Workshop, 15 June, Umeå, Sweden: Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research
Dan Lockton
We thought you might be interested in a workshop we're running at the 2014 Design Research Society conference in Umeå, Sweden, 15 June, on Designing with people in sustainability and behaviour change research. Please do send this email on to anyone else you think might be interested.
Designing with people in sustainability & behaviour change research
This full-day workshop should be of interest to designers and
researchers working at intersections of sustainability and ‘behaviour
change’—two major current themes across product, service and
architectural design and HCI. It's been put together by researchers from the Helen Hamlyn
Centre for Design and Sustain RCA at the Royal College of Art, Chalmers
University in Gothenburg, and the Wuppertal Institute.
While technology is important, people are key to the environmental and social challenges of design in everyday life. Understanding people—and the contexts and practices of living and working—is crucial. Without these insights, work on sustainability risks being based on assumptions about human behaviour and decision-making which may not capitalise on the opportunities design offers.
In the workshop, we’ll be exploring methods for involving and including people better in design research for sustainability and behaviour change—designing with people. These include ethnographic methods, participatory design and co-creation, prototyping, probes and provocations, and integrating qualitative and quantitative data. We’ll discuss aspects distinguishing sustainability and energy research from general user research—how can specialist knowledge best be used?
We're looking for submission of brief case studies by 1 April. For more information, please see suslab.rca.ac.uk/designing-with-people and details of the DRS 2014 workshops and how to register (for the conference, including workshops).
Organisers
Dan Lockton, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, UK
Flora Bowden, SustainRCA, Royal College of Art, UK
Sara Renström, Design & Human Factors, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Anneli Selvefors, Design & Human Factors, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Pernilla Hagbert, Homes for Tomorrow, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Carolin Baedeker, Sustainable Production & Consumption, Wuppertal Institute, Germany
Najine Ameli, Sustainable Production & Consumption, Wuppertal Institute, Germany
Dr Dan Lockton FRSA
Design with Intent toolkit http://designwithintent.co.uk