Dan Lockton: ‘Design for Sustainable Behaviour’
2007-10, Cleaner Electronics Research Group, Brunel Design, Brunel University, London
Supervisors: Professor David Harrison, Head of Design, Brunel University and Professor Neville A. Stanton, Chair in Human Factors in Transport, University of Southampton

Design for Sustainable Behaviour:
Improving the use efficiency of consumer products
by understanding user behaviour and influencing it through design

As technological advances make consumer products more efficient, it’s often human behaviour that’s the weak link in the chain. We buy ‘energy-saving’ lights and then leave them on all night. We boil a kettle-full of water even though we only need a mug-full. We stick with the default setting on the washing machine, afraid of investigating the others.

Behavioural decisions (or the lack of them) can be responsible for a third of household energy use—this is a big issue, and while governments have favoured social marketing campaigns to ‘solve’ it, in many ways it’s worth thinking about this as a design problem. It’s about people interacting with technology: how and why they do it, and how that interaction might be influenced (if indeed it should), by helping people do things better.

We have developed the Design with Intent toolkit for designers and strategists working on products, services and systems where influencing user behaviour could lead to improved performance, both environmentally and in other areas of social benefit. The toolkit encompasses more than 50 design patterns for influencing people’s behaviour from different disciplines, and has been refined via a series of workshop sessions with designers and design students. We’ve demonstrated it to a diverse range of design teams from companies including Engine Service Design, UFI Learndirect, EMC Consulting and QinetiQ, and have more trials and demos lined up – please do get in touch (dan@danlockton.co.uk) if you’d like to be involved in a trial.

A further stage of our research involves building functional prototypes of concepts & influencing it suggested by the method in response to a particular energy use brief on kettles and running comparative user trials to find out which techniques have the most significant effects on behaviour in practice: enabling, motivating or constraining? Results—which patterns work best, in what situations, and why (both technologically and in human factors terms)—will be fed back into the toolkit to refine it further and produce a useful innovation tool.

Download a poster (870 kB PDF) version of this introduction page

About the researchers

Dan Lockton has worked as a product designer, engineer and researcher for Sinclair Research and other clients. He has a BSc (Hons) Industrial Design Engineering from Brunel’s former Runnymede design school, and a Cambridge-MIT Institute Master’s in Technology Policy, during which he started to research the idea of ‘architectures of control’, a precursor to DwI.

Professor David Harrison is Head of Design at Brunel University, and leads Brunel’s Cleaner Electronics Research Group within the School of Engineering & Design, carrying out a variety of sustainable design research on areas including conductive lithographics, active disassembly using smart materials, and eco-innovation tools.

Professor Neville A. Stanton holds the Chair of Human Factors in Transport in the University of Southampton’s School of Civil Engineering & the Environment; he is a widely referenced expert in ergonomics, human factors, decision-making behaviour and augmented cognition systems.

Most of our publications that have arisen out of the PhD work so far are available in an open-access form (often as preprints) via Brunel’s institutional repository.

In the listings below, any links with ** are open-access and the paper can be downloaded free of charge without registering or any hassle. For articles marked with ^^, please email me if you would like a copy. These listings are in need of an update at some point soon to include some more recent and forthcoming work.

Journal articles

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘The Design with Intent Method: a design tool for influencing user behaviour’. Applied Ergonomics Vol.41 No.3, pp. 382-392, May 2010, **http://research.danlockton.co.uk/Lockton_et_al_Applied_Ergonomics_preprint.pdf** (preprint), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2009.09.001 (final)

Bisset, F. and Lockton, D. ‘Designing Motivation or Motivating Design? How service designers can create sustainable behavioural change’. Touchpoint Vol.2 No.1, May 2010 ^^

Marsh, N. and Lockton, D. ‘Research in practice: Bringing behaviour change from lab to studio’. Touchpoint Vol.2 No.1, May 2010 ^^

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, **http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2137** (preprint), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19397030802131068 (final)

Workshops and invited presentations of research to industry

In 2008-9, presentations on Design with Intent to teams from: QinetiQ, Sevenoaks; Marks & Spencer, London; Engine service design, London; UFI Learndirect, Sheffield; EMC Consulting, London; Design Council, London. Multidisciplinary Design with Intent workshops run with IDEO, RSA and National Police Improvement Agency, London.

Refereed conference and seminar presentations & papers

Sustainable Innovation ‘09: Towards Sustainable Product Design 14. Centre for Sustainable Design, Farnham, October 2009. Presentation: ‘Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour’ (in proceedings: Lockton, D., Harrison, D. & Stanton, N. A. Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour. In Sustainable Innovation ‘09: Towards Sustainable Product Design 14, Farnham, UK, 26-27 October 2009, Proceedings, Centre for Sustainable Design, Farnham, 2009, ); **http://hdl.handle.net/2438/3664** (preprint) 

NDM9 “NDM and Computers”: 9th bi-annual International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. British Computer Society, London, June 2009. Doctoral consortium presentation: ‘Choice Architecture and Design with Intent’ (in proceedings: Lockton, D., Harrison, D. & Stanton, N.A. Choice Architecture and Design with Intent, in Wong, W & Stanton, N.A. (eds.), NDM9 – 9th Bi-annual International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making, June 23-26, 2009, London, England. pp. 355-361, BCS eWiC, 2009 **http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.26891**)

Persuasive 2009: 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology. Claremont, California, April 2009. Presentation: ‘Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method’ (in proceedings: Lockton, D., Harrison, D., Holley, T., & Stanton, N. A. Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method. In Persuasive Technology: Fourth International Conference, Persuasive 2009, Claremont, California, April 27-29, 2009, Proceedings, ACM Digital Library, New York: ACM Press, 2009, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1541948.1541956); **http://hdl.handle.net/2438/3257** (preprint). Slides with synchronised audio on Slideshare.

Persuasive 2008: 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology. Oulu, Finland, June 2008. Presentation: ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ (in proceedings: Lockton, D., Harrison, D., & Stanton, N.A. Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context. In H. Oinas-Kukkonen, P. Hasle, M. Harjumaa, K. Segerstahl, & P. Ohrstrom (Eds.), Persuasive Technology: Third International Conference, Persuasive 2008, Oulu, Finland, June 4-6, 2008, Proceedings (p. 274―278), Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 5033, Berlin: Springer, 2008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68504-3_30); **http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2138** (preprint). Slides with synchronised audio on Slideshare.

Other academic & industry conference & seminar presentations

UX London 2010 (details to follow)

DeSRes 2010, Loughborough University (details to follow)

Design for Persuasion. Belgacom Surfhouse / Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen, Brussels, October 2009. Presentation (invited): ‘How to influence user behaviour: Design with Intent’. Slides + transcript on Slideshare

Architectures of Control Symposium. Loughborough University, May 2009. Presentation (invited): ‘Architectures of Control: Design with Intent’

Skillswap Goes Behavioural. Clearleft, Brighton, May 2009. Presentation (invited): ‘Design with Intent: How designers can influence behaviour’. Slides on Slideshare; Audio recording on Huffduffer.

Design-Behaviour: Making It Happen. engCETL, Loughborough University, October 2008. Presentation (invited): ‘Design for Sustainable Behaviour: Easier Efficiency by Influencing Interaction’. Slides and MP4 video on Design-Behaviour website.

Human Centred Design Institute seminar series, Brunel University, October 2008. Presentation (invited): ‘Design with Intent: How designers can influence interaction and help users help themselves’. Slides parts 1,2,3,4 on HCDI website.

New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living. Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, July 2008. Presentation (invited): ‘Design with Intent: behaviour-shaping through design’.

ReSCon 2008: Engineering & Design Student Conference. Brunel University, June 2008. Poster: ‘Design for Sustainable Behaviour’, **http://research.danlockton.co.uk/ResCon_poster_DL.ai.pdf**

Card decks, posters, book chapters, etc

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. Design with Intent: 101 patterns for influencing behaviour through design (v.1.0), Windsor: Equifine 2010 (ISBN 978-0-9565421-0-6 print; 978-0-9565421-1-3 eBook) http://www.danlockton.com/dwi/Main_Page (wiki version); **http://www.danlockton.com/dwi/Download_the_cards** (link to download different versions)

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. Design for Behaviour Change: The Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9, Uxbridge: Brunel University Press 2009 (ISBN 978-1-902316-6-1 print; 978-1-902316-63-5 eBook) http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2009/04/06/the-design-with-intent-toolkit/ (website version); **http://hdl.handle.net/2438/3258** (link to download)

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design for Behaviour Change’ in A.M. Columbus (Ed.): Advances in Psychology Research 67, Hauppauge: Nova Science Publishers 2010 (forthcoming) ^^

Other articles / publications

Lockton, D. ‘Designing with intent’. Review of Greengaged session Design for Life: Barriers to Behaviour Change. Invited article for Design Council / Greengaged website, September 2009, http://greengaged.com/articles/view/dan-lockton-on-design-with-intent/

Lockton, D. ‘Design for sustainable behaviour: influencing users to improve efficiency of product use’ (‘My PhD’ series). Interfaces 78, British Computer Society Interaction Group, Spring 2009, **http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/files/usermedia/file/interfaces_69on/interfaces78.pdf**

Lockton, D. ‘J.G. Ballard and Architectures of Control’. Lead story for Ballardian, January 2008, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-architectures-of-control

Lockton, D. ‘Architectures of Control in product design’. Engineering Designer, March/April 2006, **http://www.danlockton.co.uk/research/28-31-ED.pdf**

Lockton, D. Architectures of Control in Consumer Product Design, MPhil Technology Policy dissertation, Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, 2005, **http://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpot:0512009**

For publications unrelated to my PhD, see the fuller listing on my CV (PDF).

Updated November 2009