Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context

Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘De- sign with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disci- plines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space

Design for sustainable behaviour: Investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour

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

The design with intent method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

The official published version can be found at the link below.Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process

Design for Sustainable Behaviour: investigating design methods for influencing user behaviour

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

Technology Driven Behaviour Change Using Mobile Devices.

Introducing new technology inherently changes the way people behave. Often there are unintended consequences. Technology driven behaviour change looks to inform the design of our interactions with an aim to direct these behaviour changes in a useful and positive way. However, many of our behaviours become habituated, especially around our use of technology. These kinds of behaviour are robust to interventions. This seminar will highlight this challenge and discuss the potential of technology to identify the formation and existence of these habits and how we might use technology to intervene and ‘break’ existing undesirable habits and perhaps even promote good habits

Scenario analysis as a tool for informing the design of behaviour change interventions

This article presents the design process behind the specification of a behaviour change intervention method to promote energy saving. The amount of energy used for food preparation is highly influenced by people’s behaviours. A user-centred design approach based on scenario analysis was applied to provide understanding of context of use and specification of user requirements. This knowledge was applied to the design of behaviour change interventions to motivate sustainable behaviours

Scenario Analysis as a Tool for Informing the Design of Behaviour Change Interventions

This article presents the design process behind the specification of a behaviour change intervention method to promote energy saving. The amount of energy used for food preparation is highly influenced by people’s behaviours. A user-centred design approach based on scenario analysis was applied to provide understanding of context of use and specification of user requirements. This knowledge was applied to the design of behaviour change interventions to motivate sustainable behaviours

Towards sustainable use: design behaviour intervention to reduce household environment impact

The use of electrical products has a significant environmental impact, mainly determined by user behaviour, which has overridden the energy efficiency gains in the household from technological and educational solutions. Designers are identifiably in a position to plan and shape the way in which consumption occurs and to fill the gap between values and everyday user actions. Despite this, the literature demonstrates that the use phase of the product life cycle is often neglected in sustainable design. Few attempts have been made to change user behaviour through design-led interventions to limit its environmental burdens. In addition, there is a lack of understanding of users perceptions of environmental issues with reference to the specific context: actual use, habits and fundamental needs of the product as well as the behaviour changing products. This makes creating sustainable use of the household appliance lessen the significance of its original purpose. The aim of this research is to seek the role that design could play in influencing more sustainable actions to reduce environmental household impacts. Based on a comprehensive literature review in diverse disciplinary fields of enquiry, a Design Behaviour Intervention Model has been established to bridge the social-psychological theories of behaviour and the behaviour intervention approaches. To inform this enquiry, a single product type (household cold appliance) was chosen as a case study to explore the capacity of a qualitative behaviour study to identify unsustainable aspects of product use. Two design activities were carried out: one examining the designer s ability to respond to the design brief and the other applying the findings that emerged from the in-depth behaviour analysis and the model into the design process. The selected outcomes from the design study are evaluated by a focus group to uncover the users acceptance level of these concepts and the behaviour intervention approaches applied. The collective findings are discussed along with the usefulness and effectiveness of the Design Behaviour Intervention Model in Design for Sustainable Behaviour. This research highlights that a detailed user study is not only the first step for improving energy efficiency in product use but also the origin of innovative design concepts to tap the market by providing better and greener use experiences. Useful insights on primary findings have emerged: the effectiveness of applying the social-psychological theory in the Sustainable Design domain; principles of improving effectiveness and acceptability of the behaviour interventions; and a guide for Design for Sustainable Behaviour

Designing and evaluating a behaviour change intervention that introduces modification of time perceptions as a solution to promote sustainable behaviours

This research presents the design and evaluation of an intervention that introduces modification of time perceptions as one of the solutions to promote sustainable behaviours. It is demonstrated in this thesis that unnecessary energy use is often caused by temporal tensions, defined as the relation between actions to be performed and available time. This research proposes that it is possible to deliberately reduce temporal tensions, and this can motivate people to behave more sustainably. Persuasive technology and human-computer interaction provided the tools needed to manipulate time perceptions and therefore bring about changes in the specific behaviours that result in unnecessary energy usage. Previous studies indicate that behaviours play an important role in energy consumption. From the different domains of energy use that could be examined, cooking was chosen to be the platform where the studies on behaviour change and energy use would take place. How behaviours influence energy use motivated the design of empirical studies to understand behaviours related to domestic energy use and identify what are the determinants of these behaviours. Each determinant was related to a strategy to be included on a behaviour change intervention. A wider survey was developed to understand students acceptance of a set of proposed energy saving techniques, and resulted in a vast volume of information about user preferences and intentions to perform the suggested energy saving behaviours for cooking. It emerged that participants rushed into the cooking tasks without much deliberation, consequently not following preparation procedures and thus using more energy. Information gathered during the first studies also showed that participants behaviours were partially motivated by the need to speed up the cooking process in order to reduce boredom when they were waiting for the food to cook, consequently resulting in extra energy usage. The knowledge gathered from the preceding steps and a literature review informed the design of strategies to modify the non-sustainable behaviours and promote energy saving. A user-centred design process involving an idea generation session and scenario analysis was used to provide a set of strategies to be embedded in an intervention, containing the specific methods to tackle the correspondent determinants of behaviours. The specific needs of the cooking activity indicated that an electronic intervention was an adequate platform to be implemented and tested. Two high resolution working prototypes of the electronic interventions were developed as mobile phone applications. The final study comprised the evaluation of the proposed interventions in improving aspects of the cooking activity, the acceptance of the interventions and effectiveness in promoting energy saving

Design with intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental and social behaviour change

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis describes a systematic research enquiry into influencing more sustainable behaviour through design, which has produced communicable new knowledge in the form of a design pattern toolkit, called Design with Intent, developed and evaluated through an action research process. The toolkit aims to help designers create products, services and environments which influence the way people use them, primarily for environmental and social benefit; it brings together techniques for understanding and changing human behaviour from a range of psychological and technical disciplines, illustrated with examples, with the aim of enabling designers to explore and apply relevant strategies to problems. 'Design for behaviour change' has grown significantly as a field in the past few years, to a large extent due to recognition of the contributions that user behaviour makes to the environmental and social impact of technology, and designed systems in general. People's behaviour is inevitably influenced by the design of the systems which they use, and it is not a great leap to consider that design could be used intentionally to influence behaviour where some benefit would result. This thesis starts by identifying the need for a guide for designers working on behaviour change. It extracts insights from reviews of perspectives on influencing behaviour from different disciplines, inside and outside of 'design', which could be usefully applied in a design context. Through an action research process of iterative development and workshops with design practitioners and students, these insights are incorporated into a toolkit for designers, which is applied mainly to environmental and social behaviour change briefs. Versions of the toolkit are made publicly available, and feedback from early users in different contexts is analysed and implications for continuing development discussed