Chapter 1
Introduction
With the intention to change user’s attitude or behavior or both, a persuader sends persuasive messages to an audience in a communication process of persuasion traditionally. Along with the development of science and technology rapidly nowadays, applications of computer technology are taking on the role of persuader to influence people and help people change their behaviors through the design of interaction which is referred as human-computer persuasion. Information technology systems and services are appeared generally to apply and design for persuasive purposes, such as commerce, education, environmental preservation, healthcare, fitness, in different domains and applications in late 20th century. For the great development of cycling in Taiwan, the persuasion of getting female onto participating biking in their life is focused and investigated to propose persuasive strategies when developing system design in our research.
1.1. Background
Influenced by the global warming issues, activities for sustainability with energy saving and carbon reduction are arisen. To actualize these activities, cycling is one of the ways to go green for helping environment all over the world. The policies with rewards and public environments are constructed with encouragements in the well-developed countries of cycling in Netherlands, Denmark, France, Japan and Australia. According to an investigation in Fig.1-1, there are about 11.5% Taiwanese indicating that biking is the most common exercise in their lives (He, 2008).
2 Fig. 1-1 The well-developed countries of cycling which is regarded as necessity in lives
With the growing number of purchasing and utility rate of bicycles, our government also has paid much attention to cycling recently in Taiwan. According to the investigation, the quantity of bicycle sales reached 1400 thousand, and the cycling population was 10.3 million out of 23 million until 2009.
Exercises, recreations and travelling are the primary cycling activities in 60.5% while daily activities are secondary in 26.4%. For facilitating the population of cycling with friendly supplying and supports in their activities, the large growing number of bike lanes is about 48.4% from 2008 to 2009 among cities in Taiwan (MOTC, 2010).
Fig. 1-2 Participation of cycling activity in Taiwan
From eco life to healthy recreation, cycling provides people another choice for enlivening their life in a health way. Having varied purposes in large cycling population in Taiwan, however, cycling uses are different from gender. The participation of Taiwanese male in cycling is more over 30% than female (Social indicators, 2005). The gender imbalance in cycling in Taiwan suggests a potential issue for cycling providers, sustainable supporters and health promoters to investigate and further increase female’s participation in cycling. The female’s problems or frustrations toward cycling should be investigated and
3 proposed with solutions.
To understand the persuasion of female cycling, there has already a great variety of development for discovering human behavior change. In the field of social science and psychology, the traditional behavioral theories were well-developed for explaining what human perceived of cognitive process during behavior change. Based on varied aspects of research field, different theories have been proposed to apply in education, health care, fitness, environmental preservation and many other issues. They proposed different strategies to influence and try to change people’s attitude or behaviors to reach their purposed issue. It’s also used in commerce and marketing field to influence consumer to accept and further purchase their products or services. For example, the provider, Polar, presents series monitoring devices for helping people to get fit and improving their physical performance of cycling or jogging; while Nike+iPod plus is the similar product providing to monitor and train in jogging or physical activity. WiiFit is another example of persuasive technology on the video game platform with exercise activity (Fig. 1-3).
Fig. 1-3 Applications of persuasive design: Polar CS600X-Maximize road cycling performance (top left), WiiFit:
video game with exercises (top right), Nike iPod plus: monitoring and training devices for jogging and activity (down right), QUITNET web service for helping people quit smoking online (down left)
4 According to the recent decades of development with computer science, a variety of persuasive design cases in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) field also have applied the social psychological theories in their design strategy. Special interest in exploring the domain of computers and persuasion appeared at CHI97, which is called “captology”. It was later defined “captology focuses on the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors,” which is the overlapped area of technology and persuasion with the graphic in Fig. 1-4 (Fogg, 2003, p.5)
Fig. 1-4 The shaded area called Captology, which is overlapped by both technology and persuasion (Fogg, 2003, p.5)
The applications of HCI technologies provide an interactive and ubiquitous approach with persuasion in widely developments. The Web, Internet, mobile and other ambient technologies provide a reachable path for users to interact with. The design technology gives influence and tries to change attitudes and behaviors on target audiences with health diet, fitness, and environmental preservation through the process of human-computer interaction. Fogg proposed that there are three functional roles in computing technologies persuade: as a tool, media, and as social actors (Fogg, 1998). For example, computer can be tool or instrument to provide personal health information for better diet decision making. The technology can be a personal health information tracker, or computerized software with analysis and supportive advices to motivate exercises or jogging through Nike+iPod and Nike plus systems.