Our ATTENTION to and RELEVANCE of a message, determine people’s perceptions of its VALUE whilst an individual’s CONFIDENCE  will determine their expectancy for success and their perceptions of CONTROL and SATISFACTION.

Whilst the emotionally charged sharing of news and updates is critical for raising AWARENESS or generating ATTENTION amongst potential supporters, in order to induce motivated behaviour parallel strategies need to be introduced to support both those sending the messages and guiding the individuals responses towards a specific short or long term goal. In it’s simplest manifestation this could include feedback on the number of times a particular piece of news has been linked to / read / retweeted, thus through feedback, motivating users that their voice is being heard.

Indeed, this has had a more literal and physical manifestation in the recent Iranian situation as this haunting and beautiful video demonstrates:

Shouting at the Sky

Such feedback is hugely valuable in combatting feelings of frustration or at their most extreme a feeling of learned helplessness – which is to say the sentiment that “nothing I do is ever going to make a difference.” But in this situation this is not didactic feedback from ‘a system’ to the user. The system in question here both online and offline are ‘social’ and enable users themselves to feedback to, inform and support each other. As Arne Oosterom elegantly put it a week or so back:

@designthinkers: “service designers should provide people with tools to self-organize around a common interest.”

How far can we as designers design in features that combat learned helplessness? As Nick Marsh highlighted yesterday in reference to this article;

@choosenick: ”People don’t think like the state: “I don’t have ‘needs’, I have something to give.”

Again there are a number of strategies for designers addressing ‘learned helplessness’, something that might also be referred to as demotivated behaviour. How many of these can be wrapped up by changing your focus to design dialectic as opposed to didactic systems.

Other Relevant Posts...

• September 13th, 2009 -- The Philosophy of Service Design (2)
• November 30th, 2009 -- Motivational Design Framework v.0.1 (2)
• October 1st, 2009 -- Framework of Motivated Behaviour (0)
• July 13th, 2009 -- Making Design a Concrete Experience (0)
• June 22nd, 2009 -- Design for Change (0)
• December 9th, 2009 -- Modelling Motivation in the Design of Products, Systems and Services (0)
• October 30th, 2009 -- Design for Self-Service – A motivational psychology perspective (2)
• October 29th, 2009 -- Theories of Planned Behaviour (2)
• February 15th, 2010 -- A Big Day for British Youth and Winter Sports – An Inspiration For The Rest of Us? (2)
• December 3rd, 2009 -- Managing Motivation (1)

via Presentation Zen.

Groups versus Conversations?

Amateurs versus Professionals? Something I considered here the other day.

Convene versus Control?

Shirky presents the changing media landscape in terms of the sliding scales above.  How can we make best use of the media tools that we all have available?

Other Relevant Posts...

• December 9th, 2009 -- Modelling Motivation in the Design of Products, Systems and Services (0)
• November 30th, 2009 -- Motivational Design Framework v.0.1 (2)
• October 1st, 2009 -- Framework of Motivated Behaviour (0)
• July 13th, 2009 -- Making Design a Concrete Experience (0)
• June 22nd, 2009 -- Design for Change (0)
• February 15th, 2010 -- A Big Day for British Youth and Winter Sports – An Inspiration For The Rest of Us? (2)
• December 3rd, 2009 -- Managing Motivation (1)
• October 30th, 2009 -- Design for Self-Service – A motivational psychology perspective (2)
• June 18th, 2009 -- Is Design a Skilled or Procedural Process? Or Both? (2)
• May 17th, 2009 -- Systems That Encourage You To Think You Can (1)

Ever been left frustrated by a system, product or service that didn't work the way you wanted it to? Photo from: Maryam Kh

This week I’m going to try and do it in more of an active problem solving sort of way, responding to the design brief of designing for democratic regime change. In other words, as a designer of systems, products and services what can I contribute from my research to enable and empower individuals striving to undermine an autocratic regime. Contentious – yes. Interesting – yes. Educational – yes.

Hopefully, if I do a good enough job, this will be a nice theoretical study into motivational design and to positively influencing human behaviour. Indeed, this exercise might provide an insight into understanding contrary behaviour, which is to say systems, products and services that aren’t designed to motivate or empower their users or might be actively implemented to demotivate and dis-empower them. My hope is that this exercise will provide a valuable and unique insight into better designing dynamic systems and services to better support the intentions and will of the majority of it’s users. I hope you will see this as something worth contributing to or at least broadcasting further afield, it is certainly not intended to be prescriptive and as far as it is published here is purely a theoretical discussion, although clearly influenced by powerful recent world events.

The video that inspired this post. What motivates the behaviour that lead to this incident and what can we as designers do to prevent its reoccurance?

Other Relevant Posts...

• November 30th, 2009 -- Motivational Design Framework v.0.1 (2)
• June 24th, 2009 -- Expectancy for success? (1)
• December 9th, 2009 -- Modelling Motivation in the Design of Products, Systems and Services (0)
• October 30th, 2009 -- Design for Self-Service – A motivational psychology perspective (2)
• October 28th, 2009 -- User Needs are Outdated, We Should Be Designing User Goals… (1)
• October 1st, 2009 -- Framework of Motivated Behaviour (0)
• July 13th, 2009 -- Making Design a Concrete Experience (0)
• December 3rd, 2009 -- Managing Motivation (1)
• October 29th, 2009 -- Theories of Planned Behaviour (2)
• September 21st, 2009 -- Motivational Design Personas (11)