9 Apr 10:15 Tetsuo Yamabe: Behavior Change through Human-computer Interaction: Feedback Design in Persuasive Applications

HIIT seminar, Friday Apr 9, 10:15 a.m. (coffee from 10), Exactum B222

Tetsuo Yamabe
Distributed and Ubiquitous Computing Lab., Waseda University, Japan
Visiting researcher at HIIT/Spektri (Ubiquitous Interaction Group)

Behavior Change through Human-computer Interaction:
Feedback Design in Persuasive Applications

Abstract:
Persuasive technology is the exciting research field that aims at influencing and changing human behavior with interactive technologies. For example, the deterioration of living habits, such as immobilization and unhealthy diet, has become serious social problems in developed countries. It is often difficult to change such bad habits by oneself,
even though (s)he is aware of the importance of maintaining desirable lifestyles. The persuasive applications help us to achieve target activities by providing supplementary information and several kinds of incentives that affect our decision-making process. They reinforce our behavior and/or attitude as well as simply induce us to particular
actions, but on principle they must not use either coercion or deception.

In this talk, I will present our persuasive applications that are designed with different types of incentives. For example, MonaLisa Bookshelf and Virtual Aquarium affect our aesthetic feelings and encourage sustainable behavior change in playful manner. On the other hand, activity-based micro pricing system attaches economic incentives
to activities, in order to allow marketers and regulators to induce consumers to perform particular actions. Based on lessons learned in the prototyping processes and experimental studies, I will address the importance of feedback design and present a system framework for persuasive applications. I am also happy to introduce our latest work in the concept of "augmented classic games", which aims at exploring the feedback mechanism in the tabletop game domain.