I’m pleased to announce the launch of Design and Behaviour, a new discussion list / Google group:

The design of products, services and environments can be used to influence behaviour, and there’s a growing appreciation of the possibilities for social benefit, especially in environmentally sensitive design, health, safety, security and crime reduction. This group aims to bring together people interested in this emerging field: interaction designers, product designers, graphic designers, engineers, architects, ergonomists, computer scientists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, philosophers, researchers, strategists, policy-makers and anyone else with something to say, or an interest in learning what others are doing.

Run, initially at least, by myself with help from Debra Lilley, the group’s intentionally got a pretty broad scope. Please, if you enjoy this blog (or even if you don’t enjoy it but are interested in the field!) sign up (there’s also a Facebook group if that’s your thing). How the group develops is up to the members, so I can’t give you a definitive high/low traffic indication. But we will endeavour to keep it usable.
P.S. Both designandbehaviour.com and designandbehavior.com go to the same place.
P.P.S. My apologies for the few weeks off the blog’s had. I’ve been very busy. Thanks to everyone who’s sent interesting items in the meantime – I hope to get round to posting them as soon as I can. It’s intriguing though, looking at the statistics that (aside from one-off spikes such as when we’re Boing Boing’d) the number of unique daily visitors to the site itself (i.e. not via RSS) remains fairly constant Monday-Friday regardless of how stale the posts on the front page are.