Tool, Servant or Coach? Reframing the metaphor of computing

Speaker
John Canny
Professor, Computer Science and Director, Berkeley Institute of Design Lab

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Computing is being marshaled to tackle some big challenges: education, health care, energy and environmental stewardship, and international development. In these areas: success depends on individual action, on each actor doing “the right thing.” But doing the right thing turns out to be hard for most human actors. In fact we often need help doing what we already want to do. This talk will cover several of the challenges above that turn out to be challenges in motivation or persuasion. They suggest a metaphor of computing not just as tool or partner, but as intrinsic motivator.

We first cover our work on video conferencing. The surprising result is that with careful preservation of non-verbal cues, there is no deficit between video conferencing and face-to-face meeting, in contrast to earlier findings. Then we discuss “First Days” a project on maternal and child health in developing regions, and why persuasion is the barrier to better outcomes. By using a simple form of interactive presentation, we show that persuasion improves significantly. We are also exploring persuasive/motivational mechanisms for energy conservation in a project called “mPower”. In parallel with this work, we are developing a “post-rational” model of behavior which is a synthesis of concordant ideas from many fields. The post-rational model natural incorporates motivation, social influence and the role of language in determining action. A very high-level introduction to the model will be given.

Speaker's Bio

John Canny is a Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His 1987 Ph.D. was from MIT in robotics, and received the ACM doctoral dissertation award. His research then focused on the interaction between computers and the physical world—robotics, geometry, vision and computational biology. Since the 1990s he has focused on the democratization of computing, and what it means to design systems for the everyday. In 2002, he started the Berkeley Institute of Design, an interdisciplinary, human-centered design research lab. BID now houses 30 researchers from 8 departments. His research priorities are educational technology, IT for health care, persuasive technology, mobile HCI and CSCW. He has best paper prizes from ACM CHI 2007 and the Persuasive Technology Conference 2008. His MILLEE project with Matt Kam was a winner in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning competition in 2008.

Host
Eric Paulos