User-centred design for energy efficiency in buildings: TSB competition

The deadline’s fast approaching (mid-day 17th Dec) for the UK Technology Strategy Board’s ‘User-centred design for energy efficiency in buildings’ competition [PDF] – there’s an introduction from Fionnuala Costello here.
This is an exciting initiative which aims to bring together (in a 5-day ’sandpit’) people from different disciplines and different sectors to address the problems [...]

Thoughts on the ‘fun theory’

The ‘Piano Staircase’ from Volkswagen’s thefuntheory.com
The Fun Theory (Rolighetsteorin), a competition / campaign / initiative from Volkswagen Sweden – created by DDB Stockholm – has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks from both design-related people and other commentators with an interest in influencing behaviour: it presents a series of [...]

Some interesting projects (Part 1)

I’ve come across some interesting student projects at various shows and exhibitions this summer, some of which address the relationship between design and people’s behaviour in different situations, and some of which explicitly aim to influence what people do and think. Here’s a selection (Part 2 and Part 3 will follow).

Jasmine Cox’s Displacement Engine (Dundee) [...]

Cialdini on the Beach

Self-monitoring is one of the most common persuasive techniques used in interface design: basically, giving people feedback on what they’re doing and what they’ve done. There are lots of issues about which kinds of feedback work best, in what circumstances, pairing it with feedforward, i.e. ‘What would happen if I did this?’ information, and so [...]

Modelling users: Pinballs, shortcuts and thoughtfulness

The different approaches to influencing people’s behaviour outlined in the Design with Intent toolkit are pretty diverse. Working out how to apply them to your design problem, and when they might be useful, probably requires you, as a designer, to think of “the user” or “users” in a number of different ways in relation to [...]

‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view

Here’s my (rather verbose) response to the three most design-related questions in DECC’s smart meter consultation that I mentioned earlier today. Please do get involved in the discussion that Jamie Young’s started on the Design & Behaviour group and on his blog at the RSA.
Q12 Do you agree with the Government’s position that a [...]

frog design on Design with Intent

Robert Fabricant of frog design – with whom I had a great discussion a couple of weeks ago in London – has an insightful new article up at frog’s Design Mind, titled, oddly enough, ‘Design with Intent: how designers can influence behaviour’ – which tackles the question of how, and whether, designers can and should [...]

What is demand, really?

In a lot of the debate and discussion about energy, future electricity generation and metering, improved efficiency and influencing consumer behaviour – at least from an engineering perspective – the term “demand” is used, in conjunction with “supply”, to represent the energy required to be supplied to consumers, much as in conventional “supply and demand” [...]

Persuasive 2009

UPDATED (7 April): Here’s an ‘author version preprint’ of the paper, Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method [PDF, 1.6MB]. At some point soon this version of the paper will downloadable from Brunel’s research archive, while the ‘proper’ version will be available in the ACM Digital Library. ACM requires me to state the [...]

Eight design patterns for errorproofing

Go straight to the patterns
One view of influencing user behaviour – what I’ve called the ‘errorproofing lens’ – treats a user’s interaction with a system as a set of defined target behaviour routes which the designer wants the user to follow, with deviations from those routes being treated as ‘errors’. Design can help avoid the [...]