Year 2020 - Special Issue of the Working Group PISTIL, from AFIHM. Guest editors: Christian Bastien & Gaëlle Calvary
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a means for Information and Communication Technologies to help facing the climate-change challenge. Researchers have conducted work on this way for two decades. They followed the track of progressive change through persuasion for individual consumption reduction. This track is however seriously discussed, what leads the community to retarget coming research. This paper reviews the main criticisms of the controversy that takes place in the community, and considers a possible track to overcome the problems: a radical change through new social practices.
The goal of persuasion is to change the behaviour or the attitude of a person without using any form of coercion (Oinas et al. 2010). In the last ten years, several models, approaches and theories have been developed in the research field of persuasion, producing a copious scientific literature. Different reviews of the state-of-the-art focusing on specific aspects have been proposed. Pindel et al. (Pinder et al. 2018) for example analyse the state of the art under the perspective of the mechanisms that lead to the habit forming. In this work, we report a state-of-the-art review on the key elements of the process of change using the concepts of states, transitions, and determinants to propose a common generic paradigm. We conclude with a discussion about the operationalization of persuasive processes and with a comparative analysis on the reviewed theories.
The background of persuasive technologies is the traditional interpersonal persuasion, studied for over two thousand years in rethoric, philosophy, and more recently in psychology. This last discipline offers many theories and models to understand more precisely the processes that influence human behaviors. These theories show in particular that persuasive situations are complex, varied, with many influence factors. Therefore, we propose the notion of adaptive persuasive technologies, i.e. technologies able to adapt their persuasive strategies to the user context. To design such products and services, we propose a model of the persuasive context, i.e. of all the constraints that influence a user’s targeted behavior at a given time. Each constraint in the persuasive context is at the same time an adaptation criterion and an action leverage for the adaptive persuasive technology.
This article reviews surveys, design spaces, and frameworks related to the design of persuasive interactive systems, with a particular focus on energy. We first propose a cartography of these conceptual tools. Most previous work focuses on persuasion principles but is difficult to apply for the software design and engineering of persuasive interactive systems. As a result, we propose UP+, a new framework that synthetizes and revisits existing surveys, design spaces, and frameworks from the software engineering perspective of persuasive interactive systems.
Making people change is difficult; making them change for ever is all the more challenging. We explore adaptation as a means for bringing diversity and thereby for killing the annoying effect of persuasive messages. The case study is TILT, a persuasive application dedicated to smartphone usage regulation. We show that adapting persuasion increases efficiency.
Optimizing microgrids' renewable-energy-consumption rates can be done by energy demand-side management. Shifting consumption at better moments is possible thanks to storage capacities. To explore this context, we consider a new practice aiming at shifting laptops' consumption on workplaces thanks to their batteries. This practice requires providing usage instructions and forecasts on renewable energy availability. In order to do this, we evaluated the usability of a shape-changing cylindrical histogram, during a two-day public event, by asking 90 visitors. We also tested three kinds of motion speed in peripheral vision in order to notify neither disturbing nor irritating, by requiring 30 participants in lab conditions. Our results show success rates over 90% for range and compare tasks, which are necessary to retrieve renewable energy production peaks. Our results show that an exponential speed is the best to design perceptible movements, whereas being as calm as a constant speed.