Another live-blogging effort. I’ll clean this up later …
John Zimmerman—a professor at Carnegie Mellon University with a joint appointment to Human-Computer Interaction Institute and The School of Design—gave a talk Friday on “Designing for the Self,” consumer behavior research into the design process. His other research interests include intelligent agents in business settings, smart homes for dual-income parents, customized digital television, and the role of design in HCI education. John used to work at Philips Research as a senior researcher developing interactive TV applications for the home.
Abstract:
For the HCI community, the struggle to change focus from designing for ease of use to designing for user experience has created an opportunity for new theories and methods. My research addresses this challenge by exploring how designers can operationalize the consumer behavior researchers’ theories on product attachment. These theories demonstrate how consumers initiate and grown meaningful relationships with products in a process of identity construction. This perspective adds a distinctive counterpoint to the HCI’s current focus on “functionality the ability to easily complete important tasks” and on increasing desirability through surface level aesthetics. While HCI practitioners are quite good at exploring and finding product opportunities base on who people are and what they do, this new perspective asks them to also consider who people are trying to become through their use of interactive products and services. In this talk I outline two opportunity areas to incorporate consumer behavior research into the design process. The first focuses on the design of products that help people move toward an idealized vision of themselves in a specific role. The second focuses on products that help scaffold the role transition process, such as when a high school student must shed their high school identity and invent and discover who they wish to be as a college student. In addition, the talk shares insights gained from select pilot projects that attempt to address the appropriate role for interactive products to play as people construct their identities.
john prefers to talk about stuff that is new, rather than stuff he can prove
* background in filmmaking, media design … shaped HCI work
* drawing on own desire to make stuff people need, love and desire … in film, makes more sense than HCI
example:
* grocery checker: (hci) study who user is and what they do … (self approach) include investigation of who they wish to be
motivation – “isn’t an HCI talk if you don’t talk about OJ” (shows photo of Ford Bronco) … interested in celebrity and impact on design
question – celebrities exert strong influence on behavior … can I make a product that exerts the same level of attachment?
how celebrities work
* people – form para-social relationships with mediated characters, attach self-esteem to celebrity and rise
* celebrities – provide safe, one-way relationships, provide shared, vicarious, emotional experience in a narrative structure
* consumers get more out of relationship than celebrities
* celebrities are between product/brand and character in narrative … fucnction through identification (fan’s ideal self) … products allow a one-way-plus relationship … social phenomenon of clebrity difficult to produce (cannot be easily operationalized)
Identity and products:
* consumer behavior researchers: people are what they possess (william James, 1890) … people construct themselves through their possessions … preople form strong attachments to products that play a role in their identity construction
Theories:
* social construction of self (Belk, 1988) – built on Sartre’s three stages (having, doing, being)
* possessions in our life narratives (McAdams, 1993; Kleine, Lkeine & Allen, 1995) – constructing ourselves in our past
* plotting our possessions (Kleine, Kleine & Allen, 1995) – not me/like me … not we/like we … past (not future)
* applying social identity theory (Kleine, Kleine & Kernan, 1993):
— social role – see examples of certain roles
— social identity and ideal identity – ideal ID can be conflicting
— social identity perspective on product attachment – look at what roles people are playing as designing a product, who are you in the moment
products play passive role – not actively trying to engage
attachment forms through life narratives (use and reflection)
attachment through affiliation and autonomy
who we are and who we desire to be
– this research is saying you are your khakis, grande latted, etc (from Fight Club)
HCI: from utility to experience
* operator (run machine) … User (do work) … people (live life)
Pat Jordan’s four pleasures
* physiological pleasure, social, psychological, ideological
* pleasure built upon usability built upon functionality … but does pleasure cut through the entire process (people use things that are pleasurable but not usable or functional)
Don Norman’s model of product emotions
Forlizzi/Ford on experience – thinking of it in a very social context
how does the product connect me to me (self becomes the other, after relationship to the product)
* can interactive products help people move toward ideal identity?
* can products scaffold identity and make it explicity to be a participant?
* can they make people feel better about themselves (as primary goal)?
opportunity areas:
* role expression – people make things that are expressions of themselves (rather than controls, give them expressions)
* role switching – manage who am I now/here/to you … express availability to different channels/groups … leave personal messages
* role enhancement – make people feel better about the role they are in
* role transition – smoker to non-smoker, high school to college, couple to family, adult children to caregiver for elder parent
transition examples:
* therapists/life coaches/support groups
* personal web
operationalize:
* digitalSelf – scaffold transition – find product opportunities to identity construction process … tracking 20 first-year students over first semester (monthly interviews on use of digital selves, weekly monitoring of digital selves) … image as insight (take pictures of products people associate with college students, products used as student, products desired as student, college products not like them) … EARLY FINDINGS: social networking used up to 6 hours a day (need to build social support), connections via music/media, desire to browse/comment more than update self, desire moves from luxury to practical to home/comfort … Stage personas, different than Cooper’s type personas: Anticipation (connect online, locally), Orientation (meet roommate and other), Mid-Terms (core group, need academic support), Thanksgiving (reconcile new you and friends from home), Finals (lean on friends to survive) … Can personas drive a design process to make the experience more pleasurable? … PRODUCT OPPORTUNITIES: “face book gold” (mobile content acquisition device), mobile access and opportunistic commenting, digital pasteboard for collecting content, display history for reflection on change, acquisition exercises to more fully explore identity options
* project on family, control and the smart home – role enhancement (dual-income, bad/good parent) … families live in a constant state of rush hour, want to make stressed people feel good (not good feel great) … people don’t want more control over stuff, want to feel more control over life … opportunity map (busyness, control, identity) -> feeling in control, like good parents … questions: can home help parents feel like better parents? how does ability of home change the idea of what home is? when do devices become the home (environment)? should the home be an active participant in identity construction? … ideas: smart soccer bag – bag knows contents/schedule/routine (parents train bag, children get just-in-time feedback to avoid failure, positive feedback when successful, parents get summary so they can reward child), hand strap vibrates, light display on the edge of main zipper, zipper controls setting and use modes, touch screen tag that displays photos/text … routine learning and monitoring: collect data and predict destination (90% accurate at 3/10 of journey, screwed up because of parking)
* reverse alarm clock – parents not getting enough sleep is a problem and huge opportunity … parenting moment: child selects the wake up system (tokens), informed decision (rules from easy cues to help your child feel responsible), relative control (wall setting that gives parents easy tool to control settings, but masks the conditional rules from kids) … creates emotional reserve … object becomes a precious memory
—
Questions:
* how do you construct rigorous measures of success? … Make something, put it in someone’s life, and try to understand their perception. HCI shouldn’t be doing measurement, but rather put things out in the world and spark interesting behavior.
* Does this actually make you a better parent? … if you can decrease the role stress a parent has, they are more receptive. Give people the tools to make themselves the parent they want to be. That may not be the parent you think they should be.
* Why are we doing this? … Making a bunch of singular instantiations (monitor’s medicine, kids cleaning up their room, … ) to understand what the larger set of needs are
* Some things are hard for us to do, but we are better for doing them. … Bag doesn’t give you an immediate reminder. As you get closer to departure, it checks to see if you have everything. Says “Goooo!” when it thinks you are read (positive feedback). The bag is for the child, to make the child responsible without making the parent issue role reminders.
* Are there design guidelines? … We’re making it up. Anthropologists in HCI are good at coming up with design specifications, but the rest are not good at that. Figure out if we can design, try a design and learn where we fail. This is a research through design approach.
* By reducing cognitive load, parents might turn focus away from kids. Are you worried about reinforcing negative behaviors? … This won’t make people be better parents. How do we design to help get the parents realize that being with a kid at a soccer game is more important than the oranges.
* Looking at divorced families, too. kids feel a lost sense of space.
* Not designing commercial products, but are designing products. Very psychologistic view of identity. Because you are thinking of identity in terms of products, rather than identity through connection with others. Productizing is deeply embedded in your sense of self. … If you are doing product development, this is a way to look at it.
* Is there a place for the social in the product development? … we’re looking at the role transition with college students, and their identity is what they are struggling to understand. We are asking if there are tools we can give them to help them in that understanding.
* Doing this kind of work gives understanding about how to do this kind of work. How do you describe the importance of the outcome? … The photo work we did, we see very much as a method. Applying personas in a very different way. If we can make several things in a space, patterns will emerge. We’re not trying to make “the right thing.” By making specific examplars in a design space, it might create templates for future development.
