Mindful Design as a Driver for Social Behaviour Change, Dr Kristina Niedderer: http://niedderer.org/1961-1b.pdf

• design for behavior change
• social innovation by design
  • “new solutions (products, services, models, markets, processes etc.) that simultaneously meet a social need (more effectively than existing solutions) and lead to new or improved capabilities and relationships and better use of assets and resources. In other words, social innovations are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act.”—European Union [42, 43]
  • “Mindful design in contrast is assumed to be able to operate without such a supportive context, and instead to work on the intersection of coercive and persuasive design, being strong and explicit, but giving the user the choice of how to act, thus requiring the user to take responsibility. A good example of this is the traffic junction in the Netherlands, where the increasing number of signs did not reduce the rate of accidents, but taking away all signs did improve the situation (ibid, p. 10-11). In contrast to Tromp’s interpretation, the argument here is that the improvement is achieved because people have to actively think about their environment and how to navigate it, putting the responsibility on them rather than on the traffic management system. The explicit nature of this design intervention then is not based on the forceful nature of any addition, but on the disruptive nature of the omission, which causes conscious awareness and reflection.”
  • “Mindful design facilitates a process of conscious decision making by creating awareness of one’s own behaviour and shifting the focus from an external to an internal locus of control through mindful reflection as explained in the example of the traffic junction above.”
  • “…mindful design seeks to induce reflection of the individual on their inner state/emotions, their inter/actions and how these reflect personal and social beliefs, to open them to scrutiny through the disruption of the physical or symbolic function of an object used in the context in question.”