Exploring Design Patterns for Sustainable Behaviour

ABSTRACT

Products and services explicitly intended to influence users' behaviour are increasingly being proposed to reduce environmental impact and for other areas of social benefit. Designing such interventions often involves adopting and adapting principles from other contexts where behaviour change has been studied. The ‘design pattern’ form, used in software engineering and HCI, and originally developed in architecture, offers benefits for this transposition process.

This article introduces the Design with Intent toolkit, an idea generation method using a design pattern form to help designers address sustainable behaviour problems. The article also reports on exploratory workshops in which participants used the toolkit to generate concepts for redesigning everyday products – kettles, curtains, printers and bathroom sinks/taps – to reduce the environmental impact of use. The concepts are discussed, along with observations of how the toolkit was used by participants, suggesting usability improvements to incorporate in future versions.

KEYWORDS:

• user behaviour
• design tools
• design methods
• ecodesign
• idea generation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dan Lockton

Biographies

Dan Lockton, PhD, is a Senior Associate at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, London. He specializes in design for behaviour change, for social and environmental benefit, and his PhD at Brunel University focused on developing Design with Intent, a design pattern toolkit for this emerging field. From 2010–12 he was a researcher at WMG, University of Warwick, and at Brunel University, working with startup CarbonCulture on a digital platform for reducing workplace CO2 emissions, through connecting staff with data in more engaging ways. Dan is interested in ‘public understanding of everyday systems’ – how we understand and interact with the technology (and institutions) around us, and how this could be improved for social benefit. He does consultancy as Requisite Variety.

David Harrison

David J. Harrison, PhD, is Professor of Design Research at Brunel University, lecturing in Environmentally Sensitive Design and leading the Cleaner Electronics Research Group. He has research interests in sustainable design methods, low-impact electronics manufacturing and innovative energy generation and storage. Professor Harrison has a PhD in Robotics, and worked for six years at the BBC, mainly on the BBC Computer Literacy Project. He held a Royal Society Fellowship in the Parliamentary Office and Science and Technology, before joining Brunel in 1994.

Neville A. Stanton

Neville A. Stanton, PhD, holds the Chair of Human Factors in Transport at the University of Southampton, and is a widely cited expert on human factors and cognitive ergonomics in technological domains. His research interests include intelligent transport systems in vehicles and flight deck design. Professor Stanton is an editor of Ergonomics and on the editorial board of Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science and the International Journal of Human Computer Interaction. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal papers and 14 books on human factors and ergonomics.