I’m running a workshop on Wednesday 31st August at dConstruct 2011 in Brighton, and I thought it would be worthwhile explaining in a bit more detail what it’s about, and what we’ll be doing.
Here’s the summary from the dConstruct website:
Whether we choose to do it or not, what we design is going to affect how users behave, so we might as well think about it, and–if we can–actually get good at it. Bridging the gap between physical and digital product design, a systems approach can help us understand how people interact with the different touchpoints they experience, how mental models and cognitive biases and heuristics influence the way people make decisions about what to do, and hence how we might apply that knowledge (for good).In this full-day practical workshop, we’ll try a novel approach to design and behaviour, using ourselves as both designers and cybernetic guinea pigs in exploring and developing a combination of physical and digital experiences. You’ll learn how to improve your own decision-making and understanding of how your behaviour is influenced by the systems around you, as well as ways to influence others’ behaviour, through a new approach to designing at the intersection of people, products, services and systems.
So what will the day actually involve? (You’re entitled to ask: the above is admittedly vague.) I’ve run quite a lot of workshops in the last couple of years, mainly using the Design with Intent toolkit in one form or another to help groups generate concepts for specific behaviour change contexts, but this one is slightly different, taking advantage of a full day to explore more areas of how design and behaviour interact, in a way which I hope complements dConstruct’s overall theme this year of “bridging the gap between physical and digital product design” usefully and interestingly. Also, the concept of ‘design for behaviour change’ is probably no longer new and exciting (at least to the dConstruct audience) in quite the way it might have been a few years ago: a more nuanced, developed, thoughtful exploration is needed. We’ll be using some of the Design with Intent cards throughout the workshop, but they’re not the main focus.
My plan is for the workshop to have four stages (3 shorter ones in the morning, 1 longer one for the afternoon):
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