The Persuasion Project

The last mini-project is inspired by the work of B.J. Fogg and his colleagues at Berkeley. This in turn draws on the work of Robert Cialdini, whose work is always of interest to students, as it is so relevant to ordinary everyday life. Apparently he's the most cited social psychologist in the world. But then he would tell us that,wouldn't he? That's social validation at work :-)

We looked at IBIS-like design rationale systems as a way so structuring the design thinking for this project. These have been an interest every since James Goodlet and I worked on the SussexIBIS system many many years ago.

Tomorrow we're going to do some quick and dirty acceptability evaluation, using the Microsoft Product Reaction Card method, developed by Benedek and Miner.

Back in Austria

We started the second section of the course today, with four excellent presentations of the ideas the students had been developing with the Ubiquitous Computing theme. More details later.

Mini-project 2

The second mini-project involved generating ideas for adding interactivity to children's toys. We talked a bit about whether children shouldn't just be left alone to simply play with real physical objects without being assailed by computing technology. I think we're all in favour of the simple option, but the students were willing to suspend their disbelief and developed some creative ideas about different sorts of toys, which they described in an "elevator pitch" style.

The inspiration for this brief comes from the work at ETH Zurich on an augmented medieval castle, the AKC project, which uses PlayMobil figures and buildings to create genuinely interesting interactivity. The project is described here. AKC seems to have been the starting point for an interesting project, Designing Tangibles for Learning, at the London Knowledge Lab.