Workshop Overview

User activities and behaviours are “scripted” by the products they use. Therefore, designers intentionally or unintentionally end up shaping the user behaviour. Service design, which factors in longer span of user engagement has great potential to influence user behaviour through the appropriately designed product-service systems. There is a need to influence and change user behaviours in their own interest to meet several social challenges, be it at the level of an individual (e.g. health and well-being) or society (e.g. global warming). Balancing the concerns of user freedom and privacy is critical too. Service Design and Design for Behaviour Change have significant congruence in terms of concern for value creation over long duration, dynamic usage contexts and accounting for diversity of users, among others. However, despite the affinity of these two fields, we do not come across works that demonstrate practice that blends both the fields or synthesised design knowledge base.

It is likely that practitioners would be tacitly using design knowledge from behavioural change domain in service design, and vice versa. Intention of this workshop is to understand how it is practised currently, the challenges designers are facing and how they are addressing those. It would be helpful if the practices are reflected upon in a group to make explicit that knowledge and design principles underlying the practice. As well, it is hoped that applying the uncovered knowledge, albeit limited in scope due to the constraint of the workshop format, would nevertheless allow a degree of internalisation.