Hello all,
I’m a graduate student studying Computer Science (with a focus on Human
Computer Interaction, or HCI) at the University of Waterloo. One of the
areas that I’m interested in is tools and systems for self-motivated
behaviour change, which ties well into the focus of this group. Within HCI,
this topic fits into a subfield called “persuasive technology” which is
about tools and systems that try to influence people’s behaviour, often
with a background in health or sustainability.
I thought I would share some insightful papers that I ran across when doing
background research, that I thought might be of interest to anyone thinking
about tools and systems for combating akrasia:
- a couple of papers on the Transtheoretical Model of behaviour change,
which describes how people go through several stages when adopting new
behaviours, with different interventions being useful at those stages. The
second paper contains advice on how to apply that within the context of
computer systems to encourage behaviour change.
Prochaska, James O., and Wayne F. Velicer. “The transtheoretical model of
health behavior change.” American journal of health promotion 12.1 (1997):
38-48.
http://www.uri.edu/research/cprc/Publications/PDFs/ByTitle/The%20Transtheoretical%20model%20of%20Health%20behavior%20change.pdf
He, Helen Ai, Saul Greenberg, and Elaine M. Huang. “One size does not fit
all: applying the transtheoretical model to energy feedback technology
design.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. ACM, 2010.
http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/1880/47425/1/2009-943-22.pdf
-a survey of users in the quantified self movement, helping to define the
difference between using data to discover new things and using data for
motivation
Li, Ian, Anind K. Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi. “Understanding my data, myself:
supporting self-reflection with ubicomp technologies.” Proceedings of the
13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing. ACM, 2011.
-a general model of how technology can try to create behaviour change,
including trying to impact motivation and ability, as well as providing
appropriate triggers
Fogg, B. J. “A behavior model for persuasive design.” Proceedings of the
4th international Conference on Persuasive Technology. ACM, 2009.
I’m also part of a group running a survey on experiences with goal tracking
systems (as part of a design project) that I hope some of you might willing
to fill out (I will send an email out on that shortly).