01: Welcome; Designing Agency; Looking for tales from the field

Hello, and Happy New Year!

Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter. Some of you have been waiting a few months for the first of these; I can only apologise for the delay. As of today (2 Jan 2016), there are 169 subscribers, which is quite a lot for a newsletter with, until today, no track record—so, thank you all for your confidence.

This is the first newsletter accompanying the Design with Intent book, to be published by O’Reilly Media in late 2016. My aim is that these are partly an irregular* series of updates about progress with writing the book (with some requests for suggestions and input), and partly a way of sharing a few other things I come across that, if you're interested in design, technology, people's understanding and people's actions, you might find as intriguing as I do. 

A round-up of some of the projects I did in 2015, including the book Drawing Energy, a video of a talk at Product Tank London, a bit in the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast, and some projects I've done with students.

• On 20 January, I'm talking at Behavior Design Amsterdam — thanks Wilbert Baan and Iskander Smit for the invitation
• In February, I'm off to Mexico City as the RCA lead, working with Dr Laura Ferrarello, for a collaborative Mexico–UK project with Laboratorio para la Ciudad, Superflux, Future Cities Catapult and UNAM. Supported by the British Council’s Newton Fund, we'll be looking at aspects of how to make policy visible, tangible and interactable-with, in the city environment, transposing ideas between Mexico City and London and vice versa. Thank you to Dan Hill, Claire Mookerjee, Gabriella Gómez-Mont, and everyone else involved in setting this up
• 'Taking the Code for a Walk', written by Delfina Fantini van Ditmar and me for Elisa Giaccardi's 'Connected Everyday' forum in ACM Interactions will be published at some point in the next few issues. This is a brief but exciting article detailing some of the research Delfina has done for her PhD around human interaction with the algorithmic systems of the 'smart' home, taking a second-order cybernetic perspective
• From 27–30 June, DRS2016 in Brighton, the Design Research Society conference, is shaping up into an interesting and diverse programme of perspectives on design, research and society. I'm conference experience chair, along with Veronica Ranner, and we'll be trying to help curate a good experience for everyone taking part. Some thoughts here on how you can help

4. The book: your tales from the field

The Design with Intent book will feature a number of focused case studies, interviews and 'tales from the field' about particular situations where design and behaviour have intersected in interesting ways. Some of these are done already, but I'm really interested in your stories: your tales from the field, particularly around:

• how people's behaviour changed after you tried some kind of 'designed' intervention or experiment: what were you trying to do, and what were the results?
• situations where you have learned something through doing research with people that changed your assumptions about people's behaviour (and what you did about it)
• how (mis)understandings of how systems / services work have affected people's behaviour
• experiences of trying to change people's actions through design, in practice
• different assumptions that different stakeholders (e.g. a client) had about people whose actions they were trying to influence

If you have a story (however brief), images or comments along these lines that you think would be interesting for the book, please do get in touch—dan@danlockton.co.uk—you'll be fully credited and your input very much appreciated!

Writing the book's been going more slowly than I hoped. I've come to realise (which I should have known) that this kind of project works best when it's possible to devote solid blocks of time to it—at least a few days at at a time. That's difficult to do alongside a job which (though nominally part-time) is pretty much full-time in reality. The problem otherwise, with half-days and evenings working on it, amidst replying to endless university admin emails, is that I spend the entire time getting up to speed with what I did the last time I had a snatched few hours to work on it, and revising and re-revising the same bits rather than making much progress.

I am gradually solving this, but it certainly reinforces my respect for people who do manage to write books alongside working and looking after family.

5. Some interesting links

Finally, a few interesting things to read:

• Design, White Lies and Ethics by Dan Turner on A List Apart
• Superflux's New Year's Resolution Generator
• Workplace design for behaviour change—Phoebe Moore's talk from our V&A Design Culture Salon on 'Is designing for behaviour change 'creepy'?'
• Can We Avoid Marginalizing Women with the Internet of Things? by Mrs Smith
• Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action by Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro in Cybernetics & Human Knowing
• "Means Well" Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions by Natalie Kane
• Critical Algorithm Studies: a Reading List (too much to read, but what a collection!)

6. Good luck for 2016

Thanks for subscribing, and please do let other people know if you think they'd find this interesting.
Until the next time (which will be, hopefully, next month!)
Take care
Dan

dan@danlockton.co.uk

*My initial thought was to do weeknotes, like Berg did so well for so long, but I don't have the stamina.