#feedfeedbackback

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Feed(feed-back)back in action

Continuing the ambient holiday season’s playground theme, here some pics from a Berlin playground that we literally stumbled across with the kids when taking the cycle route less traveled to the local swimming pool.

This playground has been nicely refurbished about a year ago and someone had the great idea to put some of the suggestions collected during the preceding consultation period up on large banners on the side of a building that encases parts of the playground. 

A really neat example of my obsession with feeding feed-back back (e.g see the general idea or a fascinating application in Lithuania), here in the form of actual focus group quotes and quantitative survey summary. 

Plus a very personal note a the end where some of the involved kids signed their names. 

A nice marker of community involvement and a city administration that listens to and talks with residents, but also an important baseline for accountability where everyone can see if and how suggestions were taken up and turned into reality. Very interestingly not all ideas mentioned on the placards have been realized, suggesting that this is not simply a cherry-picking exercise of self-praise by officials. And given my recent observation that lots of ambient feedback mechanisms are skewed towards tracking blue collar job performance it is worthwhile noting that this playground is situated in a not very privileged, mixed immigrant neighborhood, adding another function: the positive encouragement of and the demonstration of the efficacy of civic engagement.  

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Eat your vitamins - and vote with them too!

Corruption in the Lithuanian health sector is a really big problem, yet people are reluctant to discuss or report it. What to do? 

Inspired by the ambient accountability idea and embracing the old adage that often you cannot fight corruption by fighting corruption, the Transparency International group in Lithuania took a very innovative approach. Together with social designers and a healthcare center they designed and piloted a very engaging ambient feedback mechanism, the Vitamin Lab. Here is how it worked and what happened.

Placed right in the main lobby, patients were given little balls and asked to place these “vitamins”  in a set of transparent test tubes (the Lab) according to how they rated different aspects of the health service they had just received. 

The idea behind this ambient feedback system was to help patients develop a stronger sense of their rights and entitlements and nurture their willingness to speak out about their experience. The transparent tubes and single, rising line of feedback balls in them ensure that an instant and intuitive tally of the aggregate feedback is clearly visible to everyone passing by. And the placement of the visually highly engaging Lab right at the center of the clinic ensured that all stakeholders, doctors, patients, non-medical staff, were all directly exposed to and invited to reflect upon a public conversation on service values and service experience. 

The feedback system was further enhanced by a workshop with doctors in which they were asked to describe the values of their practice, Placards across the clinic then advertised these values in the hallways. 

The results of this three month experiment? Some very preliminary research suggests that patients really liked the feedback idea and doctors felt that the quality of communication with patients had increased. The conclusion: a really great first that begs for more experimentation, more research and tons of creative fun with designing high-impact ambient feedback interfaces!!

Check out the 3min video. 

Copyright pictures and video: TI Lithuania. The experiment was part of the EU-funded ANTICORRP research initiative.

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More feedback science

Yes, I am obsessing with the potential of feedback systems to unleash beautifully unpredictable social dynamics of empowerment, accountability, responsiveness in what may look like hopeless situations where power takes advantage of the powerless. And I believe this potential is particularly egregious when it comes to wickedly designed feedback systems that are ambient, highly visible and actually feed{feed-back}back. So wicked design matters and I am collecting cues from strange places and spaces where empirical research on feedback systems is generating relevant insights. This journey has so far included the somewhat unrelated themes of cow semen, noisy Chinese pensioners, toxic fumes and speeding cars . Now here comes another pocket of fascinating research: public health and how feedback systems can improve medical care. And as it turns out this empirical pocket is more of an entire data universe with lots of in-depth cases, randomized experiments and systematic reviews. Here a recent review paper that neatly summaries the gist of this vast literature and comes up with 15 sticky design principles to make such feedback systems most effective. Nothing really surprising there but still a useful checklist, and for a change reassuringly backed up by lots of empirics. Lots to learn from for designing ambient feedback systems to empower people and tackle corruption and other service failures right where and when people have to deal with it. 

Brehaut, J. C., Colquhoun, H. L., Eva, K. W., Carroll, K., Sales, A., Michie, S. & Grimshaw, J. M. (2016). Practice feedback interventions: 15 suggestions for optimizing effectiveness. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2016;164:435-441.

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Ambient pro-sociality

In my travails to find ideas and actual empirical evidence for ambient accountability I am increasingly discovering research and thinking on traffic as an amazing trove of facts and inspiration. Actually not surprising, when thinking how deeply transport and traffic are ingrained into our daily lives and how big of a business and innovation area the car industry alone is - VW and Toyota are among the top 10 biggest corporate R&D spenders worldwide. So no wonder a lot of research and thinking goes into ambient interventions that make people behave better in traffic, such as the dynamic speed displays that I profiled previously as inspiration for my feed(feed-back)back idea and that have been found to be quite effective. 

Here another interesting snack for ambient thought from the field of traffic research: researchers in Germany have developed and tested a pro-social ambient assistance system that promotes pro-social behaviour by enhancing the situational awareness about other, weaker traffic participants. So the system automatically plays the sounds of playing children when the driver enters a zone around a kindergarten or other areas frequented by children, with the effect that drivers do indeed adjust their driving behaviour and act in a more cautious and considerate manner. Interesting! 

Eckoldt, K., Laschke, M., Hassenzahl, M., Schneider, T., Schumann, J., & Könsgen, S. (2015). Soziale Assistenzsysteme–respektvoll handeln im Straßenverkehr. Mensch und Computer 2015–Proceedings.

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Ambient actuators

(image c localcontext)

An inspiring project by UK’s Future Cities Catapult to imagine applications for e-paper signage in public places. The technology has evolved to be super-low energy and eminently readable in daylight. Deployed on placards and linked up with the internet of things this opens a world of fascinating, infinite opportunities for ambient accountability. The project team aptly calls these dynamic signs actuators that can help shape information environments and social dynamics in a particular situation. Just watch the clip and then spin this further and envision how this could be deployed the ambient accountability way to make people aware of specific rights and entitlements in a public space or service environment, or help them get a sense of what people like them have commented upon / experienced, would be ready to do in the same situation... Imagine that this could be not only provided by public authorities but also NGOs, citizen groups etc. And then link this, for example to the feed(feed-back)back idea and off you go into beautifully uncharted territory for new social dynamics that may boost accountability, empowerment, collective action...

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feed{feed-back}back

my little ambient accountability idea on the next level of feedback mechanisms  Read about it here - and needless to say: feedback most welcome!