Joining forces:investigating the influence of design for behavior change on sustainable innovation

Design is a significant driver of behaviour change, enabling, encouraging or discouraging particular practices from taking place. Despite design’s clear influence on behaviours, no overarching framework exists for the effective implementation of Design for Behaviour Change (DfBC) in professional and public contexts. This paper takes a first step to synthesizing current models and approaches of DfBC, covering the thematics of ecological sustainability, safety, health and well-being, and social design. The review is supported by a range of case studies that illustrate the role of DfBC as a driver for sustainable innovation for small and medium size businesses (SME). The objective is to develop a better understanding of how to stimulate ecological and social innovations in SMEs that enable lasting behaviourchange. The findings of the review highlight opportunities and challenges for the effectiveimplementation of sustainable innovation through DfBC, in particular the lack of a holistic evidence base of the current understanding and application of DfBC

Behaviours: Design and behaviour change in health

This chapter explores the role of design in the context of behaviour change for people living with long-term conditions. A series of short case studies illustrates how design can facilitate the development of products and interventions that better support the needs of individuals and how these can lead to positive coping behaviours. The chapter concludes with a broader discussion of the complexities and ethical issues that design in the context of behaviour change promotes

Persuasive technology for overcoming food cravings and improving snack choices

This research is partially supported by EPSRC Grant EP/G004560

Using the Default Option Bias to Influence Decision-Making While Driving

Gaining a better understanding of human–computer interaction in multiple-goal environments, such as driving, is critical as people increasingly use information technology to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously. Extensive research shows that decision biases can be utilized as effective cues to guide user interaction in single-goal environments. This article is a first step toward understanding the effect of decision biases in multiple-goal environments. This study analyzed data from a field experiment during which a comparison was made between drivers’ decisions on parking lots in a single-goal environment and drivers’ decisions in a multiple-goal environment when being exposed to the default option bias. The article shows that the default option bias is effective in multiple-goal environments. The results have important implications for the design of human–computer interaction in multiple-goal environments

HCI as a means to prosociality in the economy

HCI research often involves intervening in the economic lives of people, but researchers only rarely give explicit consideration to what actually constitutes prosociality in the economy. Much has been said previously regarding sustainability but this has largely focused on environmental rather than interpersonal relations. This paper provides an analysis of how prosocial HCI has been discussed and continues to be defined as a research field. Based on a corpus of published works, we describe a variety of genres of work relating to prosocial HCI. Key intellectual differences are explored, including the epistemological and ethical positions involved in designing for prosocial outcomes as well as how HCI researchers posit economic decision-making. Finally, emerging issues and opportunities for further debate and collaboration are discussed in turn

Perceptions of the Ethics of Persuasive Technology

This thesis explores the perceptions of the ethics of persuasive technology as applied to the design of user interfaces. The intentions are to learn whether consumers of software see persuasion through technology as ethical, whether producers of software view the development of persuasive technology as ethical, and whether these opinions can be reconciled. This research consists of a review of relevant literature on the topic, a survey of software consumers, interviews with software producers, and an analysis of the data, resulting in conclusions intended to influence the responsible design of user interfaces in the future. The results suggest a number of findings, including that persuasive technology is effective, that software consumers do not necessarily recognize persuasion when it is applied to them, and that they do not generally wish to be persuaded, unless they view the motivation of the persuader as being morally admirable. Software producers, on the other hand, do not intentionally behave unethically, but they are open to the development of persuasive technology, and even deceptive technology under some conditions. Persuasive technology has been described and analyzed to some extent in the academic literature, but often the ethical considerations have been given only secondary importance, although in a few cases, authors have expressed strong opinions that ethics can and should be considered when designing and developing software. Recent discussions among software design professionals online have demonstrated that there are growing concerns about the use of persuasive technology, even if these concerns have not yet been extensively explored in academic study