Tuesday 11 August 2015

FMP: Aesthetic of Friction- Marc Hassenzahl


A famous psychology experiment of giving a small child one marshmallow, and tell him/she if they can resist eating that marshmallow, they can get two later on. The result mainly show that the kid will attempt to resist eating that marshmallow but mostly fail in the end. This in psychology is called "temporal discounting" 



Temporal Discounting is a tendency to give greater value to rewards as they move away from their temporal horizons and towards the "now". However, the preference reversal occurs when both rewards are set to be the future by a little difference, for example, a £100  in a week or a £150 in a week and a half, they usually choose to wait a week and a half. But, when the little reward comes to now, the preferences maybe reversed again. Pigeons have the same tendency over the preferences. 

So what does this have to do with the interaction design, or just design world in general?

Lets say we want to change one's health state by convincing him not to consume too much sugar. In this case, the little reward is eating sugar, the large future reward is a healthier body. Yet the idea of better health is abstract and vague, you maybe able to persuade a person in a short term, but in the long run, persuasion will turn into a self-regulation. with the uncertainty of future reward( a vague idea of health), the person might prefer the little immediate reward (eating sugar). And this is where persuasive technology comes in.


Persuasive technology is designed to change attitudes or behaviours of the users through persuasion and social influence, not through coercion.


The persuasive technology model are fairly simple, they usually provide basic information and feedback, nor employ a very simple model of conditioning behaviour.


     

(Conditioning Behaviour/Operant Conditioning  )

Although persuasive technology offers feedback or operant conditioning, human is much more complicated than pigeons even we have the same time-discounting. Human have insight of the world and cannot be forced in to a motivation machines. They need something else help them to transform, to trick them into motivation.

To achieve this, we must forget the socialised culture of design, which is making things easy and convenient, because the aesthetic convenience does not instill change. What we actually need, is an aesthetic of friction, through this friction, but not a coercion, people will then to start behave like the way that object is meant to deliver. 

Although Marc Hassenzahl did not mention anything about meaningful experience in his presentation, I feel this still could be a definition for it, and it is very different from what Carla Diana has given, right here he focus more on the psychology side of interaction, base on psychological studies and design to shape a person's behaviour in a better way, or not!





What's interesting is that the projects he shows on the surface all have very clear statement of what it is trying to express, but the user still owns a choice of accepting the message or not, in an other word, the devices are not trying to force people into a motivation, just like he said, human cannot be forced to become something, all they need is a trigger which to help them develop the behaviour themselves. 
The devices make the suggestion and still offer choices is what draws me into his thinking. 






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