Strange Aeons

The Interactive Institute has a range of energy consumption interfaces, devices and services designed to feedback to folk about the amount of energy that they are consuming and possibly also to influence their behaviour with respect to their energy consumption. These include:

• The Energy Coach - a service to help you take better control of energy usage
• The Energy AWARE Clock - a feedback device that visualises the spikes of energy usage in your household on a clockface.
•  The Energy Plant - an LCD that visualises household electricty consumptions as a growing plant

Many of the ideas in isolation are not entirely novel although they do have a shiny factor that isn't to be found in similar offerings elsewhere. For example, OPower have a similar system that they describe as their smart grid front-end. This is designed to influence customer behaviour through a combination of feedback via a hardware peripheral, good usage analytics and visualisation, and social influence, e.g. see how much energy you are consuming compared with the aggregated consumption of your neighbours.

One of the interesting things that the Interactive Institute is doing is combining serious games with energy consumption monitors. The important thing I find with this approach is having a game that is worth playing in the first place. Once you have done that I can imagine a game in which data from the sensors in your, and possibly your neighbours houses, affect the game world. Increased energy consumption might negatively affect the variety or amount of game items available. Other things, such as running a higher consumption device at a peak usage time might affect how exciting or dangerous the game world is.

My last post about discovering the Institute for the Future generated more traffic than this little blog has ever seen before (although this isn’t actually saying a lot). One of the most interesting comments that I noticed was one that mentioned Aldous Huxley and persuasion.

I was pondering this all week and felt that it was time to draw a distinction between two form of persuasive technology, at least in the context of my previous post where I suggested that we wish to use persuasive and argumentative technology “to influence people to make the correct decisions”. In this context we have to ask the question, what do we mean by “make the correct decisions”?

I see two senses of this that can be delineated based upon viewpoint:

    In the first sense a correct decision is one that is made in the argumentation theoretic sense of a decision that is based upon sound and justifiable reasoning. This follows from the de facto meaning of scepticism in which we say that a sceptical reasoner will come to a decision if they have a reason to do so. In this sense persuasive technology can be seen as a supportive technology, helping people to come to concious decisions and ensuring that they understand their own reasons for doing so. Technically though this isn’t actually persuasion but is closer to a form of deliberation, in the Walton & Krabbe (1995, “Commitment in Dialogue”) sense, although to my mind, supporting the deliberative process is one of the more benign uses to which persuasive (and related) technologies could be put.
    The second sense is more coercive. In this sense a correct decision is from the perspective of the person directing the persuasive technology. The correct decision is whichever decision that that person wishes the audience to make. It is in this context that most forms of persuasive technology will probably be used as  it is the form of the technology that can be used to sell things and influence peoples behaviour.

A good place to start lucking at coercive persuasion from a layman’s perspective is probably with Douglas Rushkoff’s “Coercion” which explains how sellers use coercion, usually surrepticiously via psychological tricks and understanding of behaviour, to persuasde us to do what they want us to do. Because this sense of persuasion is already in the wild it makes sense to study it and to begin to identify and construct defences against it.

I found this blog run by the Future of Persuasion: Future as Persuasion project at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Persuading others is just one way that we make use of argumentation in order to achieve specific goals in the real world. This IFTF project proposes the following core research questions:

• What are the new directions of change in persuasive tech? In particular, we will track RT data/activity streams, modeling/simulation, augmented reality, video, haptic interfaces, mobile supercomputing with the cloud, and the cognitive web.
•  What are the new directions of change in the science and art of persuasion?  We’ll look at behavioral psychology and economics, social networking, design thinking, neuroscience, and game theory.
• How is what we are persuading for changing? What new values and norms will emerge over the next decade that could change what we want to be persuaded about, or how others want to persuade us?  These could be as large as the concept of sustainability, or more narrow, such as the emergence of new parenting norms in the U.S.
• How are the agents of persuasion changing? The crowd and the individual are both agents gaining the power to persuade.  How will this change over the next decade and what will the new agents be?
• How is persuasive power being redistributed? Who is likely to gain more persuasive power, and who to lose it, over next decade?
• What might be new obstacles to persuasion?
• What are the implications of these changes for 5 important domains of persuasion in the next decade?
  
  • Learning,
  • Marketing/Advertising,
  • Working/Belonging to an organization,
  • Health, and,
  • Governance/Politics.

As software developers & technologists we can also look to how persuasive elements of interfaces can be designed in order to influence behaviour.

For example, visual feedback to the driver of a car indicating their fuel consumption can persuade the driver to modify their driving technique, influencing their behaviour for the better (the picture above illustrates the Ford Fusion dashboard in which a vine, on the right hand side, withers or thrives depending upon how economically the car is driven).

Similarly, visual interfaces that give feedback on home energy consumption can be made to make user feel worse about consuming more energy, and better about reducing our energy consumption, again influencing our behaviour as researchers at the Eindhoven Institute for Technology have done using the Phillips iCat:

One place to find out more about this is the AISB symposium’s on persuasive technology [2008, 2009] that have run over the last couple of years which have drawn together interface designers, interaction designers, and, persuasion, dialogue, and argumentation researchers to present work and discuss both how to build persuasive systems, and how to use them responsibly. I presented papers at both of these symposium’s, the first on MAgtALO, an agent-based dialogue system used to perform knowledge elicitation about the opinions held by real people on real subjects, and a paper on mapping the outputs from dialogue software, like InterLoc, onto argument structures represented in the Argument Interchange Format (AIF).

As I continue to develop argument blogging software to support online argumentation, I believe that persuasion will take a more central theme. At the surface level of the argument web, users will primarily attempt to persuade each other to accept the other’s standpoint, but there will come a time when we have sufficiently good corpora of structured argument and opinion that we also start to reuse argument oriented software to influence people to make the correct decisions.

To give you a little bit more of an idea of why argumentation is important, I found this blog run by the Future of Persuasion: Future as Persuasion project at the Institute for the Future. Persuading others is just one way that we make use of argumentation in order to achieve specific goals in the real world. As computer software developers we can also look to how persuasive elements of interfaces can be designed in order to influence behaviour. For example, visual feedback to the driver of a car indicating their fuel consumption can persuade the driver to modify their driving technique, influencing their behaviour for the better (the picture above illustrates the Ford Fusion dashboard in which a vine, on the right hand side, withers or thrives depending upon how economically the car is driven). Similarly, visual interfaces that give feedback on home energy consumption can be made to make use feel worse about consuming more energy, and better about reducing our energy consumption, again influencing our behaviour. One place to find out more about this is the AISB symposium's on persuasive technology [2008, 2009] that have run over the last couple of years which have drawn together interface designers, interaction designers, and, persuasion, dialogue, and argumentation researchers to present work and discuss both how to build persuasive systems, and how to use them responsibly.