Week four, BREAKTHROUGH- The Fun Theory

HALLELUJAH!
We've had a breakthrough!

In class today everything just came together.
We were just finishing off the last tutorial for Arduino (or more correctly Will did as he has taken charge of Arduino seeing as he has taken it home the most and has the best grasp on it so far) and we were again, going around in circles unable to think of anything inspiring at all.

We had researched a eliminated wuite alot of stuff together and suddenly Ann-Maree remembered a video that Charlie showed us last year sometime of the 'world's deepest bin'  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw ), a video which was part of something called 'The Fun Theory', an initiative by Volkswagon.

http://www.thefuntheory.com/

The Fun Theory is that through fun interactive design, you can change people's behaviours and attitudes for the better. You will see examples here in these images of encouraging people not to speed, encouraging them to recycle, to throw their rubnish away, to take the stairs instead of the excalator,and to buckle up in the car.
The key word in all of this is encourage. It's no strict nazi-esque enforcing of rules that make you want to rebel, it's a gentle fun encouraging suggestion to do the right thing... and they can be such simple games but they seem to evoke such a beautiful childlike delight that these chores are now fun and enjoyable.

This just sang out to us so intensely we felt we couldn't ignore it. So we emplyed the fun theory into our designign and suddenly we had a million ideas!
Such as, encouraging people to:

• walk at the lights and not jay walk
• Put their trolleys away at coles/woolies etc
• stand on the right side of the escalator (escalator ettiquite)
• turn their tv off at the wall
• turn all lights off in the house that aren't needed
• alway buy a ticket and not scam their way onto a bus
• gum in the BIN and not on the ground of under a table

etc etc etc. There were so many more but we wanted to do the jay walking one.
So we were thinking about light up hopscotch, or interactive soccer, or something fun but after talks with Marianella, we were informed that another group were doing a crossing the lights thing so we decided to go for something completely different. This is when we decided on the trolley scenario as we thought you could make a game out of physically pushing the trolleys home at the trolley bays.