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A video featuring Carnegie Mellon Professor of Entertainment Technology Jesse Schell has been making the rounds this week, and it touches on a number of themes that I think are central to understanding the intersection of games, education, and persuasive technology.

Schell’s talk, given at DICE 2010, outlines a brief recent-history of games – explaining the shift from immersive-games to casual games as being due in large part to games starting to “bust through to reality”. The move from games like DOOM to ones like Farmville is in response to games becoming increasingly tied to our real-life (and external/non-game related) social networks. In short, the argument stems from the premise that humans are hard-wired to compare their personal performance on things that they hold as important with how members of their social networks perform. As a result, the games that have overrun Facebook have done so in large part because they have managed to understand, and integrate, this understanding of the importance of markers of external, comparative rewards.

If we accept this take on human nature, and then add a healthy dose of the internet-of-things (replete with sensors attached to everyday items like soda cans, clothing, and anything else you might imagine), it becomes possible — and important to this discussion, desirable, according to Schell– to create external and comparative rewards for any and all routine human behaviors. In his talk, Schell’s envisions of a world in which we are provided external incentives for all sorts of behavior: where brushing teeth earns points from Crest, and taking public transport earns points from the government.

As Schell points out, persuasive technologies like the Ford Fusion dashboard, are already being designed with game-like feedback in mind. To him these technologies fall short, however, because they are being engineered by people who are not game designers. If game designers would start to design reward systems that aimed to improve behaviors, we’d have feedback mechanisms that are much more enjoyable, and as a corollary that are much more effective.

Though I agree with his conclusion – that there is a clear need for people with game design expertise to design things that can help people improve behaviors – by focusing on creating technologies that aim to achieving measurable ends, Schell misses a much more important use of persuasive technologies: namely, technology that aims to influence means.

Ends vs. Means

“the tools of persuasive technology are often used exclusively in the support of ends rather than means. A website ‘tunnels’ a user from browsing to purchase. A heart-rate device allows a user to self-monitor and adjust behavior based on digital output. An exercise bike conditions a rider by rewarding him with a television image when a target speed is reached. A surveillance system dissuades a knowing subject from taking the wrong action, as defined by his surveyors, through implicit threat. These techniques might produce desirable ends, from the perspective of the creator or sponsor of a persuasive technology. But they do not necessarily produce desirable means.” (Bogost, 16)

Over at The Ephemeral Notebook Aaron Matthew outlines some important objections to the External Rewards approach. In particular, Matthew writes that reward structures are “only ONE of the many neural motivators for gaming, and while the most basic and exploitable with our current understanding, they do not represent the true power of games.” Although Schell’s future employs game mechanics for positive behavior change, such a world also omits the centrality of elements like “learning and mastery” in games. As I mentioned on Tuesday, games and/as learning is a fairly extensive and important topic, and I think Matthew’s brief critique of External Rewards is on point. The person living in this future world would ostensibly face daily tasks for which, “the entire ruleset is one item long and mastery is immediate.” Faced with an unending stream of binary tasks (e.g. brush teeth, take vitamins), we may well end up improving particular behavior-related afflictions (e.g. gingivitis, scurvy) but at what cost to our free will?

It is this aspect of eroded individual causality that I think troubles me the most about Schell’s dystopic future. When I wrote about Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented (hyper)Reality video a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the most disturbing aspect of that film was that the subject’s life “seems to have few opportunities for acting on internally compelled behaviors. His life seems to consist of executing directions given by a series of reminders of what he needs to do, rather than of undertakings that he chooses to do.” This seems to be exactly what Schell is envisioning, and although I am sure he his being someone hyperbolic for the sake of making his case more compelling, I am still left feeling that his call to action could do more harm than good.

In a paper presented at the 2008 conference on Persuasive Technologies, Game Theorist and Designer Ian Bogost points to the crux of my wariness. In what he calls a “provocation for … future work” in laying out “a detailed theory of fine processes,(Bogost, 19)” Bogost examines his objections to persuasive technology (also known as captology). Bogost writes that one of his concerns for the field is that:

“‘captology’ risk[s] becoming manipulative rather than persuasive. This issue … should serve as a strong warning to persuasive computing projects. But it’s not the whole story. There is another reason to pay closer attention to the means by which computational persuasion takes place. A downside of an overzealous focus on outcomes is that we tend to lose all the richness and wonder of experiences in our chase for them. Encounters with computer artifacts are experiences as frequently as they are tools. And understanding experiences requires a different focus.” (Bogost, 17)

By focusing on “outcomes” instead of “our chase for them,” Schell has fallen into a persuasive technology trap. Schell concludes his talk by voicing the internal monologue of a citizen of his future, raising the possibility that since we are, “being watched and measured and judged, maybe I should change my behavior a little bit, and be a little better.” What Schell is saying is that conditioned behavior through external rewards has the potential create cascading effects in changes in attitudes. Although there is a tremendous lure in believing that external feedback can gradually influence our thinking for the better, so that we start to change internally negative/destructive behaviors into desired ones, there is a gap in this logic. If external rewards are incentivizing certain types of behaviors then so long as those incentives remain in place, it is unclear what motivation the user would have to actually internally decide to change his behaviors. If he is playing the game to get points, then surely he is looking to maximize his points in any way possible: the specific behaviors that are targeted for changing are incidental to the gamer’s experience since he just wants to win.

In this sense, reliance on External Rewards obviates the true potential of persuasive games: namely, that they can be used to help people think about themselves, the world, and life in new and empowering ways. Rather than relying on persuasive games to provoke or impede certain behaviors, what if they were used to open up a world of previously inaccessible experiences? What if games were used to get people thinking about why they acted in particular ways? If they helped them identify if these behaviors were in line with who they believe they are and how they ought to be? If they helped people think through the steps they needed to take to improve themselves from within, rather than from without? I, for one, would feel much better if this was the type of world we wanted game designers to help create.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. “Fine Processing.” PERSUASIVE 2008. H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.) LNCS 5033, 2008. pp 13-22

The possibilities afforded by a world with pervasive Augmented Reality has been a topic of great interest to IFTF for many years now (go here to read about the inaugural Augmented Reality Developers Camp that was organized by our Distinguished Fellow Mike Liebhold). In recent months, as discussions about the possibilities afforded by AR permeate into wider culture, it has been interesting to see examples what people think an AR future might look like.

One such example is the video“Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop”. Produced by Keiichi Matsuda, a student at the Barlett School of Architecture in London, the video was created for his final year Masters in Architecture, as “part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.” Explaining the work Keiichi writes, “The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.”

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Showing us a quite mundane segment of his subject’s life (making tea, going to the bathroom) the future that Keiichi has created is an unsettling one. Access to information on demand has eroded even the most basic skills, and as such the protagonist has to consult his AR computer to ascertain the correct algorithm for making a cup of tea. This may seem like taking the concept of cognitive offloading to the extreme, but imagine the consequences of living in a world in which the most routine, trivial tasks are aided by a personal, contextually aware computer. Thanks to continuous reminders of how to best perform particular task, we’d certainly make fewer mistakes (”carefully pour boiling water into the mug”), but at a substantial cost to personal agency. As with the growing use of GPS in personal vehicles, with pervasive, perpetual assistance from computers we may be able, for example, to get to our location more efficiently, but as a result we lose opportunities for getting lost, discovering the unexpected, and learning from our experiences.

More jarring are the “Hunger, Thirst, Solid Waste, and Liquid Waste” indicators that fill the film’s field of view, and prompt him to head to the restroom. The ability to read and act on one’s indicators of hunger and waste is a fundamental aspect of human biology. If these routine functions are being outsourced, I shudder to think what other biological and chemical imperatives are being reduced to indicator levels in this future — will we be shown how happy we are? When combined with the step-by-step instructions for making tea, Keiichi’s subject seems to have few opportunities for acting on internally compelled behaviors. His life seems to consist of executing directions given by a series of reminders of what he needs to do, rather than of undertakings that he chooses to do.

My favorite part of the video, however, has got to be the halting, muzak version of “Girl from Ipanema” that is playing throughout – it is certainly the perfect soundtrack to this provocative vision of a potential future.

Thanks to Anthony Townsend for pointing me to the video.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the growth in programming and computational skills that will be required in a world in which Everything is Programmable, and I was really surprised and heartened to see an article by Mitch Resnick et al. about Scratch in this month’s Communications of the ACM.

To Resnick’s group, the importance of Scratch is clear:

“As Scratchers program and share interactive projects, they learn important mathematical and computational concepts, as well as how to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively: all essential skills for the 21st century. Indeed, our primary goal is not to prepare people for careers as professional programmers but to nurture a new generation of creative, systematic thinkers comfortable using programming to express their ideas.”

I think the authors have touched on an important feature of introductory programming environments – that introductory programming languages such as Scratch do not necessarily have to serve as bridges towards higher-level programming languages, and to careers in computer science.

As noted in the article, for many,

“Scratchers, who see programming as a medium for expression, not a path toward a career, Scratch is sufficient for their needs. With Scratch, they can continue to experiment with new forms of self-expression, producing a diverse range of projects while deepening their understanding of a core set of computational ideas. A little bit of programming goes a long way.”

Not all students of Scratch use the language as a platform for further computer science education. However, the as computational thinking grows in importance as a critical skill set, environments like Scratch are invaluable precisely because of their ability to teach computational thinking without requiring a long-term commitment to programming. Indeed, it is important to recognize that there are limits to the amount of programming that the general public will be able to undertake.

I think that the dissemination of computational thinking is akin to the spread of digital cameras. The pervasive availability of digital cameras has not resulted in a world of professional photographers. Rather, as the threshold for experimenting with novel photography techniques and accessing high-end photography equipment and post-processing tools has grown, there has been a commensurate growth in literacy and awareness of the grammar and syntax of photography. Not every person who owns a digital camera understands how to change the camera’s ISO setting or shutter speed. However, as the threshold for capturing high quality imaged has lowered thanks to the automation of a camera’s settings, the overall quality of the average photograph has increased. Similarly, as the cost of taking a bad picture has plummeted (since the expense associated with throwing out of a roll of film filled with terrible photos is much higher than simply deleting the same number of photos on a digital camera), and the ability to see photos in real time has grown (with the availability of built-in displays), amateur photographers are more able to curate selections of relatively good photographs for their digital photo albums.

Similarly, as more of our world become programmable, there is a growing need for what the authors re-define as, “digital fluency,” which is,

“not just the ability to chat, browse, and interact but also the ability to design, create, and invent with new media…. To do so, you need to learn some type of programming. The ability to program provides important benefits. For example, it greatly expands the range of what you can create (and how you can express yourself) with the computer. It also expands the range of what you can learn. In particular, programming supports “computational thinking,” helping you learn important problem-solving and design strategies (such as modularization and iterative design) that carry over to nonprogramming domains. And since programming involves the creation of external representations of your problem-solving processes, programming provides you with opportunities to reflect on your own thinking, even to think about thinking itself.”

I’ve championed the benefits of languages like Scratchfor a while now, and I am happy that Resnick and his collaborators have so eloquently framed the pressing need for computational thinking literacy, and am thankful that they have created such a strong environment in which students of all ages can begin to learn how to live in a programmable world.

If you are interested in the rise in importance about computational thinking, and the programmable world it will enable, be sure to check out the full text of the Scratch article, as well as ourpost about our Everything is Programmable Digital Stories.

The rise of the netbook has made its way into traditional print media – a strong indicator that the trend toward low cost, cloud-reliant computing has firmly taken root in American consumer behavior. The increasing reliance on stripped-down machines that are built to make use of the massive, and growing, number of internet-only applications (for example, the google application suite, Flickr, and Sumo Paint, among others), has in turn created an interesting challenge for hardware manufacturers. Loading a bloated operating system on an otherwise slimmed down system is counter productive, and as a result manufacturers such as surging Acer are thinking up new ways to squeeze every last drop of speed out of their technology.

An interesting development in this field is recent moves towards convergence of the operating systems smartphones and laptops. With “growing similarities between smartphones and laptops [that] play directly to Acer’s strengths” as a low-cost manufacturer, the Taiwanese company has signaled its intentions to move into the cellphone market. Even more significant is Acer’s plans for the first netbook to natively run Google’s Android. In a CNet article on the upcoming Acer/Android collaboration, Acer’s president of IT product, Jim Wong, is quoted as writing :”Netbooks are designed to be compact in size and easy to connect to the Internet wherever you go …. The Android operating system offers incredibly fast wireless connection to the internet; for this reason, Acer has decided to develop Android Netbooks for added convenience to our customers.” Having a light-weight, blisteringly fast computer that runs the latest Microsoft offering is one thing; having a streamlined machine designed for the web that runs an OS that is designed for the web is something that I think will make a lot more sense to the average consumer.

Apple, you may have heard, has its own OS that was designed for interaction with web-based apps in mind. With months of furious speculation about the company’s plans for the netbook market, the possibilit of the smartphone war jumping to personal computing is very real. With its upcoming release of Snow Leopard, Apple is slimming down the size of its OS while decreasing application loading times — exactly the kind of changes needed to the mac OS for it to compete with an android-based netbook. Granted this might not signal the rise of the Apple notebook, but it does indicate that after years of unchecked growth, operating systems are beginning address the fact that personal computing is increasingly taking place on the web, and that consumers need personal computers that reflect this shift.

While working on the Digital Open: the Innovation Expo for Global Youth that IFTF is running in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing, I have tried to keep an eye out for potential areas that would benefit from the types of projects the Open is seeking. It was great to see this interview with the U.S. Government’s first C.I.O. in the July edition of Wired. Among Mr Kundra’s responsibilities as Information Czar is overseeing the fantastic resource Data.gov, a veritable font of government statistics and studies, which is open for manipulation by anyone with the time and technical know how.

Earlier this week I tweeted about the Guardian’s project to crowdsource government oversight – which has been described as “like signtificlab but for journalism” – and while I think the Guardian’s efforts are commendable, the beauty of Data.gov is that citizen oversight of government need not be limited to responses to crises of faith in elected officials. With this resource, citizens can begin to maintain continuous contact with their representatives, as Kundra notes, “not only [will people be able to rate the usefulness of the data feeds], they’ll also be able to provide feedback on quality. And one of the most important things … is [for users] to tag the data feeds. Once you tag them, you’ll be able to put them in the right context.” Once the government data begins to acquire user-generated metadata, the potential applications for the governmental information will grow exponentially.

With the 2010 Census (and its attendant data dump) not far off, I hope that the Data.gov is able to iron out the kinks in its systems — chief among them, the acknowledged need to achieve “a balance between privacy and security on the one hand, and ensuring that we have a participatory democracy.” In the mean time, if you are 17 or younger and are looking for a way to contribute to the Digital Open, here is your chance: Read the Wired interview, dig into Data.gov, and see what you can do to Open up your government.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned my long standing fascination with the history of architecture, and in particular my interest in how spatial design affects behavior. Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on ‘Infrastructure’ was therefore an unexpected delight. With articles on the proposed high-speed train in California, the design of prisons, proposals to revitalize the downtown of Paris, and the growth of data centers, the Times Magazine was in superlative form.

I find discussions of Infrastructure intriguing because of how the topic resides at the intersection of a wide range of disparate spheres of everyday life. Social, biological, political, economic, and cultural concerns are all embodied in the decisions society makes when we, for example, decide that in order to qualify for government funding, any high speed train that travels between Los Angeles and San Francisco cannot take a second more than 3 hours. Minute changes in the proposed path of the train often have unintended consequences, as Jon Gertner writes in Getting Up to Speed, “it’s difficult to separate engineering concerns from economic and political issues. It’s as if the relationship between these competing forces forms a set of interrelated mathematical equations; change one variable and you have to rework the entire calculus.”

When we make choices about how to build technologies, we are making choices with social consequences. In his piece on a new prison in Leoben, Austria, Bill Lewis points to the historical antecedents of prison design, and in doing so he explicitly references design’s position at the crossroads of technologies and human:

“Among the first people to try to blend ideology, morality and design principles into a carefully planned building were the Quakers of Pennsylvania, whose late-18th-century model was characteristically spare, consisting primarily of cells where convicts were to be kept in strict isolation, that they might better explore their own souls and find a way to God.”

The tendency to treating technologies as inert components of our everyday ecosystems has the net effect of preventing us from making the kinds of decisions needed to address the seemingly intractable problems of, for example, designing a more intelligent prison system. If, as a result of the discussions of the type developed in the Infrastructure issue of the Times Magazine, designing for the future of cities, railroads, and prisons can begin to render explicit the cascading impact of the choices we make for what we build, and why, we might begin to make smarter choices for a more sustainable, productive, and equitable tomorrow.

Of late I’ve been scouring the interwebs for ways to jump into the vast, nebulous topic of the “Internet of Things” and thanks a tweet by Nick Bilton of the New York Times and The Times Research & Development Lab, I was pointed to a fantastic presentation by Matt Jones, founder of Dopplr, formerly director of UX design at Nokia, and now at Schulze & Webb.

The talk was given at the Frontiers of Interaction conference in Rome this past week, and Jones has noted that his presentation was “primarily about the territory of “the Internet of Things” moving from one of academic and technological investigation to one of commercial design practice, and what that might mean for designers working therein.”

As a relative neophyte to the subject, to me this talk struck a balance between introducing some fundamental concepts of the field while at the same time outlining the opportunities and challenges developers will face in designing for what Jones calls the ‘Thingfrastructure’ – “designs of media, service and product that are resilient, and self-sustaining as far as possible.”

Making human/non-human interactions more meaningful while designing our way out of cycles of planned obsolescence are lofty aspirations, and given the brevity of his presentation, Jones offers little in the way of concrete steps to be taken to realize these ambitions. We are, however, treated to a taste of the future of design, wherein creators design, “from the start so that as far as possible, every thing in the system radiates infrastructure and service to every other thing.”

We’ve already seen products like the Chumby and the Ambient Orb, which have the capacity for passively transmitting information to humans. What I’m really excited for though is what Jones is pointing to — a world in which information exchange goes in two directions. In this coming world our interactions with machines tend more towards what Bruno Latour describes in We Have Never Been Modern — a seamless network of human and non-human actors informing and influencing each others’ behaviors.

I highly recommend taking a look at the slide show from the talk, or if you’ve got the time you can watch a video of the presentation. Also, if you have any suggested reading for me, I’d love to hear some ideas about where I can read more about the topics covered by Jones.

In “Rethinking the Mall”, former Dwell Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff reports on her experience at the 2009 International Council on Shopping Centers, and a number of the ideas she brings up strike me as examples of exactly the type of thinking needed in order to confront some of the looming problems of retail in America.

Arieff recognizes that any potentially successful remedy for the current highly-disperse, car-reliant, big box retail environment must deal “with physical space but also with human behavior,” and at the same time must strive to “strengthen the customer-retailer relationship.” Basic ideas, yes, but surprisingly hard to incorporate in planning given the seemingly intractable symbiosis between destination retailers (e.g. Walmart, Costco) and automobile culture.

How, then, to approach the problem? Arieff identifies a few architectural firms that submitted promising proposals to the conference’s Future Image Architectural Competition, but the one that caught my eye was the Wilson Yard proposal by Chicago based Fitzgerald Associates Architects. From Arieff:

“[The proposal] is not futuristic in the traditional sense — no biomorphic forms, moving sidewalks or shimmering touch screens. Instead, FAA recognizes that the future is already here and we’d better start building for it. The project dispenses with the notion of a freestanding mall and conceives instead of a walkable, mixed-use community. Key to their design is LEED silver certification, open space and multi-modal access (not just cars but rail, transit and pedestrian).”

A simple solution, yes, but also an example of the type of subtle-yet-radical shift in thinking that will be required on a large scale if any meaningful changes are going to be made to the American retail environment. Technological fixes are important, but technologies are as much social artifacts as they are physical objects, and any attempt at a solution to the problem of retail must necessarily address the social, biological, and political structures that uphold the current system.

Another proposal highlighted by Arieff, entitled FutuRetail 2020 by CommArts of Boulder, is interesting because of its wholesale re-envisioning of the mall. It is in this project that we can see the seeds of a strategy for moving towards a new future for our shopping experience:

“Malls will not only generate sales, they will ‘grow food, create crafts, manufacture products, generate energy, and provide education.’ As an antidote to time spent online, argue the CommArts folks, the mall becomes a social center, a ’spectacle of hands-on demos, lectures, performances, classes, tastings, parties, and shows.’”

The idea of creating a ’spectacle’ of the mall’s activities is striking given the long history of the spectacle as a driving engine of commercial development. Drawing from signals such as the current popularity of the DIY culture, and the general malaise of lives lived entirely online, CommArts has presented a vision of the future that would be worthwhile working towards.

Though I have not read any of Arieff’s other work, her ideas have sent me running back to literature about History of Architecture and Social History so that I can learn more about this subject, and I look forward to pouring through her archives to read more of her ideas.