques, with examples of each technique being applied in different contexts.

The initial development produced a rather TRIZ-like method, using a tree structure to match target behaviours to relevant design techniques, and my own paper-based run-throughs indicate that it seems to work in terms of generating new design ideas. This is described briefly in the poster I presented at Brunel’s ReSCon [5].

Research phase 2: Testing and refinement of the Design with Intent method (current)

The aim of testing the method is to determine: a) to what extent it is useful to designers addressing user behaviour problems in sustainable design; and b) how the method can be improved. In terms of a), the comparison is with an unstructured brainstorming-type method: does the Design with Intent method offer anything beyond this? Would it perhaps be better implemented as a reference book, a ‘design for sustainable behaviour manual’, rather than a ‘suggestion engine’?

As a precursor to practical testing, in July 2008 I explained and ran through the tree-structure method with two directors and the studio manager of Live|Work [6], a major service design consultancy in London specialising in socially beneficial design solutions for both public- and private-sector clients. The feedback – from exactly the kind of designers I envisage being the ultimate users of the method – was extremely useful, and resulted in a significant redesign of the way the method is presented, moving from a tree structure to a series of concentric rings which allow easier creative exploration of ‘related’ design techniques and target behaviours. This redesigned method, along with some revised (simplified) terminology, is what will be tested.

The testing programme is intended to involve both design students and design consultancies: this is the best way of assessing its usefulness both to existing designers in the context of commercial constraints, and the next generation of designers in an academic setting. The method will be refined as a result of the testing.

First, a pilot study is being arranged with individual design students/recent graduates, using a think-aloud protocol, with all guidance and assistance recorded, primarily to identify points that need clarification or potential problems that may arise. The plan for this study is being written at present (August 2008) and, subject to approval, should be reasonably quick to undertake.

The full study will take the form of workshop sessions in the Autumn term, probably with Level 3 Design students. Participants will be introduced to the method, and, in separate groups, assigned ‘sustainable user behaviour’ problems, with the method there to guide them in generating solutions. (The control will not have the method.) The group interactions and creative process will be recorded and assessed, as will all the output; the specifics of this study have not yet been decided.

A possibility has also arisen to apply the method to one of a consultancy’s client projects, in due course, which has significant potential for testing the method’s worth under more market-based constraints, in a real design consultancy. Other consultancies will also be approached.

Research phase 3: Application of the method

The usefulness of the method will best be tested by the quality of the concepts it generates, so the aim of this phase of the research is to build (prototype) and run user trials comparing products developed by applying the method to a particular problem (users overfilling kettles is a favourite, but there are many possibilities).

This will allow quantitative assessment of the actual energy used by different products, by representative users, in use, over a period, to provide some information about the effectiveness of different techniques in that context, as well as qualitative feedback on usability and other issues. This information can then be used to refine the method further, so that, for example, details of the relative effectiveness of different techniques can be incorporated.

Contributions to knowledge

The project will address these questions, reformulated as appropriate:

• How can users’ behaviour be changed, through redesign of systems, to reduce environmental impact?
• How significant are the impact reductions, and what technology and human factors issues affect the implementations?

It’s hoped that the process of investigating and answering these questions, will constitute an original, distinct and useful contribution to knowledge, and that the Design with Intent method — however it evolves — will prove useful to designers working in the field of behaviour change in society in general. Since the ‘suggestion engine’ of the method is effectively an ‘innovation engine’, it is envisaged that worthwhile intellectual property may also result.

Research output and academic development

Two papers (one journal article, one published conference paper) have so far resulted from the research, and thanks primarily to visitors from the blog, have achieved significant visibility on BURA (top paper and 3rd highest number of views in June, and still currently the highest average views per author):

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’. International Journal of Sustainable Engineering Vol.1 No. 1, pp. 3-8, March 2008 [3]

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context’. in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): Persuasive 2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5033, pp. 274-278, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2008 [4]

As a result of the IJSE paper, I was asked to become a reviewer for the journal and have so far reviewed one submission.

I have presented at two external conferences, Persuasive 2008: The Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology, in Oulu, Finland, in June, the costs of which were partially funded by receiving a Vice-Chancellor’s Travel Prize (presentation: ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ [7]) and New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, in July (presentation: ‘Design with Intent: behaviour-shaping through design’ [8]). I also presented a poster [5] at Brunel’s ReSCon (and the Graduate School poster competition) which provided a good opportunity to try explaining the research to more engineering-focused visitors, and has (I hope) helped me understand how to improve the clarity needed to present research in poster form.

The invitation to present at Lancaster came as one of the organisers has been following the research via my blog; it’s hoped that this kind of visibility can help even further as the research progresses. At present I have an invitation to present at Design|Behaviour: Making it Happen at Loughborough in October.

I also attended a doctoral consortium organised by the Universities of Oulu (Finland) and Aalborg (Denmark) prior to the Persuasive conference, and the networking and discussion with other researchers working in similar areas of design, computer science and psychology were extremely useful and have dramatically expanded and sharpened the focus of my thinking. I now have contacts at a number of institutions and companies internationally who are interested in the research and some of whom may be, in time, potential collaborators. During the year I’ve tried hard to attend and participate in as many relevant events as possible, both to meet other researchers involved in related fields, and to learn more about how academia and practising designers work together – a partial list:

• Anthrodesign & UX Meetup, London, Sept 2007
• BSI Manufacture, Assembly, Disassembly, and End-of-life Processing standards meeting, Sept 2007
• EPSRC Network on Product Life Spans seminar, Sheffield Hallam, Sept 2007, with Alex Plant
• Sustainable Design Network seminar ‘Envisioning a Sustainable Future’, Nottingham, Dec 2007
• Meeting at University of Bath with Dr Elies Dekoninck and Ed Elias to discuss similar research areas, June 2008
• Attended meeting with Staffan Davidsson (Volvo Cars), Dr Mark Young and Stewart Birrell, June 2008
• Interviewed by Jamie Young (Imperial College) for behavioural change policy research, July 2008
• OpenTech open innovation & technology conference, London, July 2008
• The Affective in Sustainable Design, seminar, Central St Martins, July 2008
• RSA lecture by Richard Thaler, author of Nudge, London, July 2008

At Brunel, I also gave a seminar in June 2008 as preparation for presenting in Finland, and received some very useful feedback.

In terms of parallel activities at Brunel, as well as the Graduate School and SED induction training modules, I’ve completed the Graduate Training Assistant training, and the Graduate School’s Entrepreneurship Masterclass, and have helped assess Level 3 Environmentally Sensitive Design group projects. During the Spring term I assisted with the weekly Level 2 Electronics labs and also marked some of the final assignments, which has given me a good insight into how all this works. I’d welcome the opportunity to be involved further with Design teaching in the next couple of years.

I am excited and enthusiastic about the years ahead, and the opportunities they present, and would like to thank everyone who’s helped me so far.

[1] Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=908493
[2] Architectures of Control / Design with Intent blog: http://danlockton.co.uk
[3] Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2138
[4] Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2137
[5] Available at http://danlockton.co.uk/research/poster_DL.ai.pdf
[6] Live|Work website: http://www.livework.co.uk
[7] Available at http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2008/06/09/design-with-intent-presentation-slide/
[8] Not yet available online

I passed the review OK, but it was made clear that I really ought to have a more formal, critical literature review, at least in draft, done by now, pertinent to the actual intended contributions to knowledge, and explaining the ‘hole’ in current knowledge and previous work that I’m aiming to fill. Of course, I’ve done plenty of reviewing what’s out there, but given the amount of new avenues and relevant theories I seem to come across weekly, it’s been difficult to draw it all together coherently, and I’ll admit I’ve been putting it off. Perhaps now it’s time to do it properly, along with a ‘contents page’ for the thesis, alongside organising the pilot studies of the DwI method (more on which on the blog in the near future). Yes, deciding what to leave out is going to be hard, but that’s part of the point.

Thanks again to everyone who’s helped this year: having the collective experience of hundreds of intelligent blog readers from many disciplines to draw on and inspire the research has really made the whole thing so much more dynamic, somehow.

He repeatedly referred to the importance of ‘user experience’ throughout the presentation, and it took me a while to realise that he was not talking about UX, but “the degree of prior knowledge/understanding a user has, having dealt with similar products/systems”. That made a whole lot more sense. Yet no-one else in the room – including a number of people with backgrounds in human-centred design – asked about or pointed out this (quite important) difference.

It made me think: how often in science, technology – indeed any subject – are people talking about very different things yet using the same terminology? Do they realise they’re doing it? And can this ever be used as a deliberate provocation tactic to generate new ideas or ways of looking at things? Can we think of third and fourth meanings for terms that might give us insights? (E.g. with ‘user experience’, can we think of the ‘experience’ a product has with a user – his or her quirks, errors, misperceptions and so on – rather than the other way round? Is that ever helpful?)

But I digress. A lot of the fascination comes from seeing a different way to explain a concept to someone else: a structured, alternative form of learning or understanding a problem, which is, somehow, immensely satisfying. There’s always the glint of a possibility that if we could find different ways to explain difficult or complex subjects, more people might be able to understand and appreciate them.

Sarah Burwood, a graduating Industrial Design student showing her work at Made in Brunel this week, has created Tumble Sums, a ‘Child’s Mechanical Visual Calculator’:

Helping children understand fundamental mathematical principles, Tumble Sums is a calculating tool which visually shows a child how an answer is being reached. Calculations are solved in a physical way, based solely on mechanical operations. Tumble Sums focuses on an understanding of the way children think, their mathematical understanding and the psychology behind these aspects.

It looks to be beautifully machined from acrylic sections, and that height alone makes it extremely imposing. Imagine one of these at the back of every primary-school classroom!

This concept of making hidden processes visible in order to aid the construction of the user’s mental models is something that will, I think, be an important component of lots of more advanced interfaces in the years ahead, particularly in areas where, fundamentally, we’re bad at understanding the consequences of our actions (environment, health, finances). It’s maybe allied to constructionism, though by no means the same idea.

*Incidentally, the morning I first turned up at Brunel again as a PhD student, I sat in the wonderful garden John Crank had created, reading Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, waiting for the doors to the building to be unlocked.

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 you have any problems.

I’ve put my presentation from Persuasive 2008 on SlideShare, – because of the visual style it really needs to be listened to, or viewed alongside the text (below, or in the comments when viewing it on the SlideShare site). Alternatively, just download it [PPT, 11.6 Mb] – it comes with the notes.

P.S. The slide about defaults, with the alarm clock stuck on 12:00, is meant to show it flashing – the actual PPT file uses an animated GIF – but SlideShare’s conversion process seems to have lost this element.*

1. I’m Dan Lockton, from Brunel University in London, and I’m going to be talking about what we call ‘Design with Intent’. It’s effectively Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context.

2. Persuasive Technology is an example of design that’s intended to result in certain user behaviour.
It’s design with intent.

3. If we cast our net a bit more widely, we can see that this idea recurs across many areas of design: solutions employed in one context are often applicable to others. Our research involves developing a tool to help designers match applicable design techniques to a range of ‘target behaviours’, and we’re ultimately going to be applying this to ecodesign, guiding more sustainable product use.

4. In this presentation we’ll look at a series of Design with Intent examples across different fields not normally considered part of Persuasive Technology, then see how the ideas of PT and DwI fit together. Then I’ll quickly describe how our work’s progressed since the paper was written.

5. Before getting started, have a look at these so-called ‘anti-loitering’ benches in Oxford, England – designed to prevent users actually sitting down, as the council freely admits. The seats are too high to sit properly and curved so you slide off if you try – you can ‘perch’, but that’s it. But there’s a worthwhile lesson right here: whatever the designers’ intent might be…

6. …people will find their own ways of using things. It’s easier to bend metal than to twist arms.

7. OK. In Human-Computer Interaction, as in Product Design, the main expressions of Design with Intent relate to designing specific affordances and constraints to guide users: shaping users’ perceptions of what actions are possible, and making some actions intentionally more difficult or impossible.

8. You can ‘design out’ affordances you don’t want the user to have – constraining the options available – here, to just ‘OK’, even if the user’s not OK with that – but it doesn’t always make for the best usability.

9. Or you can be a bit cleverer, and use a forcing function (a term coined by Donald Norman) – design the system so that the ‘right’ behaviour must occur before the user can take the next step. The example here is an interlock on a Toyota: to prevent the driver starting the car while it’s in gear, the ‘Start’ button is inoperative…

10. …unless the clutch pedal is held down…

11. …while the button’s pressed. I’ll admit it took me a while to figure that one out.

12. The best-known everyday safety interlock is on the microwave oven…

13. …where it will not operate unless the door is closed. Forcing functions generally aren’t subtle. They’re tending towards the coercive side of persuasion, but because they usually help us achieve something we want, such as keeping us safe, we don’t seem to mind too much.

14. Some affordance-manipulation can be a bit more subtly persuasive. Russell Beale, a computer scientist, used the term ‘Slanty Design’ to describe design which makes certain actions slightly more difficult, to discourage them. For example, these cigarette bins are sold on the basis that they have sloping tops not for aesthetic reasons, but so people don’t just leave cigarettes or litter on top of them.

15. Another aspect of affordance/constraint thinking is the persuasive power of defaults. We all know that many users leave settings exactly how they are, or simply choose the most prominent option: as designers, we can harness this power of choice architecture – as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe it – to persuade users into making the ‘right’ choices.

16. Imagine if all washing machines simply defaulted to the most efficient cycle (maybe even sensing the load to determine this). This is, again, subtle persuasion, but could have a big impact on users’ behaviour.

17. Now, in manufacturing, it’s crucial that assembly workers follow the right procedure when building something. To a large extent these are similar problems to those we’ve just seen – we want the ‘user’ (in this case that worker) to take certain actions, probably in a certain order. Every ‘mistake’ ends up costing the company money, in one way or another. Shigeo Shingo, a Japanese engineer, believed that with clever enough ‘defensive’ design, based on observation of workers, it was possible to eliminate assembly defects altogether. He called it Poka-yoke – mistake-proofing, and many of the ideas parallel those of affordances and constraints.

18. We’re used to seeing one of the very simplest poka-yoke methods every day – the ‘snipped’ corner on SIM cards, memory cards, and so, on…

19. …which prevent ‘assembly’ errors by ensuring that they can only be inserted into devices one way.

20. This is a control poka-yoke – it actually prevents the error from occurring. These are effectively forcing functions, as discussed earlier.

21. Shingo also used warning poka-yokes extensively, where a worker (or a user) is alerted to an error condition – something’s not in the right place, or is missing, or fitted incorrectly. The seatbelt warning light here indicates to the driver that a seatbelt is not buckled. This kind of immediate feedback on user behaviour is an example of suggestion-at-the-right-moment, or kairos, as defined in Persuasive Technology. It’s the right moment to warn the driver to fasten the seat belt.

22. Volvo for many years offered a gearchange suggestion light, which (based on monitoring engine RPM and throttle position), ‘suggested’ to the driver when he or she should change gear, to ensure the best economy. That’s a simple, clever persuasive technology: it makes ‘correct’ behaviour easier by guiding the user.

23. The idea that designers might ‘inscribe’ intended behaviours into artefacts has, in various forms, been subject to some philosophical and sociological debate. Johan Redström, developing an argument by Richard Buchanan, has suggested that since all artefacts are designed with some vision or intention of how they are ultimately to be used, it may be that all design is persuasive.

24. The presence of a chair persuades me to sit down where I might not have done otherwise. Designing the chair to appear more comfortable makes it even more likely. And so on.

25. Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich have discussed the idea that designers can ‘script’ behaviours into artefacts. Jaap Jelsma gives the example of a dual-button toilet flush as seen here, which effectively scripts users into making a decision about their water usage. There is no default, quite deliberately; the user must make some kind of decision.

26. This discussion has many expressions in urban planning, in fact: how much does architecture control us? Langdon Winner asked ‘Do artefacts have politics?’

27. His most famous examples were these very low overpasses built over a number of parkways on Long Island, by Robert Moses – too low for buses to pass underneath, with the effect of making it more difficult for poorer people to visit the Jones Beach State Park.

28. But there’s always the danger in this area of ascribing to malice what might more reasonably be explained by other factors, and the use of Moses’ bridges as the eminent ‘artefacts with politics’ example has been challenged in recent years by a number of authors.

29. Nevertheless, it is clear that some artefacts do have politics. We saw those perch benches in Oxford earlier on. Now, rough sleeping, by the homeless or otherwise, is frowned upon by many public authorities.

30. Sometimes benches with central armrests are installed specifically to attempt to stop this behaviour, especially at airports and railway stations.

31. Some models of bench are even sold to authorities on the basis that they will ‘discourage overnight stays’.

32. Not that some users can’t find a way round this…

33. Not all such techniques are so ‘anti-user’. Spaces and seating arrangements can be designed to be sociopetal, that is, to persuade people to interact – the simplest technique is to face seats towards each other…

34. …it doesn’t always work, of course.

35. Transposing the ‘architectures of control’ concept to the digital world, Lawrence Lessig used the phrase “Code is law” to explain how the structure of the internet, and what actions are possible, effectively regulates and shapes behaviour online, regardless of what laws may actually apply. If the system makes it easy to copy music, it will happen. Simplicity is persuasive.

36. So-called technological protection measures such as digital rights management – DRM – can be seen as attempts by companies to lock down the freedom of behaviour afforded by the internet, and persuade consumers into adhering to specific business models drawn up in an offline world.

37. Some of the most prevalent efforts at designing persuasion are for purely commercial benefit. Aside from advertising itself…

38. …there are strategies such as the razor-blade model, where a product is designed to persuade the consumer into repeat purchases of consumables, by locking him or her into a particular format. Electronic authentication makes this easier to enforce: for example, some printers include a ‘handshake’ which ensures that only the original manufacturer’s (usually higher-priced) cartridges can be used. Such strategies tend towards the coercive side of persuasion.

39. So, that was a very quick run-through of examples and ideas from a range of disciplines. I hope you can see how the Design with Intent idea runs through it all. But how does the field of Persuasive Technology, as it is defined, fit with this? Much PT research focuses on persuasion with intended social benefit – such as improving health – but much persuasion in the world as a whole is about intended commercial benefit. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive, of course: a fitness equipment manufacturer or a gym persuading people to exercise fulfils both social and commercial benefit intentions.

40. So, it makes sense to think of these as two separate dimensions of the ‘Design with Intent’ space.
Another aspect is whether the impact on the immediate user is helpful or not. This is where some persuasion techniques may fall down: it might be better for society, in terms of energy saving, if you can’t put your TV on standby any more, but it’s likely to inconvenience you. This is the grey area above. So if this space represents all Design with Intent, then maybe PT, as it’s defined, is the area outlined with the dashed line: it’s centred on intended social benefit, usually (but not always) helpful to the immediate user, and possibly with intended commercial benefit too. Still, this is only one way of visualising the relationship: as the boundaries of Persuasive Technology as a field are debated and redrawn, we may find that visualisations illustrating other aspects, such as coercion vs. persuasion, and so on, become useful.

41. Going beyond what’s in the paper now, over the last few months we’ve considered and analysed many different examples from different fields, and have tried to classify these techniques to understand them better and synthesize similar ideas.

42. The techniques pretty much fall into five ‘approaches’ which, though always open to debate, are useful in defining the mind-set a designer might have in approaching the problem.

43. These techniques have then been incorporated into a ‘suggestion tool’, which, given a target behaviour, allows designers to explore applicable techniques.

44. …The target behaviours are abstract descriptions, but can be applied to many different problems; each breaks down further into more specific target behaviours.

45. The next stage of our research will be testing out this suggestion tool, both in practical workshop sessions with design students and then with design consultancies… and with an online version, too.
After that, the aim is to do user trials with prototype ‘persuasive’ products developed as a result of applying the suggestion tool to sustainable behaviour problems, comparing how well different techniques actually work in practice in terms of changing behaviour, saving energy or reducing waste.

46. To conclude, I hope this brief review of Design with Intent has been interesting, and more importantly, inspirational in terms of suggesting examples of behaviour-shaping design beyond the immediate Persuasive Technology field. Our research is only at a very early stage, but we hope in due course to be able to present some concrete results, applying ‘Design with Intent’ thinking to guiding user behaviour, specifically in sustainable design.

47. In the meantime, if you’re interested, please do have a look at the research blog – at danlockton.co.uk. Thanks for listening.

All photographs/images by Dan Lockton except:
Slide 6 – Oxford Cornmarket bench with teenagers – Stephanie Jenkins -
http://www.headington.org.uk/oxon/cornmarket/new_seat.htm
Slide 14 – two catalogue images – New Pig Corporation –
http://www.newpig.com
Slide 22 – Volvo 340/360 dashboard – Volvo 300 Mania forums –
http://www.volvo300mania.com/
Slide 27 – Wantagh Parkway overpass – Peacenic on Flickr –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68841932@N00/73241931
Slide 28 – Jones Beach approach – New York Architecture –
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/BKN/BKN001.htm
Slide 29 – Sleeping on a Hyde Park Bench – David Basanta on Flickr –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbasanta/2093742562
Slide 31 – Georgetown bench – Belson Outdoors –
http://web.archive.org/web/20040417173248/http://www.belson.com/gbrec.htm
Slide 32 – ‘Happy homeless’ – Rick Abbott on Flickr –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickabbott/81779858

This presentation was given by Dan Lockton at Persuasive 2008, Oulu, Finland on 6 June 2008, based on the paper: Lockton, D, Harrison, D. and Stanton, N.: Design with intent: Persuasive technology in a wider context, in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (eds.): Persuasive 2008, LNCS 5033. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2008. pp. 274 – 278.

A preprint version is available free from http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2138

*The clock is a Mayhem Aurora, designed by Rob Leeks and Matt Chapman, and in reality does not flash when the time isn’t set. But I didn’t have a VCR handy to photograph…

Seminar Announcement:
Using design to shape user behaviour:
Design with Intent and Persuasive Technology

Dan Lockton, Cleaner Electronics Research Group
27th May 2008, 11.00a.m. (Approx. length 45 mins)
Room TA049 – Tower A, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH

Everyone welcome.

Design can be used to persuade, guide and shape users’ behaviour. Anything designed for user interaction can be designed to embody intended ‘target’ behaviours, whether for socially beneficial or purely commercial reasons.

The emerging interaction design field of Persuasive Technology incorporates some of these ideas, mainly applying them to software and motivational games which guide users to change their behaviour for socially beneficial reasons, e.g. keeping fit (Brunel’s Gillian Swan’s ‘Square-Eyes‘ project has been cited in some of the literature) or giving up smoking.

Taking a much broader look across product design, engineering, architecture and computer science, a range of approaches to designing for intended behaviour emerges, and a more general concept of ‘Design with Intent’ can be identified, with techniques from one discipline being applicable in others. My research specifically involves guiding more environmentally friendly product use – Design for Sustainable Behaviour – but the development of a general model for Design with Intent, matching target behaviours with suggested design solutions, is an important part of this.

The seminar comprises two short presentations I’ll be giving at Persuasive 2008, in Oulu, Finland, in the first week of June. It’s a practice run, if you like, but it will be extremely useful to get feedback and reaction from a Brunel audience, and I hope it’ll be interesting and inspirational.

1. Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context
This is a paper to be presented at the conference, and appearing in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (eds.): Persuasive 2008, LNCS 5033. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2008. pp. 274 – 278

2. Kairos: Just-in-Time Feedback as a Design with Intent technique
This is an invited presentation to be given at the doctoral consortium which forms part of the conference.

Dan Lockton (Year 1 PhD student)
Daniel.Lockton@brunel.ac.uk | http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk (research blog)

Supervisors: Professor David Harrison, Professor Neville Stanton

Thanks to Lyn Edgecock and everyone who’s helped set this up.

One of the major tensions I find with WordPress is between the benefits of an upgrade (which may be invisible to the user) and the downsides of a load of plugins suddenly malfunctioning. When you have many plugins activated, and have designed the blog around the functionality some of them provide, the cascade of failures and odd effects which occur with an upgrade can be quite a lot of hassle; I wonder to what extent this tension controls (holds back) the rate at which bloggers do upgrade, and hence allows security holes to persist. Still, I guess I can always get a refund if I don’t like it.

Some bloggers seem to be permanently in the right state of mind to rattle off insightful, quality posts every day or couple of days. I’m not one of those people; I should probably try and even out the bursts and lulls a bit by scheduling some posts to appear, in advance, but that always feels a bit like cheating.

Aside from all of the above, in the last two months I’ve gone on holiday, had my Reliant Scimitar very nearly written off by a BT Openworld van driving into the back of me at a roundabout, negotiated with BT to get a fair price for compensation, got the car back and (slowly) got it legal again, if not pretty yet, got an allotment with my girlfriend, built a shed, dealt with a failing hard drive, been stung by fuel prices and taken the plunge to get started on the electric car project at last (but with a Reliant Fox rather than a Bond Minicar – for the first project at least), acquired said Fox, replaced the alternator to enable driving to work each day, spent too long experimenting with a GP2X F200 and continued refining and developing the DwI Method towards being testable. Fixing and getting back to the blog properly was frequently close to the top of my priority list, but that priority list was frequently knocked over and scattered across the floor by other problems which required immediate resolution.

The critical path is all over the place. I realise I need a better system for organising myself to blog consistently and frequently, and deal with all the enquiries and comments I get, and am working to try and achieve that. The stream of very kind and helpful suggestions and links that readers have sent me over the last few weeks really does demonstrate that people enjoy the site – which is a fantastic motivation in itself. I will do better!

P.S. The ultra-brief paper for Persuasive 2008, Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context [PDF, 169kb], is now available in a self-archived preprint version. It will appear in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2008, LNCS 5033, pp. 274 – 278, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.

I also thought it was worth uploading the short proposal which helped me get accepted to the doctoral consortium which precedes the conference – Design for Sustainable Behaviour [PDF, 124kb]. This is a summary of the PhD project so far, although the text explains the work specifically in the ‘Persuasive Technology’ context appropriate to the conference.

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/

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

This post’s overdue but I wanted to have some real news (and images) rather than pure speculation.

Following Brunel’s sale of the Runnymede Campus to Oracle back in May, Oracle appointed John Thompson & Partners as architects to explore options and develop a plan for what to do with the site. I was waiting for JTP to update the Runnymede Campus website, but as (at time of writing), the details haven’t gone on there yet, here’s a summary of what the vision/ideas/plans are, at least as presented to the public on Tuesday 16th October, in the Assembly Hall. In short: 150 residential houses/flats, 400 student rooms, and workshops / studios / labs space for businesses:

(It’s not clear whether the student union building would be kept. It’s still shown on JTP’s sketch of the campus, but there is no elaboration of what would be done with it. The Mews are listed buildings at present and I would expect JTP intends to keep these for residential use, though whether student or private tenants, I don’t know.)

Presumably all the above pictures, details and more will be on JTP’s Runnymede Campus website in the near future.

It’s clear that among the many other planning constraints (discussed further below), the amount of ‘affordable housing’ required by the local authority will to a large extent determine whether or not aspects such as the workshop space and student accommodation are viable. If the argument that restoring 400 student bedrooms at Runnymede will free up 400 affordable housing places in Englefield Green is accepted by the planners, then all well and good, but if not, then the campus might have to take a lot more housing, with all the resulting effects on traffic, noise, and so on. This would also mean that companies employing local people, such as Avco Systems, currently based in the Science Park, would have to move somewhere else in the area.

Overall, I was impressed by JTP’s approach and the way in which they seem to have recognised many of the important and interesting aspects of the site, and incorporated them into their vision of a new community, e.g.:

The illustrative vision seeks to build upon the history of the site and to utilise the assets of the existing quality buildings and landscape. Existing quality buildings will be retained and their setting enhanced. Existing quality trees will be retained and will become the focus for the creation of new spaces.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not somewhat cynical (so much is predicated on the affordable housing issue), but I’m willing to stay open-minded and I’d rather see positive, interesting plans for what to do with the place, such as those JTP showed, than simply allowing the place to deteriorate. It’s not going to be an educational establishment again, but I’m sure most of us would rather go back to see something worthwhile being done on the site – including space for workshops, studios and labs – than it having been completely cleared and 800 identikit houses built.

JTP also seem keen to recognise and understand the heritage of the site, and what sort of activities and personalities have shaped it, including the Brunel Design era as well as the days of the Royal Indian Engineering College, the Cheylesmore family, Cooper’s Hill Training College, and Shoreditch College. I spent an enjoyable two afternoons with JTP’s Nicola de Quincey and Eva Nickel and other interested members of the public, discussing the history of the site, and walking round examining the buildings.

There is the possibility of some sort of commemoration of the Brunel Design era as part of the new development, whether in the form of plaques explaining to new residents some of what went on at the site, or even (as John Thompson suggested) statues or a sculpture trail. I’ve agreed to get back to them with more details of significant achievements of Brunel Design at Runnymede, down even to the sort of research advances that were being made, as well as interesting alumni and so on, so if anyone has any suggestions, please do get in touch (dan@danlockton.co.uk).

The next community meeting at Runnymede, open to the public will be on Tuesday 20th November, 7.30 pm in Pillar Hall.

Background to JTP’s process

These sketches and plans were presented to the public at a meeting in the Assembly Hall on Tuesday 16th October, after a two-day ‘planning weekend’ on the 12th-13th October, where local residents (mostly from Englefield Green) and other interested parties (from businesses based in the former Brunel Science Park in the walled garden on Cooper’s Hill Lane, National Trust representatives, local councillors, and so on) were able to discuss with JTP their concerns, ideas and priorities for the site. The series of community meetings follows JTP’s usual method of “collaborative planning”.

What started on the Friday afternoon with a fairly confrontational atmosphere became more amenable as people felt their voices had been heard, but the main sticking point, initially at least, was simply that few could believe Oracle would have paid £46.5 million for the campus unless there was a specific plan in mind – and if so, what was it? As one resident put it: “Any business that lays out that sort of money without a solid business plan, return-on-investment calculations and fallback plan in place, isn’t going to last long.” The repeated reassurances from JTP’s John Thompson and Marcus Adams that “We haven’t got a plan” (exact quote) did seem somewhat unlikely, but in the hindsight of the rapidity with which the ‘draft vision’ was prepared (presented on the following Tuesday), it’s clear that while they may not have had a ‘plan’, they certainly had (and have) plenty of ideas about how they would make the most of the site’s opportunities, and the community consultation was intended to inform that, but not drive it.

it does genuinely seem that simply because of the many constraints (Green Belt, proximity of the Air Forces’ Memorial, landscape importance, tree protection, wildlife, C2 ‘residential insititution’ planning zoning, and most of all, continued need for (Holloway) student housing in Englefield Green), the process is not going to be as simple as Oracle doing whatever they want with the site. Green Belt requirements mean that nothing taller than existing structures can be built, and the ‘footprint’ of the existing buildings cannot be built outside (it can be moved, though). Targets in Surrey would suggest that anything between 25-40% of any development should be ‘affordable’ or ‘key worker’ housing – which does not include student accommodation – but as mentioned earlier, the argument might be made that by freeing up affordable housing in Englefield Green currently occupied by Holloway students, building new student accommodation at Runnymede would assist in providing affordable housing, if not actually on site.

John Thompson also made a couple of interesting comments during the meetings, which sought to allay fears and concerns felt by a number of people present:

There is certainly no intention to create a gated community on this site.

i.e. that the site will remain ‘open’ and accessible to visitors, especially given the intention to increase public access with walks across the golf course, viewpoints and so on.

This will be a managed site… there will be stringent covenants on what people can do.

i.e. that future residents of the site will only be (probably long) leaseholders: the site will remain as a single freehold unit, with a management company.

Background to the sale to Oracle

Talking further to a couple of people from Oracle, it seems that their winning bid for the campus (at least according to them) was in line with the market value and not by any emotional “Let’s outbid Holloway” stance. Royal Holloway’s bid was substantially less than Oracle’s, and this King Sturge article [PDF] notes that other losing bidders (presumably closer to Oracle’s in terms of value) included nursing and retirement home operators. Someone did make the point to me that Brunel, “as a charitable organisation” was legally required to accept the highest bid, and thus could not have sold the campus to Royal Holloway even if it had wanted to, but I don’t know enough about the intricacies of charity law to comment on this.

Certainly, though, had (for example) the Higher Education Funding Council for England assisted Holloway, or had Brunel’s attempt to become part of the University of London alongside Royal Holloway progressed further, I think we might have seen Runnymede remain in educational use. (Alternatively, of course, Brunel could have retained the site and used it for something worthwhile: I appreciate the revenue has enabled further expansion at Uxbridge, but the Uxbridge site’s fairly densely developed now as it is, and I’m not sure how Brunel will expand in the future.)

Relevant websites

In addition to JTP’s Runnymede Campus website, it’s also worth keeping an eye on the Residents’ Association’s Englefield Green Village Brunel Development blog and Councillor Daniel Hamilton’s blog for updates. John Williams and Jill Sandwell’s Shoreditch College website is also frequently updated with news and historical information and photos – it was very interesting to talk to John last week. Len Breen’s The Last Broadcast From Runnymede offers a perspective on Brunel’s internal politics. I also aim to continue this occasional series of posts on Runnymede, its history, and its future.

After a month of lifting and shifting boxes, frantic cleaning, driving lots of different vehicles, and dealing with bureaucracy, I’ve now moved house and started my PhD at Brunel; with broadband now set up, and enough space to sit with a laptop amid the not-yet-unpacked boxes, I’ll hopefully be able to get back to regular blogging. Many thanks to everyone who’s sent examples and comments in the interim.

I now both live and work in semi-Brutalist structures; it’ll be interesting to see what effect that architectural influence has.

The generally poor performance of this site over the past couple of months (database queries timing out leading to blank pages or internal WordPress error messages) has been frustrating and I will be moving hosts at some point in due course. There may be some redesign or at least restructuring of certain parts of the site too, as already the PhD has made me think somewhat more analytically about how to classify and explain methods of control and ‘design for behaviour change’.

Snowdown, by Matthew Barnett, is fantastic. Powered by a child exercising, moving the handle, it crushes ice cubes and compacts them to make snowballs. There are a lot of kids out there who would very much like one of these, at any time of year – summer especially. Shown last month at Made in Brunel – I hope Matthew finds a way to take the project forward.

Is the requiring-exercise-to-get-a-reward strategy an architecture of control? I think so, and I think this product exemplifies why and how it is possible to use ‘control’ for the benefit of the user. Sure, society benefits when children grow up more healthily, but the children (and their parents) also benefit. And Snowdown actively rewards the user for his or her effort.

We’ve seen this thinking, specifically regarding encouraging exercise, embodied before on the blog in two products, as far as I can remember: Gillian Swan’s Square-Eyes (also from Brunel), and, of course, the Entertrainer. Both of these use television as the ‘reward’ for exercise – in the case of Square-Eyes, 100 steps on the special insole equate to 1 minute of TV time (controlled by a base station); with the Entertrainer, the user’s heart rate is monitored (you can set the level of exercise you want) and the TV’s volume is controlled, which is an interesting concept: you exercise watching the TV, keeping your heart rate within the optimal range:

The chest strap heart monitor wirelessly relays your heart rate to the Entertrainer™. The Entertrainer then determines if your heart rate is within, above, or below your target zone. If your heart rate is low, the Entertrainer lowers the volume on your television (or other infrared remotely controlled device). If your heart rate is within the target zone (range), the volume remains at a comfortable level. If your heart rate is too high, the volume increases.

Stanford’s Captology research group has also investigated exercise-promotion persuasive technology extensively (e.g. here) but I’m not sure to what extent actual ‘control’ is involved, as opposed to persuasion through making exercise more attractive/fun.

 
Square-Eyes by Gillian Swan, using special insoles and a control unit

The Entertrainer (image from theentertrainer.com)

Nevertheless, with all the above examples, the element of control is very much something the user opts into (unless, say, parents were to force their kids to use Square-Eyes or have no TV) rather than having it imposed with no choice. The ‘code’ is embedded in the product architecture, but you make a choice to use the product because you want the discipline it can help give you.

And again, Snowdown stands out, since it is something fun in itself. Indeed, it may be stretching it to see it as any more a control example than any other children’s toy which requires exercise (bicycle, trampoline, rollerskates, etc). If I hadn’t seen Matthew’s description which specifically highlighted the product’s ability to promote exercise in children, I probably wouldn’t have considered it in this light at all. And it’s perhaps this ‘mindless margin’ (to quote Brian Wansink) of helping yourself while not feeling that you’re being ‘controlled’, which might lie behind positive, successful, ethical, useful applications of architectures of control in design as opposed to the generally anti-user spirit with which the majority are imbued.

Henry Ellis-Paul’s Tap Meter, above, which was also exhbited at the Ideal Home Show, shows the user the amount of water used in that particular instance. As he says, “this information changes the user’s habits and behaviour through involvement and emotional attachment to the product” – it could also presumably be used to measure out the amount of water used for recipes or to ensure that we each drink the right amount each day.

Stefan Grosvenor’s Water and energy saving tap (above) additionally addresses electricity usage due to hot water, combining both water and electricity usage in an ‘equation’ to make users more aware of the total impact they have each time they turn the tap. The project was intended as a future concept for the Red Cross, to be used as part of a campaign which would “both help others less fortunate, as well as educating users with their potential.”

Meghana Vaidyanathan’s Squirt (above) is specifically intended for children, hence the bright colours and anthropomorphism of the design:

At our current consumption rate, it is predicted that we could use up to 40% more water in the next 20 years. Squirt is an awareness-based water meter designed for children aged 3 to 6 and aims to instil conservational etiquette in the mind of a child. Squirt has a child-friendly interface and displays the amount of water consumed over a period of time from the tap to which it is attached.

The term “conservational etiquette” is interesting – how easy is it to instil a social constraint of this kind in western societies where the resource is (apparently, at least) in abundance? Most of us have a conservational etiquette regarding money, and thus many ‘speedometer’-type devices – such as Wattson – incorporate a display translating the energy usage into its financial consequences.

This could, of course, go further – as Crosbie Fitch comments,

[Car] fuel economy would probably be greatly improved if there was a UI that could simulate the consumptive clink of a particular denomination of coin (at the users’ choice).

and:

I’m not sure how many owners of gas guzzlers would like to enable the sounding of a cash register ding each time 10 pence worth of fuel had been consumed.

Just imagine the cacophony whenever the Chelsea tractor driver uses kick-down.

This post is the start of a series that will only be of interest to a few readers, but it’s about a subject that means a lot to me, and about a place which, in one way or another, has had an impact on design, and design education, in the UK and beyond. Brunel University has just sold its Runnymede campus to Oracle Residential, part of the Epsom-based Oracle Group, a property and investment company.

Oracle’s announcement on its website, under ‘Latest acquisitions’ (it’s Flash-based and unlinkable) is a little more detailed than Brunel’s rather terse statement – even if it skirts the issue of what they’re going to do with the place – and at least recognises some of what’s interesting about it:

Acting on behalf of oversees investors, Oracle Residential are pleased to confirm the acquisition of the Brunel University Runnymede Campus for £46.5m. Situated on the outskirts of Egham town centre, the 67 acres of mature parkland and woods is currently occupied by Royal Holloway, University of London for student accommodation. The site currently contains around 350,000 sq ft of buildings, some of which are listed.

With far reaching views of Windsor Castle, the site has extensive grounds which include an Area of Landscape Importance, Ancient Woodland and a Site of Nature Conservation Importance – all of which will need to be protected in any development proposals for the site.

Regional Director Scott Hammond believes that the site’s significance in terms of nature conservation and historical importance means that any proposals would need to be of a highly sensitive nature; “once occupation of the building is secured in September, we will begin the process of restoring some of the dilapidated and unsightly buildings, and seek to enhance the Green Belt nature of the site”.

King Sturge acted for the University in the disposal of the site.

I was a student at Runnymede from 2000-4, and a member of the last graduating year to be based there. Runnymede – once the Royal Indian Engineering College, and later Shoreditch College – was Brunel’s design school: a self-contained, single-subject campus out on its own, on top of Cooper’s Hill, Englefield Green – the first piece of high ground to the west of central London, with views over Heathrow and the Staines Reservoirs as well as Windsor Castle, Magna Carta Island and the Thames. It was a very interesting place to be a student, in many ways: there was enforced isolation, but we could call it ‘hothousing’; there was clearly never much money for buying new equipment, but there was a pride in using what was there to produce astonishing results; there was a lot of stress, but also proof of the total miscibility of work and play. And indeed workshop and kitchen, swarf and carpet, spray-booth and corridor, daytime and nighttime.

I know that to a large extent, I fell in love with the location before I really ‘got’ the course; the Open Day I attended, in June 1999, was sunny and beautiful, and the whole place struck me (and still strikes me) as one of the most perfect places in south-east England: a hilltop idyll with Elizabethan oak trees and Victorian parkland, yet close enough to the lure of London. Certainly many of the student halls of residence were decaying, but no more so than many, many others. The Royal Holloway students living there at present are right to complain about the place not being up to what they had been led to expect, but from what my girlfriend tells me of some of the (now demolished) halls at Holloway, Runnymede wasn’t that bad.

Of course it is much, much too late now to dwell on the decision to move the Design department to Uxbridge – one of the seemingly few concrete [sic.] decisions made about Runnymede during Brunel’s 27-year tenure of the site, since absorbing Shoreditch College in 1980. The department is merged into the School of Engineering & Design, it’s a very different set-up, they’ve taken me on to do a PhD, and I’m very pleased about that.

As for Runnymede – even in the early 1990s (gleaned from reading old documents in the library) there were proposals for selling the campus to various other organisations, such as an independent schools’ association (to use as an HQ), and in the last few years, suggested uses included temporary housing for Heathrow Terminal 5 workers, a new ‘Brunel Academy’ for underprivileged inner-city teenagers, a conference centre, a permanent expansion for Royal Holloway (both teaching and accommodation), and an administrative HQ for Brunel itself, away from the construction-site hubbub of Uxbridge. But in the end, it came down to this: sale to a property company, just as Brunel did with its (equally historic) Osterley and Twickenham. I don’t know (yet) what Oracle’s plans are: I do know that Englefield Green has a lot of executive homes and apartments already and surely doesn’t need too many more.

This is the first in a series of posts looking at some of the history of the Runnymede campus, both long past and recent, the plans for the site as they become clearer, and how it will all affect the local area. I intend to do some research in that vein, and report back semi-regularly. In the meantime, some photos of the campus: from ‘Hostler’ (2001), part 1; part 2; and some of my own, from 2004, in no real order.

UPDATE: This 2-page PDF (produced summer 2008) introduces the research

I’ve taken the plunge, and will be starting a PhD in September at Brunel University, Uxbridge, in the School of Engineering & Design.

The chosen subject incorporates both a formal investigation and review of certain architectures of control in design, and practical application of them for what I see as a worthwhile purpose: reducing the environmental impact of consumer products. This is an area which has come up quite a few times on the blog and in my previous research, and which I feel is both timely and worthy of a detailed treatment. The initial official title of the research is Reducing the environmental impact of products by using design to change user behaviour, and I’ve quoted a slightly shortened version of my brief tentative proposal below:

Introduction

Much research has concentrated on reducing the environmental impact of consumer products through improving manufacturing methods, efficiency of operation, and end-of-life processes. Attention is also being turned to changing consumers’ behaviour to the same end, through public education, policy and taxation emphasis — and product design methods, on which this study will focus.

Various techniques allow the characteristics of a product’s use phase to be influenced in favour of increased sustainability or reduced environmental impact. In purely technological terms, increased efficiency of operation is clearly a major goal, yet it may also be equally — and independently — important to reduce or otherwise to alter the period or manner of the product’s use, and that means changing users’ behaviour. Methods of achieving this, by using design techniques, range from ‘hard’ coercive constraints (technology which ‘refuses’ to be operated in a certain manner) to ‘softer’ psychological constraints which encourage or guide the consumer to use the product in a different way. The field lies at the intersection of technology and human factors, with the limits of any approach’s impact being determined by both technological and interaction design issues.

The study

This study will, in the first phase, review and characterise existing and novel design- and technology-led approaches to changing users’ behaviour to reduce the environmental impact of products. Donald Norman’s concepts of forcing functions and behaviour-shaping constraints, Shigeo Shingo’s poka-yoke methods, and B.J. Fogg’s ‘captology’ research at Stanford are pertinent here as starting points, since while these have been developed in the contexts of interaction design, manufacturing engineering and computer science respectively, there is significant potential to apply similar thinking with environmental considerations in mind; as far as the author is aware, this has not previously been done systematically.

A few specific technological approaches include: use of interlocks to ensure users make decisions or perform actions in the ‘right’ order when the ‘wrong’ order can be detrimental environmentally; sensors to shut down functionality when a product is not being used (e.g. motion-detection for lighting); sensors which prevent unnecessary energy use (e.g. a vehicle throttle which prevents over-revving when stationary); and the use of designed-in obsolescence to produce ‘optimum environmental lifetime’ products which expire at predetermined lifetimes, perhaps even using active disassembly techniques.

The second phase will involve testing-out of selected approaches through user trials and simulated trials of a number of functional product prototypes incorporating the behaviour constraints to determine levels of actual environmental benefit, and establish the technological and human factors affecting the ‘real-world’ applicability of these. Comparing life-cycle analyses of existing products’ use phases with those of the prototypes will allow a quantitative assessment of the benefits of different techniques in these contexts.

For example (illustrative only): A lot of electricity is wasted due to over-filling of electric kettles — a trial might compare prototypes ranging from the ‘soft’ constraint of a kettle with clearer visual/audio indications of fill level (prominent ‘x cups of water’ display) or financial implications of the energy use (‘Boiling this amount of water will cost you x pence’), through a kettle with a requirement to pre-select the water fill-level before filling (hence forcing the user to think about what he or she is doing), to a more extreme constraint of a kettle which will only boil one cup of water at a time — rapidly, but ensuring there can be no over-filling. Analysing the results of user trials of a range of prototypes such as these, and comparing with the energy usage of a conventional kettle, would allow actual energy savings to be quantified, and the limits of efficacy due to human factors (e.g. user frustration or misunderstanding) to be established. (The kettle examples described here are simplistic but this is the sort of approach intended.)

Another aim is to develop a ‘toolkit’ of tested design approaches, with relative efficacies and pertinent issues specified, to be of use to designers and engineers looking to create more environmentally friendly products. The outcome here would be an accessible publication (a short book, eBook and/or presentation, separate from the thesis) illustrating and detailing the techniques, made available to companies and students. It is hoped that government eco-design initiatives may also be interested in the practical implications of the work.

Background

The author studied Industrial Design Engineering at Brunel from 2000-4, and did a (taught) Cambridge-MIT Institute Master’s in Technology Policy from 2004-5. He has since worked in freelance design engineering and product design for a number of clients including, currently, Sir Clive Sinclair. His Master’s dissertation (and ongoing independent research in this area) investigated ‘architectures of control’: intentionally controlling user behaviour, mainly for political and commercial reasons, in a variety of fields, especially the built environment and digital rights. This forms a useful background to the proposed study.

Contribution to knowledge

The aim of the study will be to address these questions, reformulated as appropriate: How can users’ behaviour be changed, through redesign of products, to reduce environmental impact? Which methods are most suitable for specific situations? How significant are the impact reductions, and what technology and human factors issues affect the implementations? It is hoped that the process of investigating and answering these questions, together with an outcome synthesising the practical applications (the ‘toolkit’ described above), in addition to the thesis, will constitute an original, distinct and useful contribution to knowledge.

I’m excited: this gives me a fantastic opportunity to develop and extend the architectures of control research into what I consider to be a positive area (rather than the generally distasteful social engineering/’security’/designed-in-compliance/economic lock-in), which was otherwise going to be very difficult. I’m very lucky, thanks to the efforts of my supervisor, to have a studentship, which effectively means that this PhD is a job in environmentally sensitive design research, at one of the best technological design institutions in the UK.

I’ll continue to chart and examine all architectures of control via this blog, of course, but will now have the backing of some academic credibility – and resources – which should allow a more rigorous level of analysis, and exposure to expertise, precedents and inspirations.

The decision to go for a PhD wasn’t taken lightly; deciding how to progress professionally is something which has been taxing me for some time, alongside the challenges of freelance work (one reason why this blog has suffered over the last few months). I’m aware that it is not going to be easy, by any means (Tom Coates’ article – and the appended comments – and Rich Watts’ blog, for example, were very helpful in this regard), but it’s a long time since a project has excited me as much as this one, and I take that as a very positive sign.

Why Brunel? It’s where I did my undergraduate degree (although at the Runnymede campus, very different to Uxbridge), and many of the same staff, research strengths and commercial partnerships remain or have further developed. The university has greatly expanded the promotion of engineering and design and, as a future part of the University of London, seems a lot more confident about itself. While I very much enjoyed my time at Cambridge doing my Master’s, and it sparked my academic interest in architectures of control (specifically, in Frank Field’s lectures, both in person and via MIT videolink), I want (using my background) to develop the subject in a design context, which Cambridge does not offer in the same way.

The success of this blog in attracting some amazing, insightful comments (from what I can assume are amazing, insightful readers) has also given me a lot more confidence that taking this research further is not just worthwhile, but something I really must do, and I’m very grateful to all who’ve helped along the way so far.

The next post will review some of the ‘environmental architectures of control’ examples (both real and suggested) which I already have on my list, from this blog and elsewhere. Other than that, my girlfriend and I are off to Dublin for a few days’ break, and I’ve pledged not to take any work with me, physically or mentally, so let’s hope the spam filter can take care of the blog until next week!