Design for Behaviour Change

Design for Behaviour Change, overviewed in the Delft Design Guide (Boeijen et al., 2020), is a design perspective which is used for designing products or services with the intent to change the user’s behaviour. From this perspective, the design intervention creates awareness of a need for behaviour change and helps to realise and maintain the preferred behaviour.

Most of our eating behaviours were formed during our early years following the same model: through repetition, reinforcement, and association (Ogden, 2014). This sequence might best be used in the form of a game, which does not necessarily involve explaining all the motivations behind the rules to the user. The Delft Design Guide (Boeijen et al., 2020) recommends using a design approach called Persuasive Game Design in order to follow ‘the repetition, reinforcement, association’ flow. This method suggests that the designer could create a game that helps to make a behaviour change, by creating a transfer effect from the game world into reality. This approach persuades the user to make changes in lifestyle and health in a playful way (Boeijen et al., 2020).

An example of such a game is the Greencastle (Figure 7) project by designer Ramilison Emilli Monica (2020). Greencastle is a building set, which allows children to grow plants regardless of any experience in cultivation. Building a castle, children not only play, but also learn about the laws of nature as well as engaging in a new hobby: plant cultivation. The toy castle allows children to learn how to grow their own greens, which is a healthy habit that encourages mindfulness. In this project, the designer was suggesting that teaching humans to value resources from childhood will help them to transfer these values into adulthood.

Figure 7. Ramilison, E.M. (2020) Greencastle.