Persuasive Design
AbstrAct Persuasive design (PD) is concerned with the use of computing technology for persuasive purposes. It thereby captures a comprehensive and important trend in CMC, human-computer interaction, and software development in general. This chapter describes the basic concepts of PD as well as its development from its inception in the late 90s until now. So far, rhetoric has played a modest role in the field. However, it is shown that rhetoric offers a major step forward in consolidating PD as a discipline. The concepts of PD in many respects have a theoretical basis in and are better understood with reference to rhetoric; a number of practical guidelines for PD can and should be developed on the basis of rhetoric; and 'epistemic rhetoric' offers a sound epistemology for PD, which is at the moment lacking. Arguably, a rhetorical turn is required for coming to grips with the problem of defining PD and placing it properly as a special case of CMC, namely computer mediated persuasion.
The persuasive qualities of maps
In this article we explore the persuasive qualities of maps that connect people's behavior and emotions to location. We introduce Actor-Network Theory (ANT) [Latour 2005] to grasp the many actors involved in persuasive design processes. We argue that these many types of actors should be integrated into the design process, and we suggest the idea of 'persuasive platforms' to do this. These new insights are employed in connection with an empirical study at Aalborg Zoo, Denmark.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.