Design for behaviour change developed from work on design psychology (also: behavioural design) conducted by Don Norman in the 1980’s.[4] Norman’s ‘psychology of everyday things’ introduced concepts from ecological psychology and human factors research to designers, such as affordances, constraint feedback and mapping. They have provided guiding principles with regard to user experience and the intuitive use of artefacts, although this work did not yet focus specifically on influencing behavioural change.
The models that followed Norman’s original approach became more explicit about influencing behaviour, such as emotion design[5] and persuasive technology.[6] Perhaps since 2005, a greater number of theories have developed that explicitly address design for behaviour change. These include a diversity of theories, guidelines and toolkits for behaviour change (discussed below) covering the different domains of health, sustainability, safety, crime prevention and social design. With the emergence of the notion of behaviour change, a much more explicit discussion has also begun about the deliberate influence of design although a review of this area from 2012[7] has identified that a lack of common terminology, formalized research protocols and target behaviour selection are still key issues. Key issues are the situations in which design for behaviour change could or should be applied; whether its influence should be implicit or explicit, voluntary or prescriptive; and of the ethical consequences of one or the other.