Duncan Gotobed

Being persuaded

I have been reading BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (Interactive Technologies) and I have found it extremely thought provoking.

He describes how technology can be used to influence other people's behaviour. For example, he explains how computers can:

• make target behaviour easier to do 
• lead people through a process
• perform calculations or measurements that motivate
• allow people to explore cause and effect relationships
• provide people with motivating experiences
• help people rehearse a behaviour
• reward people with positive feedback
• model a target behaviour or attitude
• provide social support 

He makes a good case and over the next few weeks I'm going to put various forms of  'persuasive technology' to the test to see if it can help me lose weight. I'll post how I get on and my thoughts about the technology and its effectiveness in this blog.

On designing tools

I like this quote from Dave Snowden 

"Technology is a tool and like all tools it should fit your hand when you pick it up, you shouldn't have to bio-re-engineer your hand to fit the tool."

It describes a key quality of a well designed product/service.

(via davidtjones)

Maglev train spotting

This is a fascinating video of a maglev train. If you watch right to the end you will see a nice demonstration of a train using tracks mounted vertically on buildings.

Popular Science published an article five years ago on the possibility of a trans-Atlantic maglev train that would travel in an airless underwater tunnel at 4,000 MPH and make the trip from New York to London in an hour.

(via kotke) 

Twittering troubles

As events continue to unfold in Iran, the BBC reports that heavy restrictions have been placed on foreign news organisations in Iran. While this approach may have worked in the past it is unlikely to have much of an impact now, particularly as Clay Shirky argues it's the 'first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media'.

Read the TED Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran here.

I think there are a number of lessons to be drawn from what is happening in Iran:

1. People increasingly exoect events to be reported in real-time
2. It's virtually impossible to control what information is communicated about an event  
3. Anyone who has a camera phone and access to the internet is a potential journalist  
4. It's relatively easy for people to access and register support for a cause 

Terminating Twitter

Sony, is promoting the new Terminator film, with a game built on the twitter platform. To play you must register at www.resistance2018.com and follow tweets from @resistance2018. Game play follows in a similar manner to @playtwivia in which you @reply solutions to simple puzzles—word scrabbles, fill in the blanks and trivia. 

The game makes for an interesting weaving of gaming, social media, and marketing that strikes a delicate balance between being engaging and fun without being tiresomely involving. With participants pinged with messages from @resistance2018 on the hour, and puzzles being delivered every other hour, messages are kept at a manageable rate.

It's enough to get me onto twitter (@duncangotobed).

(via PSFK)

When technology goes too far...

The Open Rights Group has been campaigning for sometime against Phorm, which scans and profiles peoples’ online behavior so that it can bring them more relevant advertisements. The problem is that the technology they use infringes people’s privacy because it illegally intercepts confidential information.

The Open Rights Group is asking for people to write to major companies asking them to block phorm and in so doing protect people's privacy. Wikepedia and Amazon.co.uk are some of the companies that have blocked Phorm but they highlight there is more work to be done.  

They provide a list of major contacts here.

Picture: "I want privacy!" by bejealousofme

Simple is best

MIT researchers argue that computers need to become as easy to use as post-its.

Office workers are like electricity: When they want to get something done, they follow the path of least resistance. Which is why, say researchers at MIT, the Post-it note continues to flourish on every surface of the contemporary office, despite all those expensive computers ready and willing to help.

David Karger helps lead a group at MIT exploring the way people work with computers. A recent paper from his team chronicled the attraction of “information scraps” like Post-Its, which, says Karger, are actually near-perfect data base tools. They’re accessible and easy to use, and they take advantage of the brain’s facility to remember an object’s location in the three-dimensional world.

 

(via Experientia)

Picture: post-its! by sun dazed

Learning by design

Eduwear is a European Commission funded project to 'develop an educational low-cost construction kit for wearable and tangible interfaces'.

While there is a lot of 'Pedagogic Gobbledegook' on the project blog, the underlying idea is to enable children to enage with technology and the sciences to create smart materials that turn their ideas into reality. 

 

The workshops get children involved with all aspects of the design process and link the learning to their everyday lives.

 

'The children were very motivated and creative. They were very happy take part in this workshop. All of them stayed with us till we have finished the workshop- it was hard to send them home in the evenings, because they were so interested and motivated. They collected lots of ideas, they were open-minded, pride and satisfied when they presented their product.'

 

Extract from Report on Bremen Workshop

Picture by Francesca@CuteCircuit

The internet changes the way we learn

Renowned computational biologist and educational innovator James Bower believes the Internet, rather than representing some new stage in human development, has simply caught up with the ways people actually function.

He says, the Internet is institutionalising self-learning and we have to figure out how to get out of the way and allow it to do that.

Watch the video here.

Moulding Technology

Clive van Heerden from Philips Design provides an alternative vision of technology in which it liberates rather than tethers people to its requirements. 

He explains how his team develops life style scenarios that are designed to provoke reactions and inform the development of alternative futures. 

Watch the video of his talk here.

Clive makes a number of interesting points that inform learnng design. My favourite is thinking about the future by asking what will learning look like in 10 years time.

Learning from Google

 

Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google shares a heap of interesting nuggets, including:

• Find meaningful solutions to ordinary and everyday problems
• The simplest design is probably the best design
• Speed matters
• Search will become increasingly part of people's daily routines
• Consider what things will look like 10 years out
• Instant feedback helps people to move from novice to expert user status very quickly
• Putting coaching tips on a page frustrates expert users
• Users don't always know what they want and when they do they can't always articulate it

Watch the video here

Marissa's points are as relevant to blended learning programmes as they are for corporate intranets. 

Neuroengineering

Wired has just published an excellent two part article on neuroengineering, the practice of altering the brain with electronics or optics.

 

Dr. Ed Boyden' (MIT) forecastsTranscranial magnetic stimulation, which gets electricity into the brain peacefully, could one day be a "prosthetic for creativity," based on its ability to increase concentration and risk-taking.

 

If you could use technology to augment your brain, what would you want it to do?

Memes and 'Temes'

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology - and invents ways to keep itself alive.

 

Watch the video

Microsoft gives a vision of the future

Microsoft recently demonstrated its vision of a virtual assistant.

Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a talking head on a screen. You can speak to her and ask her to handle basic tasks like booking appointments for meetings or scheduling a flight.

 

More interesting is Laura's ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments.

 

Laura represents a sophisticated attempt to recreate the finer aspects of a relationship that can develop between an executive and an assistant over the course of many years.

 

Read the full story

 

It's only going to be a matter of time before someone develops the idea and creates the virtual HR Assistant, who can give managers advice on company policies and procedures and book appraisals and return to work interviews.

Picture by Human Digital Assitant