Influential Technologies

I read a book a while back called Persuasive Technology by BJ Fogg at Stanford.

The concept of technology persuading people to act differently fascinated me from when I first read about it on his web site. The book itself had some good ideas but is largely an introductory, high-level book covering the basics of persuasion and current products using the technique.

Fogg chose to focus on persuasion as opposed to coercion or simply control in his book. How technology affects people is an ethically sticky topic - particularly when you design to cause a change in behavior. Persuasion is the politically correct side of 'influential technology'. I personally think the ethically dark side of the technology is more fascinating from a philosophical point of view and extremely relevant for current public discussion. Many of our technologies already control our behavior on a daily basis, without our conscious knowledge or consideration.

Mobile devices for group usage will affect the behaviors of large numbers of people and enable or disable potential community activities. Maybe I just haven't been reading in the right places, but I haven't seen much discussion of persuasive or influential technology or how control of user behavior should be considered during development. These decisions are already made in the design process, but they are not made explicit.

One reason the effects of technology on behavior may not get more attention by designers is that its really hard to predict. It is hard enough for designers to simply make a complex product work. Making it work in a usable fashion is still harder. Harder than that is predicting some of the major ways it will be used. The step beyond that is predicting how that usage will change behavior. These are stages of difficulty, but not impossibility. It is ethically negligent for the design community to continue to ignore the impact their technology has on users and to rebuff attempts to integrate expectations of behavior change into the design process.

I recently happened upon a reference to Adaptive Structuration Theory [Full-text pdf] which is a method for describing how the design of software influences how it is used. I wrote an article a while back called How to manipulate social behavior (and why you'd want to) which explores some of the ideas around creating technologies intended to change behavior.

I'll continue to look for articles related to predicting or planning behavior change and post them here. If you know of any research related to this please let me know. If you have opinions about this issue, please join our discussion group on Tribe!