#feedfeedbackback

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. 

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.

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. 

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! 

(image c localcontext)