A couple of weeks ago, at dConstruct 2011 in Brighton, 15 brave participants took part in my full-day workshop ‘Influencing behaviour: people, products, services and systems’, with which I was very kindly assisted by Sadhna Jain from Central Saint Martins. As a reference for the people who took part, for me, and for anyone else who might be intrigued, I thought I would write up what we did. The conference itself was extremely interesting, as usual, with a few talks which provoked more discussion than others, as much about presentation style as content, I think (others have covered the conference better than I can). And, of course, I met (and re-connected with) some brilliant people.
I’ve run quite a few workshops in both corporate and educational settings using the Design with Intent cards or worksheets (now also available as a free iPad app from James Christie) but this workshop aimed to look more broadly at how designers can understand and influence people’s behaviour. This is also the first ‘public’ workshop that I’ve done under the Requisite Variety name, which doesn’t mean much different in practice, but is something of a milestone for me as a freelancer.
In the previous post I outlined what I had planned, and while in the event the programme deviated somewhat from this, I think overall it was reasonably successful. Rather than using a case study (I feel uneasy, when people are paying to come to a workshop, to ask them effectively to do work for someone else) we ran through a series of exercises intended to explore different aspects of how design and people’s behaviour relate to each other, and perhaps uncover some insights which would make it easier to incorporate a consideration of this into a design process.