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.

I have posted before about gamification and the use of persuasive techniques to improve the efficiency of drivers. For example, the Ford Fusion prototype dashboard and the use of simple lights and meters to encourage drivers to accelerate smoothly without aggression. Here is another take on the same idea that doesn't require buying a new car just an iPhone. The glass of water app displays a glass of water and the aim is to not spill any of the water as you drive. I am assuming that the app is correlated to the movement of the iPhone so that if you drive smoothly then you won't spill the water, and hence will improve your driving efficiency.

This seems like a great way to improve fuel consumption. Link it to an online leaderboard, possibly with prizes for the best drivers, or best improvement, and you can make a broader multiplayer game out of it. Link the leaderboard to each individual drivers social network and you might actually begin to get real improvements in average drivers fuel consumption. Of course there is also a corresponding race-to-the-bottom game that could conceivably develop as well and the rules should take this into account. If the GPS could also be used to log journeys then, suitably anonymised, it would be interesting to visualise whether there are particular roads, areas, or times that lead to increased fuel-consumption or bad driving. I also wonder how much penetration would require before we could use a system like this to monito traffic flow. Whilst many autonomous-traffic management systems rely on transponders attached to individual cars or cameras watching all vehicles, perhaps there is a lower bound to the number of vehicles we track that can still give meaningful statistics about traffic conditions?

I do wonder about how traffic police in the UK would see this though. In one sense it is only an add-on version of what could be built into the car dashboard, and is not that different to a tom-tom, especially if there were an audible cue that could be used so that the driver wasn't watching their glass rather than the road. That said, an iPhone has a screen and could be used to display video and hence should not be within the drivers line-of-sight as far as I am aware.

Now we just need an android version, and cheap mass produced widget that sits on your dashboard and does the same thing for the non-smart phoners amongst us.

Dan Lockton, he of the Design with Intent toolkit, has set out what he describes as 11 gambits for influencing user behaviour. These include:

• Challenges & Targets – Give users something extra such as a defined goal that gives them a buzz for taking part.
• Unpredictable reinforcement – Don’t let the users get complacent – they shouldn’t be expecting a treat just for taking part
• Scores & Ratings – Feedback that shows where in the pack you are
• Levels & Progression – Goal oriented users are fulfiled by levelling up
• Rewards – pat on the head, ’nuff said. Closely related to the idea of challenges and targets
• Playfulness – Encourage participation by offering a fun play element
• Storytelling – Engage users through narrative
• Gaps & Voids – Leaving deliberate voids that the user can’t help but try to fill
• Roleplaying – Allocating roles for the user to fulfill
• Collections & Aquisitions – take advantage of the hoarding nature of people
• Birth a Meme – Plan ahead for the design being shared and spread around

I like how many of these ideas overlap with the explicit techniques used by game designers to keep gamers playing that I discussed recently. Particularly: challenges, unpredictable reinforcement, scores, progression, rewards, aquisition, and roleplaying, are all techniques that game players and designers are used to. The difference is though that these gambits are not about creating games but guiding behaviour in users of other systems.

Playfulness is obviously a core element of any game design process, or at least it should be, but is sorely lacking in many approaches to designing and building interactive systems.Playfulness could actually be one of the most powerful elements to creating a new user experience to which the users persistently return. Birthing a new meme is interesting and is a technique that obviously has great potential but that we don’t know enough about the mechanics of yet to reliably spawn meme creating systems. The Japanese seem to be good at spawning memes but this approach is still quite hit and miss, either an idea has legs or it doesn’t, at least for now. The most interesting idea in the list that is new, has immediate potential, and seems tractable is the idea of leaving gaps and voids in the system that the (possibly more anally retentive) users feel an irresistable urge to complete

More persuasive technology, this time from the usability sector with “evil by design“, a site that was created to accompany the 2008 Nielsen Norman Group conferences. The site deals with “purposefully designed interfaces” in the second sense of my earlier post, getting users to do what you want rather than what they want. The techniques for bring this about are based around the idea of engendering emotional involvement in the user that is directed towards your aims rather than theirs. This is achieved via seven group of techniques named after the seven deadly sins:

• Sloth – Because users are lazy you can get them to do something by providing the least resistance along the path that you want as opposed to alternative paths.
• Pride – Take advantage of a users desire to be more important or attractive than others (or conversely their fear of not being important or attractive).
• Envy – Get the user to desire something possess by someone else
• Greed – Play upon the desire of users to get “something for nothing”, or at least appear to. For most companies it is not desirable to reduce the cost of a transation to zero but you can play upon that desire by reducing the cost of some aspect of the transaction, e.g. shipping fees, if only they do something for you, e.g. minimum purchase size.
• Lust – The success of the “I Love You” email virus is sufficient testament to the power of lust. In terms of persuading users you need to provide a way for them to tell you their hearts desire, then sell it back to them.
• Wrath – Judicious use of a users anger, if you already have them over a barrel can be useful. For example, if a user has to fill in a long and complicated form but you know that they will tend to want to minimise the amount that they have to fill in, you could give less feedback about the mandatory fields. After the form is rejected the first time, and assuming that it is important enough, the user will make sure to complete every part of the form so as not to waste their own time. A risky one this, but I am sure that many governmental forms are designed with this type of influence in mind. Your tax-return is too important to not complete correctly so after being told to fill in the mandatory fields but not being told which are actually mandatory, a user may complete fields that are not mandatory but desirable information nonetheless, because the process is too important to mess up.
• Gluttony – Take advantage of your users overconsumption. The example is rather tenuous compared with some of the others, but on the web many users now use pop-up blockers to block advertising whilst they continue to browse. As a result many sites now use hyperlinks that either lead to advertisements or do mouse-over pop-ups of advertisements, or keywords are automatically turned into links that advertise products (or link to those products).

I think that this is an interesting approach to categorising various techniques for doing persuasive technology. By being able to group persuasive techniques like this we can more easily inform users of the ways in which they are lead to make decisions that they might not otherwise make. I still feel that one of the best techniques for avoiding being mislead is that of being aware of the range of techniques that might be used against you. Rather than having a long exhaustive list of these techniques instead we have a limited number of categories with specific examples of how the techniques can be applied. This is akin to the approach I use when teaching argumentation and critical thinking, in that sometimes the best way to defend yourself against rhetorical techniques is to be aware that they exist. For example, once a person is made aware of the technique of arguing against a person’s character rather than their arguments then they are more likely to point out that their opponent has addresses their argument. Before they are aware of this technique however, many people are more likely to respond in kind and the quality of argumentation is reduced and often never recovers during that dialogue.

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.