Last year, Flora Bowden blogged about our investigation of people’s perceptions of ‘energy’—how do people visualise, or think about, what is for the most part an abstract, invisible concept? A book detailing our research, Drawing Energy, is now available to download or order: Bowden, F., Lockton, D., Gheerawo, R. and Brass, C. (2015). Drawing Energy: […]
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Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research: DRS 2014 Workshop, 15 June 2014
On 15 June, at the 2014 Design Research Society conference in Umeå, Sweden, we will be running a workshop on Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research along with SusLab project colleagues from Chalmers University of Technology and the Wuppertal Institute. This full-day workshop should be of interest to designers and researchers working at intersections […]
Guest post at Ethnography Matters
Over at the excellent Ethnography Matters we have an invited guest post about SusLab, explaining the RCA’s work on the project so far through from an ethnographic perspective. From the conclusion: …we hope to demonstrate, in the context of the wider political, academic and commercial debate over energy and behaviour change, what it means to […]
What’s the future of the UK’s energy? 12 February
On Wednesday, 12 February, we’ll be presenting our work on SusLab so far as part of What’s the future of the UK’s energy?, the next event in the RCA’s Sustain talks series, alongside some big names in sustainability policy and design. By 2050, we could get all the energy we want from safe and clean […]
Home Energy Hackday: the results
On Saturday 9th November, about 35 designers, developers, makers, researchers and other interesting people came together at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. We had everyone from energy startups to service designers, venture capital to building performance and energy consultants, along with participants from our SusLabNWE partner organisations, Chalmers (Gothenburg) and Imperial College London. (Full list […]
Seeing Things: The projects
Visualising invisible patterns in human behaviours and environmental conditions Go straight to the projects On Friday 1 November, in the Senior Common Room at the Royal College of Art, twenty students from twelve different courses presented the outcomes of their week-long Seeing Things projects to invited guests, including participants in other AcrossRCA projects run by […]
Invitation: Home Energy Hackday, Saturday 9 November
SusLab Home Energy Hackday, Dana Centre, Science Museum, London SW7 5HD Saturday 9 November, 8.30am – 8.30pm Sign up at Eventbrite Are you interested in energy, design, prototyping or user research? As part of the European SusLab project, we’re running a one-day hackday event to explore new ways of making home energy use more tangible, […]
Co-creation workshop
At the end of September, five householders from London and beyond worked together with five designers from the RCA’s Service Design department and Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, participating in a SusLab co-creation workshop at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in Kensington. Our aim with the workshop was to connect a talented set of designers […]
Our ethnographic approach
This is a guest blog post we were invited to write by Gabrielle Ackroyd, one of the organisers of EPIC 2013, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, taking place in London from 15-18 September. Our paper, ‘People and energy: A design-led approach to understanding everyday energy use behaviour’ [PDF] will be presented by Dan on […]
Some news, mostly around writing
• My PhD, which was inspired and indeed sired by this blog, back in 2007, has finally been approved by the examiners. I’ve put the thesis online with a few comments. I’ll have a proper post reflecting on it all in due course – just […]
Making it easy
I have a blog post up at Guardian Sustainable Business, looking essentially at what’s been referred to here previously as ‘enabling‘ behaviour change, specifically in the context of sustainability.
Design and behaviourism: a brief review
by Dan Lockton In a meta-auto-behaviour-change effort both to keep me motivated during a very protracted PhD write-up and demonstrate that the end is in sight, I’m going to be publishing a few extracts from my thesis (mostly from the literature review, and before any […]
Coming up for air, briefly
Thanks for all the responses to the Design with Intent Toolkit – it’s got a heartening reception from lots of very interesting people, and has brought some great opportunities. I hope to be able to deal with all this effectively! Thanks too to all the […]
Instructable: One-Touch Keypad Masher
It’s been a long time since I last wrote an Instructable, but as I’ve resolved that 2009’s going to be a year where I start making things again (2008 involved a lot of sitting, reading and annotating, and in 2007 most of what I made […]
A ‘Behaviour Change Barometer’
This is a kind of exploration of some ideas I worked on a while ago as part of my research, and have only just come back to, in order to tidy them up a bit. I’m putting it online as a way – perhaps – […]
Dredging up some old ideas
Three essays I’d pretty much forgotten about, written for courses at Cambridge during my Master’s in Technology Policy, linked here for no reason in particular: Peer Treasure: how firms outside the software industry can use open source thinking How can we strengthen links between entrepreneurial […]