I’m designing and building my first prototype, with some inspiration and advice from Adrian Westaway of Vitamins. When designing for design research, Adrian suggested, “try to design a journey to take them (participants) on”. Yesterday, I created 6 Gmail accounts, 5 ifttt accounts, 50 ifttt tasks to send emails from 5 of the newly created Gmail accounts to 1 “master” Gmail account (This sentence could’ve been written in code).

All the repetition set up a prototype that tracks participants’ production and distribution of public digital content. Using the collected data, I plan to publicly display behaviors such as amounts of tweets, uploaded photos, and status updates with Legos. Yes, Legos, a physical embodiement of data and my childhood. With insight from my survey, I will also be equating each behavior with a CO2 emission, updating up the totals daily to the physical display as well as an online component.

With this prototype, I hope to test a few biases/assumptions:

1. The quantified feedback should positively impact participants’ production and distribution of online content.
2. The public display will create a “shaming” effect: first with the sheer amounts of conent being produced by each participant and secondly with the subsequent creation of CO2 emissions.
3. By observing each participants display, non-participants will have an increased awareness of their own online habits and CO2 emissions.
4. Incentive to conserve does not have to involve monetary motivation, and can be based solely on normative comparison to similar groups of people.

The Front Row Effect

Say you’re at a concert in the summertime. You and your friend set up your blanket, set up a nice little picnic spread, and settle in for a night of music. As the evening progresses, you can expect from time to time, you will stand up either an ovation at the end of a song or to get the attention of a wandering friend. After you stand, you sit back down. Then something curious happens: the band gets on stage and everyone in front of you begins to stand up. You’re soon blocked by the wave of standing people and left with the choice of seeing the stage or the backs of legs. So you stand in order to see the stage, forcing the people behind you to do the same.

This occurrence happens all the time at public events and can be described as the front row effect. Sometimes unwanted and at odds with your own intensions, it’s a behavior change initiated and sustained by strangers with similar interests. Keith Bradsher cited a similar example in High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV; as more SUVs came on the road, smaller vehicles were not enough to make us feel safe so we all went out and bought large SUVs in droves.

When convenience matters more than size, the front row effect can be applied to our efforts to live a more sustainable lifestyle. If everyone in front and around you is throwing away paper and plastic, it can be easy to feel dissuaded into not recycling even though the behavior is against your own values. The observed actions of others directly affect your own comfort, and we tend to conform to a group in a public setting. The front row effect becomes more of an “everyone-else-is-doing-it-so-i-might-as-well” mindset and have a powerful impact on an individual’s behavior in the context of a larger group of people.

References:

Bradsher, Keith. High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.

On Tuesday, February 14th, I ordered all 1,566 photos on my Flickr to be printed as 4”x6” photos and shipped to the SVA Ixd studio. On Friday (that was fast), they all arrived in a somewhat smaller box than I had expected. This was the first step for a series of prototype experiments dealing with cloud-based services as a digital attic. Apart from myself, I intend on recruiting participants to carry around physical emobidments of their own cloud. Project details and directives to be announced in the coming weeks.