It’s been a very very very busy year, and that’s my main excuse for not blogging for far too long. There are many interesting people, interesting things and ideas and opportunities, and unresolved thoughts that need to be talked about, but haven’t been. And many people who’ve got in touch that I just haven’t got round to replying to. I apologise. For quite a while it’s been easier to use Twitter than to blog here. That’s a shame, but it’s also enabled me to get to know (virtually or otherwise) a great group of very clever people. I’ve been to Copenhagen, Ghent, Delft and Enschede on Design with Intent-related business, as well as managing to go camping on the Isles of Scilly with Harriet, which was fantastic.
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Apologies for the silence here, but I’m writing up my PhD thesis at present and trying to get as much as possible done before an exciting new project starts in August (which I will tell you about in due course!). I won’t be able to get it all done before then, but am trying to get to a stage where the rest of it doesn’t seem insurmountable.
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It’s been a long time coming, but a year after v.0.9, the new Design with Intent toolkit, DwI v.1.0, is ready. Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.
The cards (Download them here)
The intention is that the cards are useful at the idea generation stage of the design process, helping designers, clients and – perhaps most importantly – potential users themselves explore behaviour change concepts from a number of disciplines, and think about how they might relate to the problem at hand. Judging by the impact of earlier iterations, the cards could also be useful in stakeholder workshops, and design / technology / computer science education.
Games are great at engaging people for long periods of time, getting them involved, and, if we put it bluntly, influencing people’s behaviour through their very design. Something conspicuously missing from Design with Intent v.0.9 is a satisfactory treatment of the kinds of techniques for influencing user behaviour that can be derived from games and other ‘playful’ interactions. I hope to remedy this in DwI 1.0, so here’s a preview of the eleven patterns I’ve included in the new Ludic Lens on behaviour change: patterns drawn from games or modelled on more playful forms of influencing behaviour.
These aren’t original, by any means. People such as Amy Jo Kim (see her great presentation ‘Putting the fun in functional’), Sebastian Deterding, Francisco Inchauste, Jeremy Keith, Geke Ludden, and of course Ian Bogost have done work which explores this area from lots of different angles, and it also draws on decades of research in social psychology. Russell Davies’ Playful (which I really should have gone to!) looks like it was very pertinent here too. (Note, this lens doesn’t cover Game Theory-like patterns, some of which are indeed relevant to influencing user behaviour, but which I’ve chosen to group under a new ‘Machiavellian Lens’)
My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’* that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour (along with the other Design with Intent techniques). So these are (at least at present) presented simply as provocations: a “What if…?” question plus an example. The intention is that the card deck version will simply have what you see here, while the online version will have much more detail, references, links and reader/user-contributed examples and comments.
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Challenges & targets
What happens if you set people a challenge, or give them a target to reach through what they’re doing?
« Whoever laid out this coffee tub as a target for throwing coins knew a lot about influencing people to donate generously and enjoy it
I haven’t blogged for a couple of months, which is not unusual, but I always feel I owe loyal readers an explanation! Primarily, I’ve been so wrapped up in PhD-related work (now in my final year, and desperately trying to get the thing finished by the summer), that most of my writing energy has been going into the thesis and some papers and articles for various outlets, rather than towards the blog. Our Applied Ergonomics article, ‘The Design with Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour’ (co-authored with my supervisors David Harrison and Neville A. Stanton) has just been published in the print version of the journal (I will put an open-access preprint version online soon), and I’ve written articles with Fergus Bisset and Nick Marsh for the next issue of the Service Design Network’s Touchpoint journal – ‘Designing Motivation or Motivating Design? Exploring service design, motivation and behavioural change’ and ‘Research in practice: Bringing behaviour change from lab to studio’. Look out for them in the April/May issue.
There have also been a few other projects with which I’ve made an effort to get involved, mainly to secure my own future and enable expansion of research in this field once the PhD studentship runs out! I’m pleased to say that things seem to be progressing OK on that front, with some very exciting projects lined up, working with some very interesting people indeed.
In parallel, DwI toolkit v.0.95, which I think I will henceforth name Design with Intent 1.0 (shows a bit more confidence!) is nearing a stage where I’m happy to release it. More on that very soon.
As Richard Hamming said, “You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this.”
A lot of people send me ideas and suggestions for the blog, for which I’m very grateful indeed, but which I don’t always get round to investigating or posting or dealing with in a timely manner. Or sometimes I note them, use them as examples elsewhere, or in conversation with people, but never actually get round to posting about them. I apologise for all this, and I apologise if you’ve sent stuff and never got a reply, or got a very late reply. I have a very very inefficient workflow and it is sometimes embarrassing. It’s something I need to fix in 2010 if I’m going to get a PhD thesis done by the summer.
But as as a bumper end-of-2009 post, here’s a roundup of some really interesting examples, ideas, projects, and other tit-bits. If yours isn’t here, I further apologise: it may resurface at some point soon.
Transparent toilet in Lausanne
George Preston sent me a link to this video of a very interesting public toilet in Lausanne, Switzerland. As George puts it:
There’s a central quite modern district [in Lausanne] called Flon, and the toilets have an intriguing way of grabbing your attention/dissuading vandals….the walls are made of glass. But when you pay and enter, a current running to an LC layer in the glass is cut off, rendering it opaque. For people not familiar with them, they are baffling!
The tell-tale pill bottle
Ralph Borland – responsible for the impressive Suited for Subversion – and who must be just about finished with his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin – sends me this story about tuberculosis pill bottles equipped with a SIM card, which can text a patient, his or her carer, or indeed the health authorities if the pills aren’t taken, “achiev[ing] a 94% compliance rate for a TB trial in South Africa”. The SIMpill Medication Adherence Solution is a clever product, a neat technology intervention in patient compliance, an area designers are increasingly being asked to address.
From the SIMpill website:
The SIMpill® Medication Adherence Solution offers detailed compliance data and corresponding statistics, and the patient or pre-approved healthcare professionals or analyst, can gain access to real-time information regarding medication use and compliance through a private secure account on the SIMpill® website. Via the web account the healthcare providers can monitor the medication use of their patients in real-time, and can decide on type of intervention to meet the patient’s ongoing adherence schedule.
As Ralph points out, though:
Put that together with the fact that you can be imprisoned in SA if you have a drug-resistant TB strain and you have something more like a coercive technology than persuasive, interfacing directly with authority structures etc. Thought it’s an interesting cross-over of developing world design and persuasive design…
Narrower supermarket aisles
Brian Cugelman of AlterSpark sent me the following rather coercive idea he overheard, along the lines of Monkeon‘s Leonard Ball bench:
On BBC radio some caller made a proposal relevant to your research. To cope with the UK’s obesity epidemic, with 25% of the population considered obese, a caller proposed making grocery stores aisles very narrow so people of average weight could shop and obese people would not fit.
Punishing users for Alt-tabbing away
From a comment on Jeff Atwood’s 2007 ‘Please don’t steal my focus’ post (which I found again when searching for how to stop an application stealing focus):
One of the old MMOs I used to play (Rubies of Eventide) would log you out of the game if you alt tabbed, supposedly to prevent cheating. This was back in the days when web browsers on windows would steal focus back any time a script on the page reloaded.
I died so many times to those damn page reloads.Mike on December 5, 2007 4:08 AM
Obstacles speed up exiting crowds
Tjebbe van Eemeren of the University of Twente – a student of Peter-Paul Verbeek of What Things Do fame – sends me a link to this story about the use of obstacles to speed up the passage of crowds:
Even when exits are wide open, people seem to jam up in front of it. Then they tried something goofy. They put something in the way of the people trying to get out. Not so big that it blocked the way, but big enough that people had to detour around it. And it had to be in just the right place. Guess what? Everybody got out faster.
The actual research isn’t referenced in the story, but this article goes into a lot more detail. There’s a preprint of the paper by Daichi Yanagaisawa et al here. There’s also discussion of the story and the phenomenon on Derren Brown’s blog.
Opower
Robert Cialdini gets name-checked quite a lot on this blog, and rightly so: his work on persuasion and the psychology of influencing behaviour across many different domains underpins many of the design patterns and explains many of the examples we’ve looked at (particularly what I characterised as the ‘cognitive lens’ of design with intent). He’s something of a model for how to be a respected academic researcher at the forefront of his field (who actually tries things out rather than simply theorising), a consultant in high demand from industry, and also a bestselling popular author.
Cialdini is now Chief Scientist of Opower, an energy monitoring and smart metering startup which started life as Positive Energy (thanks to Mike Stenhouse for sending me details earlier in the year) and has already had significant success partnering with utility companies in the US to give customers better feedback – using personalised messages based on social proof and norms to suggest actions for householders to take to reduce their consumption:
Step 1: Customer reads report: “You used 72 percent more than your efficient neighbors.”
Step 2: Customer reads targeted tip: “Most people in your area keep their AC at 78 degrees”
Step 3: Customer turns down thermostat and takes other energy-saving actions.
I think it’s worth keeping an eye on Opower‘s development: they’re taking a different, but complementary approach to other innovators such as Onzo in the UK, and seem to be putting into practice (on a huge scale) some of the ideas that projects such as CHARM are also investigating. As I’ve talked about before, there’s a lot of opportunity for design to influence behaviour in this area, and help users as well as reducing environmental impact.
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