Summary Response Week 5: Motivating Change

CPSC 601.25 Week 5 Response Part 2

Papers

In this response I will discuss a paper regarding the trans-theoretical model of personal change and another paper applying that problem to motivating change in energy consumptuon

Models

Borrowing from the field of psychology, researchers in "Theory Driven Design Strategies" attempt to provide a set of design strategies to support persuasive technologies. These are technologies aim at supporting people to change behavior. This question invariably involves psychology because we need rigorous definitions of behavior, behavior patterns, motivations and other terms and ideas. The researchers employed two models, the "trans-theoretical model of behavior change" and the "presentation of self in everyday life". The former model describes a set of steps a person goes through before they change their behavior and the latter a discussion about how people present themselves to the world. These models are used when providing guidelines as a reference point, to make the design strategies consistent with theory.

Guidelines

The authors suggest that persuasive technologies be designed so as to have the following properties.

1. Abstract and reflexive - that the data collected by the system be abstracted so users are able to reflect on it easily.
2. Unobtrusive - so users are not annoyed by the system.
3. Public - so that data can be made public without causing embarrassment or discomfort.
4. Aesthetic - so that the system is not visibly ugly.
5. Positive - the system should present encouragement or correctives positively
6. Controllable - so that the user can remove and edit data if they feel the need.

Some of these guidelines are common sensical and obvious. Other suggests are not obvious, such as abstracting the data, many systems in this way present data in a raw or raw-ish manner. Another interesting guideline is that the data be structure in such a way that it could be made public, but this is a hard guideline to follow. How exactly would this work?

A Specific Case

These design guidelines are applied to a certain degree in the second paper, which focuses on feedback in a whole class of persuasive technologies. The "One Size Does Not Fit All" paper analyzes a set of applications which attempt to motivate or persuade users to follow green energy habits or behaviors. In this paper the authors focus in a look specifically at how feedback is handled in these systems and correlate them to different psychological theories of motivation. Several different recommendations are made and a explained using these motivation theories and the TTM. These recommendations involve providing personal feedback, connecting the feedback to social norms for people in the pre-contemplation stage or supporting individually set goals for people in the preparation stage.

This is all very straightforward and probably correct, in as much as the psychological theories are correct. The problem becomes how the software is going to be put before users if they are not in the stage already defined - a person in the pre-contemplation stage is unlikely to download software that nags them about energy use. In order to persuade, people must actively use the software, something that might fall off as the person falls behind their goals. Looking more closely at how to accomplish behavioral change in a clinical sense might provide more useful material for aiding these persuasive technologies. See Beeminder and 'The Breakdown of Will" for examples.