Digit

We recently hosted another breakfast discussion at Digit, this time on the topic of motivation. We wanted to discuss how technological innovation is opening up new ways to create positive behaviour change, and also to ask the question, is it working? We were joined by a gaming expert, a trends consultant, and various marketers representing organisations from start ups to a global bank.

The Technology of Motivation is about facilitating behaviour change not just spreading messages. Be it through data, design, feedback or incentive, the ideas we discussed all used technology to help people reach goals or increase productivity without making an assumption that they would or could do it on their own.

We discussed the reasons City Peaks had been a success at Digit and benchmarked it against other things we’d spotted to understand what people were getting right and wrong. This sparked a healthy debate, but we nevertheless did manage to come to some conclusions!

1. Everyone is motivated differently
Fuel band is a smart idea for the Nike brand. It’s fitting of the competitive way their customers use their products, and the way it collects and feedbacks data is incredibly sophisticated. But for some people sport has more to do with escapism than anything else, and feedback, no matter how personal, may not be what motivates them. We discussed the way clever game design can make one product appeal to a variety of mindsets, and how we tried to make this work for City Peaks.

2. There’s more than one way to incentivise
There is a big difference between extrinsic and intrinsic incentives. Gympact is a clever idea that forces you to use your gym membership but it also fuels a certain attitude towards fitness – one where it’s considered a chore not a pleasure. It may change your behaviour in the short term, but does it change your attitude for the better? One of the things we discussed is how technology can make data more personal and directional in a way that can change perception around an issue, like these visualisations of cardiology reports.

3. Knowledge is power
Learning can be the most empowering tool of them all. We talked about NoiseTube, a tool for collecting noise pollution data. On the one hand it’s a research tool, but on the other it’s an initiative that motivates a large group of people to act on a issue they didn’t previously understand, simply by letting them create and access data around it.

4. Peer pressure works
Social pressures govern a lot of the decisions we make, so using technology to fuel this further is helpful. Stikk is a personal incentive platform that allows you to designate a referee to watch over your progress.

5. Don’t make it any harder than it already is
Perhaps the single biggest reason there is a trend around technology that motivates, is the strength of the opportunity we have at our fingertips to quantify, track and monitor our own lives. Simply using current systems cleverly can open up vast scores of data that could have many uses. But programmes that create ongoing barriers to entry, like My Fitness Pal (a massive database of calorie content of high street food items but requires manual entry) may expect to see drop-off rates that could be avoided using mobile technology.

There was loads more discussed that we’ll be feeding in to our thinking and R&D streams in the future, so thanks to everyone who came along and helped us host a productive session.