Design with Intent | Architectures

Making it easy

21-03-2013

Articles, Behaviour change, Design, Design with Intent, Environmental, Site Announcements, Sustainability

I have a blog post up at Guardian Sustainable Business, looking essentially at what’s been referred to here previously as ‘enabling‘ behaviour change, specifically in the context of sustainability.

It’s only a short article, and barely scratches the surface of the subject, but I hope it adds a useful contribution to the Guardian’s sustainable living strand, much of which seems to focus on ‘selling sustainability to consumers’ rather than actually trying to understand the nuances of why people use energy and create waste in the ways that they do in everyday life. Hence, you’d be right to surmise that I’m not entirely comfortable with the “…green behaviour…” bit of the title: it introduces particular connotations that are not really what the article is about.

The article was commissioned by Autodesk, whose Sustainability Workshop team offer some excellent resources for designers and students — e.g. these videos on life-cycle perspectives and other concepts relevant to product designers. Last year the team ran a Design with Intent workshop.

Code as control

By: Dan

29-01-2013

Black box, Control, Design with Intent, Digital rights, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Interaction design, Law, Political design, Technology policy

'You removed the card!'

In the earlier days of this blog, many of the posts were about code, in the Lawrence Lessig sense: the idea that the structure of software and the internet and the rules designed into these systems don’t just parallel the law (in a legal sense) in influencing and restricting public behaviour, but are qualitatively different, enabling distinct forms of affordance and constraint. Designers (and developers) — or in many cases those overseeing the process — in this sense potentially wield a lot of (political) power.

Report: Most people just trying to get by

By: Dan

23-01-2013

Behaviour change, Choice Architecture, Design attitudes, Design with Intent, Heuristics, Interaction design, Sustainability, User experience

Cubicles (image by Michael Lokner, used under CC licence)

Most people, for most of their day, are trying to get by. Every day is essentially a series of problems, some minor, some major, some requiring more thought than others. Some we care a lot about; some we wish we didn’t have to. Some are welcome; some we even bring on ourselves because we enjoy solving them; others are deeply unwelcome. Some we care about initially, but then find we no longer do; some we don’t care about to start with, but they become important to us over time.

CarbonCulture blog launch

By: Dan

10-09-2012

Architecture, Design with Intent, Environmental, Interaction design, London, Site Announcements, Sustainability

It’s been quiet here, for reasons which will be explained later, but in the meantime I should mention that CarbonCulture (with whom I’ve been working for the past two years as part of the TSB-supported EMPOWER collaboration) has a new blog.

In anticipation of the forthcoming public launch of the CarbonCulture product, we’re introducing some background on behaviour change approaches, energy use and environmental impact. The first few posts (as of today) introduce:

The possibilities of a design approach to behaviour change

Identifying energy waste

Our use of participatory design

Energy literacy

Imagining energy

If…

By: Dan

09-02-2012

Black box, Choice Architecture, Design, Design with Intent, DwI Method, Heuristics, Interaction design, User experience, User Psychology, Workshops

(introducing behavioural heuristics)

Some heuristics extracted by workshop participants

EDIT (April 2013): An article based on the ideas in this post has now been published in the International Journal of Design – which is open-access, so it’s free to read/share. The article refines some of the ideas in this post, using elements from CarbonCulture as examples, and linking it all to concepts from human factors, cybernetics and other fields.

There are lots of models of human behaviour, and as the design of systems becomes increasingly focused on people, modelling behaviour has become more important for designers. As Jon Froehlich, Leah Findlater and James Landay note, “even if it is not explicitly recognised, designers [necessarily] approach a problem with some model of human behaviour”, and, of course, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. One of the points of the DwI toolkit (post-rationalised) was to try to give designers a few different models of human behaviour relevant to different situations, via pattern-like examples.

I’m not going to get into what models are ‘best’ / right / most predictive for designers’ use here. There are people doing that more clearly than I can; also, there’s more to say than I have time to do at present. What I am going to talk about is an approach which has emerged out of some of the ethnographic work I’ve been doing for the Empower project, working on CarbonCulture with More Associates, where asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways with technology (in particular around energy-using systems) led to answers which were resolvable into something like rules: I’m talking about behavioural heuristics.

Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review

By: Dan

12-09-2011

Architecture, Architecture & urbanism, Ballardian, Crime, Design, Design with Intent, Discriminatory Architecture, Do artifacts have politics?, Environmental, Essays, Foucault, Interaction design, Panopticon, PhD, Political design, Randian, Skateboarding, Social engineering, Spatial, Surveillance, Traffic calming, Urban

by Dan Lockton

Continuing the meta-auto-behaviour-change effort started here, I’m publishing a few extracts from my PhD thesis as I write it up (mostly from the literature review, and before any rigorous editing) as blog posts over the next few months. The idea of how architecture can be used to influence behaviour was central to this blog when it started, and so it’s pleasing to revisit it, even if makes me realise how little I still know.

“There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”
Winston Churchill, addressing the English Architectural Association, 1924

In designing and constructing environments in which people live and work, architects and planners are necessarily involved in influencing human behaviour. While Sommer (1969, p.3) asserted that the architect “in his training and practice, learns to look at buildings without people in them,” it is clear that from, for example, Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), through Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and La Ville radieuse, to the Smithsons’ ‘Streets in the sky’, there has been a long-standing thread of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live. Whether the explicit intention to influence behaviour drives the design process—architectural determinism (Broady, 1966: see future blog post ‘POSIWID and determinism’)—or whether the behaviour consequences of design decisions are only revealed and considered as part of a post-occupancy evaluation (e.g. Zeisel, 2006) or by social scientists or psychologists studying the impact of a development, there are links between the design of the built environment and our behaviour, both individually and socially.