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Design for sustainable behaviour (part 1)

Dan Lockton, a Ph.D. researcher at Brunel University (UK), has together with professors David Harrison and Neville Stanton, recently published a range of papers on the topic of design for sustainable behaviour (the list also contains one blog post):

Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour
October 2009
This research aims to develop a design tool for product and service innovation which influences users towards more sustainable behaviour, reducing resource use and leading to a lower carbon footprint for everyday activities. The paper briefly explains the reasoning behind the tool and its structure, and presents an example application to water conservation with concept ideas generated by design students.

Choice architecture and design with intent
June 2009
Motivation – Choice architecture (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) is a phrase of the moment among politicians and economists seeking to influence public behaviour, but the relevance of the concept to designers has received little attention. This paper places choice architecture within the context of Design with Intent—design intended to influence user behaviour. Research approach – The concepts are introduced and choice architecture is deconstructed. Findings/Design – Affordances and Simon’s behavioural model (1955) help understand choice architecture in more detail. Research limitations/Implications – This is only a very brief, limited foray into what choice architecture is. Originality/Value – User behaviour can be a major determinant of product efficiency: user decisions can contribute significantly to environmental impacts. Understanding the reasons behind them, a range of design techniques can be identified to help users towards more efficient interactions. Take away message – The intended outcome is a useful design method for helping users use things more efficiently.

‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view
June 2009
Lockton’s response to the three most design-related questions in the smart meter consultation by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change

Design for behaviour change: The design with intent toolkit v.0.9 [poster]
April 2009
The Design with Intent Toolkit aims to help designers faced with ‘design for behaviour change’ briefs. The poster* features 12 design patterns which recur across design ﬁelds (interaction, products, architecture), and there are also 35 more detailed here on the website.
>> See also these blog posts on what is happening with the toolkit: part 1 and part 2

Influencing interaction: Development of the design with intent method
April 2009
Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction. The Design with Intent Method, a ‘suggestion tool’ addressing this problem, is introduced in this paper, and applied to the briefs of reducing unnecessary household lighting use, and improving the efficiency of printing, primarily to evaluate the method’s usability and guide the direction of its development. The trial demonstrates that the DwI Method is quick to apply and leads to a range of relevant design concepts. With development, the DwI Method could be a useful tool for designers working on influencing user behavior.

Design with intent: Persuasive technology in a wider context
June 2008
Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour
May 2008
User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Microsoft social media researcher Danah Boyd in the news

Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research, is quite in the news these days, including a very nice profile in The Guardian:

The Guardian – 9 December 2009
Danah Boyd: ‘People looked at me like I was an alien’
Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd talks about social networking, young people and how the web is more private than your home.

There’s one cliche in particular that annoys Danah Boyd: the “digital native”.

“There’s nothing native about young people’s engagement with technology,” she says, adamantly.

The Microsoft researcher, who has made a career from studying the way younger people use the web, doesn’t think much of the widely held assumption that children are innately better at coping with the web or negotiating the hurdles of digital life. Instead, she suggests, they’re pretty much like everyone else.

“Young people are learning, they’re learning about the social world around them,” she says. “The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they’re learning about the mediated technologies. And they’re leveraging that to work out the shit that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, their first crush.”

ReadWriteWeb – 10 December 2009
Says Danah Boyd, Leverage the Web’s Most Disturbing Content
Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today’s LeWeb conference [and made] the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change.

“Boyd explains how those who monitor online profile information, tend to have something to gain from it in a negative way. For example, oppressive governments often monitor the web for signs of criminal activity in order to enforce laws or suppress certain activities. Nevertheless, Boyd believes the visibility of violence, drug use and criminal activity can also be used by regular netizens for constructive purposes.”

On her blog, Danah links to the crib of her talk, and to the LeWeb video and the Supernova video (where she presented the same talk).

Our misguided focus on brand and user experience

If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way, argues Jon Kolko in a long piece on Johnny Holland.

“The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational.”

Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design. He has worked extensively in the professional world of interaction design solving the problems of Fortune 500 clients. Prior to working at frog, Kolko was a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, sits on the Board of Directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. Kolko is the author of Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, and the forthcoming text tentatively entitled Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, to be published by Oxford University Press.

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