Mobile phones are gateways to many of our most important and enduring relationships with other people. People also have committed social relationships with mobile devices themselves and the services “in the cloud” to which these devices interface. These human–human, human–device, and human–service relationships grow and endure over time and across radical changes in situation. And it is often mobile devices and services that help us respond to our surroundings; increasingly, they are a principal lens through which we view the world.
People treat interactive technologies — such as personal computers, mobile phones, and websites — in many of the ways they treat people, so these technologies can employ social influence and persuasion strategies to change the attitudes and behaviors of their users. Mobile phones are a global, context-aware, and highly personal platform for adaptive persuasion; I would even contend that mobile interactive technologies are the future of behavior change.
People’s social responses to technologies do more than open the door for persuasive technologies: our capabilities for social cognition — for understanding other people — can be a valuable resource when trying to understand and interact with novel, “black box” technological systems, including mobile phones that sense their changing physical and social surroundings, Web apps hosted “in the cloud”, and micro-labor markets and communities that power valuable services. That is, thinking about computers as if they were people is a powerful way of predicting, explaining, and coping with their behavior.
Completed and ongoing research in these areas continues to inform the design of new user interfaces, systems, and organizations. New research methods and data sources — and iterative design processes that involve both — are creating exciting opportunities for grappling with these issues and applying these results. If you’re interested in these or related topics, please learn more about me and my research, read some of my publications, view my CV, subscribe to my blog on people and technology, or contact me directly.
