Interviews n’ Making
It’s been an awesome past few weeks and in the words of our program chair Liz Danzico, “It’s time to start making”. It’s been 95% research and interviews up to this point, and apart from writing and designing a few concept models, I am officially in making mode.
To kickoff the shift, I met with classmates Tina Ye and Chris Cannon (formally of Team Awesome in our Service Design class). Because thesis is a solo effort yet interaction designers are group oriented thinkers, we decided a weekly meeting was a great idea to bounce concepts around. I outlined my plan to make several projects, going for breadth not depth, in the hopes of facilitating dialogue around my thesis topic. In hoping to continue the discussion after graduation, I want to make a series of participatory experiments (prototypes for design research), on and off screen discursive design objects, and a system for offsetting the carbon output of digital communication.
It is a lot to make, but after talking with some experts in adjacent fields, I’m inspired and ready to move forward in my thesis development. In late January, I spoke with two Deena Rosen, Senior Manager of User Experience at OPower, and Stephan Von Muehlen, co-founder of Energy Hub. Both companies are redesigning our relationship with utility companies by giving customers real-time and historical data of their energy consumption. I first talked with Deena, who described how OPower’s product platform is rooted in cognitive psychology, in particular the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini. Researching the motivations behind energy consumption, Dr.Cialdini found that across all financial and environmental reasons that the only true motivator was what he called normative comparison.
Normative comparison is a concept where we compare our status and performance to people similar to ourselves, and we want to “normalize” our behavior with others. As individuals, we do not want to do any worse than a larger group in our energy consumption. In discussing this with Stephan, he mentioned that people also don’t want to do any better. He described a paradox of normative comparison, pointing out that we tend to take advantage of quantitatively “doing better” than others; if I’m conserving more energy than the majority of people I’m compared with, I will use that lead as an allowance and end up moving closer to the average (using more energy). However, if I’m given a qualitative measure - “Great Job, Dave!” - then I will most likely maintain that lead. Conversely, if I’m falling behind the group, qualitative encouragement will not work. Given quantitative data, I would treat my consumption like a game and try to conserve energy more.
In my conversations with Deena and Stephan, we covered many topics around methods for encouraging behavior change. Don Carli, director of the Institute for Sustainable Communication, has a different approach in working towards a sustainable future. Don is a fascinating character. He worked as a production artist for Robert Motherwell and others during the 1970’s in the New York art scene, and he helped develop standards for inkjet printer technology in the 1980’s. Now, he is advocating for industry standards on sustainable communication. Pursuing large companies with massive advertising budgets such as Proctor & Gamble and Unilever, he hopes to establish a series of measures that: identify the materials used to advertise/market a product, define them in a lifecycle, quantify those materials so as to track them, and then have companies make informed decisions around those agreed upon measures. In doing so, he hopes to prevent “greenwashing” in corporate communication and disclose resources used in advertising and promoting products/services.
Moving forward, I plan to incorporate two core concepts uncovered from my interviews: normative comparison and established measures. I started to learn Ruby on Rails to build a functional concept for one of my projects, and am testing out ifttt.com as means to track production of online content.
