Design with Intent is a multidisciplinary interaction design toolkit comprising patterns for influencing people’s behaviour. The format is a pack of illustrated cards, with accompanying website; other variants, including an iPad app, have been created by users.
The academic background is introduced in Lockton’s Output 2, but the toolkit itself is intended for practitioners’ use, and so was developed through an iterative action research process of workshops with designers and students in the UK, Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. It brings together a range of psychological and technical disciplines, enabling designers to explore relevant patterns, phrased as provocations enabling use as both a brainstorming tool and a reference.
Making the toolkit available online, with publicity from bloggers including Cory Doctorow, Seth Godin, Maria Popova and Tim Harford, led to large numbers of downloads (150,000 by September 2011). Comparing it to IDEO’s Method Cards, Rhode Island School of Design’s John Maeda tweeted (2011) that Design with Intent was ‘More useful than the IDEO deck and free to boot’.
Organisations buying the printed version for their own use include BBC, Philips Research, Ubisoft, EDF, CBS Interactive, Fox, Sony, Bayer Healthcare, European Bioinformatics Institute and JustGiving. It has been used by educational institutions worldwide, including Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, London College of Communication, Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Art & Design and Cambridge’s Judge Business School, set as reference material in RSA and Core77 design competitions, and recommended as a resource by the Central Office of Information.
Lockton has run workshops and given guest lectures using the toolkit for organisations including Dyson, Ubisoft and Philips, and at both industry and academic conferences; in 2012, Autodesk ran a series of workshops using the toolkit as part of its sustainability programme.