Simon’s scissors and ecological psychology in design for behaviour change

Abstract

This paper introduces a series of working papers (Lockton 2011a,b and 2012a-f) providing a background literature review of different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour, informing the development of the Design with Intent toolkit (Lockton, Harrison and Stanton 2010a,b). In the first section of the paper, Herbert Simon's 'scissors' metaphor, and the relationship between context, cognition and behaviour are discussed, while the remaining sections introduce some ecological psychology perspectives relevant to design for behaviour change, including Barker's behaviour settings, ecological interface design and Gestalt psychology principles.