The Story Machine: Combining Information Design/Visualization with Persuasion Design to Change Family-Story Sharing Behavior

Abstract

Finding a life-enhancing way to share family wisdom (history, lore, facts, traditions, and beliefs) among generations is a twenty-first century global challenge, especially in the USA, where geographically distributed, asynchronous, merged families, with diverse cultural heritages constitute a significant portion of the population. Many in the older generation are not as familiar with mobile- and Web-based tools to manage their media and storytelling as their children and grandchildren. Nevertheless, they want to and need to share important stories about the past, perceptions about the present, and predictions of the future.

Story/memory management products, and services, are available to increase people’s awareness of family history, personalities, and issues, and to encourage awareness and change, but they do not focus on innovative data visualization, and they lack persuasive effectiveness to convert family members to preserve family wisdom. Communicating family facts, concepts, and emotions, helps build awareness and identity, but does not result automatically in effective behavioral changes. The question then becomes: How can we better motivate, persuade, educate, and lead people to manage their stories, media, and time, thereby preserving their legacy for future generations?

The Story Machine project of 2011 researched, analyzed, designed, and evaluated powerful ways to improve intergenerational story-sharing behavior by persuading and motivating people to increase story generation, and to increase story sharing with other family members by means of a well-designed mobile application (for smart phone, tablet, and associated Web portal) concept prototype: the “Story Machine.”

The author’s firm previously designed and tested similar concept prototypes: the Green Machine application in 2009, oriented to persuading home consumers to make energy conservation behavior changes; the Health Machine application in 2010, oriented to avoiding obesity and diabetes through better behavior regarding nutrition and exercise; and the Money Machine in 2011, targeted to baby boomers and oriented to their managing their wealth better. The Story Machine uses similar principles of combining information design/visualization with persuasion design. AM+A’s presentation and this chapter explain the development of the Story Machine’s user interface, information design, information visualization, and persuasion design.