As part of my PhD I’m testing different variants of the Design with Intent toolkit with designers (and design students) to find out how well different configurations work when a designer’s faced with a brief about influencing user behaviour: how useful are the ideas in inspiring solutions, and how well does using it compare to not using it?*
For the latest round of workshop sessions, to take place in September, I need 6 people to take part – if you’re a practising designer, design student or someone interested in this kind of field, and are able to give up a morning or afternoon, please do let me know.
I hope they’re relatively fun sessions – you get a series of design briefs and the idea is to generate and explain (sketches, notes, discussion) some possible solutions quite quickly – some briefs will mostly suit product solutions, while others are suitable for service solutions too. There’ll also be a bit about how you, as a designer, visualise and model the users you’re designing for, and how different design choices relate to different ‘models’ of the user. If you’re working on anything to do with behaviour change, or design innovation methods, I hope it will be useful to you.
There are going to be 3 sessions, with 2 participants in each. The sessions will last around 3 hours each; for part of it, you’ll be working together, and for the other part you’ll be working on your own. They’ll be during the week, taking place at Brunel University (Uxbridge, west London, end of the Piccadilly and Metropolitan lines). The most I can pay you for your time/travel is £10, plus cake or doughnuts or biscuits and plenty of coffee / tea / water. If that still sounds attractive, please get in touch!
The exact dates aren’t decided yet, because it depends on who’s taking part, so if you’re interested, please email me – dan@danlockton.co.uk and suggest a few of the following dates when you’d be available and I’ll get back to you if / when I can pair up people around at the same time! Possible dates are: 7, 8, 9, 10, (not 11 or 14), 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 September 2009.
Thanks for your help!
P.S. If a team from your company or organisation would like to take part in a full / longer / tailored-to-what-you-need ‘Design with Intent’ workshop, please get in touch too. The more people use this stuff, find flaws and suggest improvements, the better it’ll get and the more useful it’ll be.

Photos from some workshop sessions earlier this summer. Doughnuts will be provided; racing car might not be there.
*The results, along with those from some of the other workshops I’ve run in the last few months, are going into an article to be submitted to Design Studies, and the results from part of the session may also be used in an article to be submitted to the International Journal of Design.