Persuade Me

June 06, 2008

Oulu, Finland played host this week to something called Persuasive 2008: the third international conference on persuasive technology. And just what is it about this conference that could almost get this technology correspondent to consider venturing 350 miles north of the capital, Helsinki, and into the region of Finland known by the every-so-slightly forbidding name Northern Ostrobothnia? (I mean, if I had the money, the time, etc.)

Well, persuasion, of course. Check out the conference program (PDF)!

I've written before about my feeling that the interactive nature of the Internet, mobile phones, games and so forth is fundamentally changing the way we engage with technology.  It's no longer a passive affair, where a user just takes whatever someone else gives him or her. There can, and moreover should be a give and take. Persuasive 2008 explores this idea, and asks these questions: How can software, Web sites, video games, mobile phones and other applications and devices be designed to motivate and persuade people?  How do such things influence people's attitudes and behaviors?

Leading the way at the conference was a keynote by Ian Bogost, who teaches at Georgia Tech, designs games at both Persuasive Games and Water Cooler Games, and, in his spare time, authored a new book on gaming called Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. 

I last talked with Ian for a piece I did on Silverback, a mobile phone based game designed to raise awareness of, and prompt activism for, endangered gorilla populations in Africa. You can hear the radio piece here.

The Persuasive Games tag line is: "Think games are just for fun?  Think again."  The idea is to, ahem, persuade people through game play. I could keep writing about it, but it would better if you just downloaded their latest creation, Fatworld, and give it a go. It's about the politics of nutrition, and will give you a good sense of what the Persuasive 2008 conference is aiming to explore, albeit from many different angles besides gaming.

A lot of the session titles in Oulu were real chin-scratchers. My favorites: "Digital therapy: Addressing willpower as part of the cognitive-affective processing system in the service of habit change," and "Affective loop experiences -- What are they?" My question exactly...

But I decided to dig a bit deeper into a session called "BLB: A persuasive and interactive installation designed to improve well-being." To find out more, I went to one of the presenter's homepages.  BLB, it turns out, is a the result of a team project to "design a product or system that improves the well-being of single adults, by encouraging them to 'seize the moment' and increasing awareness of happy moments."

Best to let Connie Golsteijn's words and pictures describe it. 

The BLB system consists of a number of similar objects, called 'bulbs', that are placed on the wall. A person can put artifacts in the bulbs that remind him of a happy moment or goal he wants to achieve. There are different types of bulbs for personal memories and shared ones. The shared artifacts can be seen in a friend's system through a third bulb-type: the receive bulb, which shows the shared artifact on a screen. BLB encourages you to reflect on happy moments, and undertake activities alone or with friends.

   

For the record, a Rubik's cube would be the last thing I put in one of the these "happy memory" bulbs.  Hungarian mental torture device, more like.

(Photos courtesy of Fatworld website, and Connie Golsteijn's website)