Dan Lockton: ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change’*
2007-12, Cleaner Electronics Research Group, Brunel Design, Brunel University, London
Supervisors: David Harrison, Professor of Design Research, Brunel University and Neville A. Stanton, Professor of Human Factors in Transport, University of Southampton

My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products, services and environments which influence the way people use them. The toolkit brings together techniques for understanding and changing human behaviour from a number of psychological disciplines, illustrated with examples, to enable designers to explore and apply relevant strategies to problems.

I’ve tested different iterations of the toolkit in controlled trials with designers and students, with a focus on reducing the environmental impact of everyday consumer products and routines through influencing more efficient user behaviour, but the toolkit has also been applied to other areas of socially (and commercially) beneficial behaviour change, such as improving public confidence in the police, maintaining student engagement with an online learning system, shaping online user experience, reducing strategic mortgage default, and a number of ‘Big Society’ behaviour change ideas for a local authority.

Through making the toolkit available online and in print versions, it has also been applied by other people to a range of problems and briefs. By the end of 2010, more than 130,000 copies had been downloaded, and 160 printed packs had been sold or given away directly. An ongoing survey is capturing the experiences of toolkit users.

The main research theme breaks down into a number of sub-questions which have evolved as the PhD has progressed, through a series of workshops:

Can industrial designers use the Design with Intent toolkit to apply insights from other disciplines (psychology, ergonomics, architecture, human-computer interaction, behavioural economics) to generate novel, realistic design concepts, addressing briefs on influencing user behaviour, primarily to reduce the environmental impact of technology use, but also in other social benefit contexts?

How useful is the toolkit to designers, compared with conventional brainstorming? (Assessed by the quantity and diversity of concepts generated, compared with control groups)

How usable are different variations of the toolkit, such as a structured ‘prescription’ approach using a form of decision tree with ‘target behaviours’, a more freeform approach, posters and card decks? (Assessed by observation of participants and a think-aloud method)

What can be improved to make a better ‘product’ which designers will feel comfortable using, and want to adopt as part of the design process? (Assessed by observation, think-aloud method, and surveys)

An extra theme which has emerged from the workshops concerns the interplay (often a mismatch) between the mental models that designers (or clients) have of how people interact with systems, and the mental models that users themselves have of how technological systems work. This introduces aspects of systems theory and cybernetics to the work, alongside insights from behavioural economics about practical decision-making heuristics that people use to understand the systems around them. While this area has only been tentatively explored during the PhD (mainly via card-sorting exercises, asking designers to categorise different design techniques according to the ‘model of the user’ they represent, or clustering assumptions about user behaviour into different ‘mindsets’), in the context of heating system design I have started to investigate it further as part of TSB/EPSRC-funded EMPOWER User-centred design for energy-efficient buildings project which started in September 2010.

Publications arising from the PhD (so far) are now listed (and linked where possible) here.

I have a number of presentations on Slideshare which also provide an introduction to the PhD.

*The original thesis title was to be Design for Sustainable Behaviour, reflecting specifically the focus on reducing the environmental impact of consumer electrical products, but since much of the interest shown in the work has been from designers interested in applying it to broader areas of social benefit, it was decided to apply a title reflecting this.

About the researchers

Dan Lockton: I’ve worked as a product designer, engineer and researcher for Sinclair Research and other clients – I have 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 I started to research the idea of ‘architectures of control’, a precursor to DwI.

Professor David Harrison is Professor of Design Research 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.