Dan Lockton’s blog post announcing his PhD, ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change,” is super inspiring.
My PhD involves developing a ‘design pattern’ toolkit, called Design with Intent, to help designers create products, services and environments which influence the way people use them. The toolkit brings together techniques for understanding and changing human behaviour from a number of psychological disciplines, illustrated with examples, to enable designers to explore and apply relevant strategies to problems.
I always love keeping an eye on thinkers whose work engages with academia and industry. Like Christina Dennaoui, Leila Takayama, Danah Boyd, Barry Brown, Laura Watts, Paco Underhill, Nicholas Nova, Julian Bleeker, Lyn Jeffery, Jane Fulton Suri, Ian Bogost, Sam Ladner, John Battelle, and James Landay. I try to learn from their work because they draw on academic research yet communicate their thoughts without the academic jargon.
I now have to add Don Lockton to the list!
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Lately, I have been dreaming up of a visual component to my dissertation when I write it up next year after I finish my fieldwork in China. I have a collection of small books, pamphlets, guides, and materials from organizations that give me inspiration for my creation.
One of my favorite examples is Laura Watt’s ethnographic work on Orkney Islands in Scotland. We were both guest lecturing at Irina Shklovski’s seminar at IT University in Copenhagen, and Laura gave an amazing presentation about her research. In addition to her talk, she passed around a fieldwork tool kit that created to help clients understand her research. I remember that her research was one of the first and few times (to date) where I can hear the word “innovation” and not roll my eyes. She created a beautiful book of stories and poems about possible futures of Orkney Islands and a digital booklet about the future scenarios of infrastructure.
Oh and another super cool project coming out of academic research is Reframing Mexico City, an interactive website from University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Tecnologico de Monterrey. To create part one of the scenarios on the website, UNC & TM students used data collected from UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies’ (CCIS) interviews with Mexican immigrants on how they crossed the border into the US (research led by Leah Muse-Orlinoff). Data from the interviews were used to convey the perils and experiences of clandestine border crossing in Tijuana, Tecate, and Sasabe. Then users on the website actually have the opportunity to experience the border crossing - they get to “make decisions about where they would like to cross, how much they want to pay a coyote, and what to do when confronted with certain obstacles such as apprehension by the border patrol, extreme climatic conditions, and injury.” This is an excellent example of how academic research can be turned into story-telling and creating empathetic experiences.
Well, now I get to add Lockton’s toolkit to my collection! He (and David Harrison, Neville A. Stanton) created a wiki for the toolkit where you can download the cards and purchase a set.
Reading his dissertation summary reminds me of all the educational toolkits that I created for workshop that I led before I started my PhD. (I created conferences and workshop for educators on how to incorporate popular culture like hip-hop into educational curricula, and how to use new media in after-school programs in low-income communities.)
While my dissertation is vastly different from Lockton’s and making a toolkit does not make sense (at least for now), it’s inspiring to see how it could be done. It makes me excited to figure out the appropriate tools to create when it comes to my dissertation!
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Aside from creating a lovely tangible set of materials, Lockton’s dissertation has intellectual teeth. His primary research questions is:
Can industrial designers use the Design with Intent toolkit to apply insights from other disciplines (psychology, ergonomics, architecture, human-computer interaction, behavioural economics) to generate novel, realistic design concepts, addressing briefs on influencing user behaviour, primarily to reduce the environmental impact of technology use, but also in other social benefit contexts?
One field to add to the disciplines that he’s mentioned is Sociology! While psychology helps you understand beliefs that influence user behavior from an individual’s point of view, sociology takes a more meta approach by situating beliefs that influence the user from a communal point of view.
Drawing on sociology would compliment Lockton’s last section that seeks to understand designers’ and users’ mental models about technological systems. Sociological research on culture and group interaction can be incredibly useful to answering how mental models affect designers. Mental models are culturally grounded. As such, one has to understand the broader context of the society that that the designer AND user is embedded in to really get at this question.
Now I already anticipate some academic purists arguing that Lockton’s dissertation is super normative - he’s explicitly trying to change user behavior, or that his work is too subjective - like creating his own index of measurement for his own products, or that it just isn’t academic to do a dissertation on something that one invented for industry use. But that’s really not fair to say this. Physicists, geneticists, or educators come up with their theories or ideas all the time and test it out with their dissertation. And just because research is normative form the get-go doesn’t mean that this isn’t legitimate academic research. Lockton is explicit in his research questions, and I think that is most important. Whereas many of academic research is hidden in super jargony language that is trying to prove something they already believe in, but hiding it under the cloak of reflexivity. Reflexivity is a mirage (according to Mike Lynch).
Thank you to Mark Vanderbeeken for tweeting & blogging about this!
In preparation for 
