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Monday
Sep272010

Design with Intent: The Ludic Lens

Ludic: [adj.] showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness.

‘Design with Intent’ is a fairly simple but quite profound idea — design directly influences behavior and also reveals a designer’s (and/or his or her organization’s) conscious or subconscious intent. How about I just quote PhD candidate Dan Lockton:

What is Design with Intent?:

From the layout of shopping malls to digital rights management, our everyday lives are full of examples of products, systems and environments which have been designed to shape, guide or control — influence — our behaviour, using a wide range of techniques: technological, physical or psychological.

Intended commercial benefit is a major reason behind this; intended social benefit can be too (though it’s often fraught with politics). Sometimes the behaviour-shaping is helpful to the user; sometimes it’s serving someone else against the user’s best interests. Sometimes it’s trying to get the user to do something; sometimes it’s trying to stop the user doing something.

 

Lockton has released a card deck of patterns for influencing behavior through design.

Design with Intent toolkit 1.0 now online:

Officially titled “Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design”, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit’ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses’ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.

 

One of the eight categories within the toolkit card deck is the “Ludic Lens” dedicated to affecting behavior change via games and playfulness. The cards reference fun examples like those gravity wells for coin donations and web sites that imaginatively use role playing. Download the .pdf from the above link to take a better look; the cards are put together quite well. From the Ludic Lens introduction:

Games are great at engaging people for long periods of time, getting them involved, and, if we put it bluntly, influencing people’s behaviour through their very design. Yet this potential has (so far) been underexplored in application to other kinds of situations outside ‘recreation’.

The Ludic Lens includes a number of techniques for influencing user behaviour that can be derived from games and other ‘playful’ interactions, ranging from basic social psychology mechanisms such as goal-setting via challenges & targets, to operant conditioning via unpredictable reinforcement and rewards, to common game elements such as scores, levels and collections.

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