On Friday, October 9th, I was part of an invited panel at the Walk21 conference on Using Powerful Web Apps to Build a Livable Streets Movement hosted by Nick Grossman from The Open Planning Project (TOPP) Labs. Other panelists included Ben Berkowitz from SeeClickFix, a tool to report and monitor community issues; Aaron Ogle from WalkShed.org, a visualization tool to explore very precise and personal walkability calculations; and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR, a website to host geo-based scavenger hunt games. It ended up being a tremendously successful panel with a very fruitful discussion which included questions about privacy, the pros/cons of transparency, motivating adoption, and government engagement. Discussions will continue on the mailing list: streets-advocacy-tech@googlegroups.com.
The title of my talk was The Feetback Cycle: Leveraging Everyday Technologies to Change the Way We Move. I focused on the emerging area of Persuasive Technology and the ways in which technology may be used to encourage particular behaviors. I began the talk with a brief overview of popular behavior motivation techniques, highlighted past studies by Sunny Consolvo and colleagues at Intel Research exploring the use of mobile phones to promote fitness activity and then transitioned into a lengthier overview of the UbiGreen Transportation Display. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was not able to go over commercial offerings of persuasive technology like the Nike+iPod, the newly released iPod Nano Pedometer or the long-awaited FitBit but you can see the slides here (pptx file, 33.9 MB).
Below are some pictures from the talk itself:
The Toyota Prius is perhaps the quintessential eco-feedback system, it provides real-time information about a driver’s fuel efficiency as well a historical graph to track progress over time.
Back in 2005-2006, Sunny Consolvo and colleagues from Intel Research, Seattle used a pedometer and mobile phone to show that rewards mediated by a technology could be effective in motivating fit behavior even if that reward was simple. In this case, study participants were rewarded with an asterisks when they achieved their step goals.
The UbiGreen Transportation Display semi-automatically senses transportation modes such as bicycling, running, and walking and feeds this information back to the user with the goal of motivating green transportation decisions.
The UbiGreen Transportation Display uses the background of the mobile phone (sometimes called the wallpaper) to display evocative imagery that changes based on sensed transit activity (sort of like a real-life Choose Your Own Adventure where the choices are sensed in the physical world rather than in a book).
