"EcoDesign2009 is organized by the Union of EcoDesigners and National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. The purpose of this symposium is to suggest the possible future direction through discussions on various topics such as technologies which lead to low energy consumption and improvement of material recycling, and new systems which can initiate radical change in human behaviour as well as social and economic structures i.e. social design. Moreover, a session examining the special themes of "Green ICT" and "Sustainable Manufacturing" will be set up. To celebrate the10-year anniversary of this symposium, we invite papers which touch on innovative EcoDesign."

Including a special session on human behavioural studies related to sustainable use. I hope I'll be able to go!

"I've started to make a collection of persuasion 'nuggets' that can help towards those difficult website conversions, I thought I'd share a few in this post. All of these are tried and tested so I hope you find them useful. I'll share some more later but if, in the meantime, you have any your prepared to reciprocate with please just add them as a comment or email me."

A lot of these are really based on logical fallacies, or the result of cognitive biases.

"Today’s mandate is to move beyond traditional usability. Instead of designing only for what visitors _can_ do on a site, superior Web design is now responsible for determining what customers _will_ do"

"The Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki is a companion site to the book that Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone are currently writing for O'Reilly Media."
A great resource – this is the sort of thing I need to put together on this site, for the Design with Intent patterns, once some more of the workshop sessions are out of the way.

Some of these sound really interesting, e.g.:
"Realistic Driving Trips for Location Privacy "
"Inferring Identity using Accelerometers in Television Remote Controls"
"PL-Tags: Detecting Batteryless Tags through the Power Lines in a Building"
"Adding GPS-Control to Traditional Thermostats: An Exploration of Potential Energy Savings and Design Challenges "
"Geo-fencing: confining 802.11 coverage to physical boundaries"
I expect most will be available online in one form or another (Springer LNCS terms and conditions allow the authors to put preprint versions online)

Some really interesting switches among other great projects.

Beck Tench: "When you are in a position to encourage people (inc. yourself) to contribute something (opinion, media, money, etc.), be hyper vigilant about lowering the threshold for contribution."

Onzo's Joel Hagan on "automated technology in houses, how smart meters bode well for the future, and why a truly “smart home” is still far, far away."

Tom Stafford on learning styles: "Using a learning style theory is great, but you lose a lot of flexibility and potential for change if you start to believe that the theory is based on proven facts about the way the world is, rather than just being a useful set of habits and suggestions which might, sometimes, help guide us through the maze of teaching and learning."
(via Mind Hacks)