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.”