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.