To understand what it means to design ‘persuasive technology’, one probably needs to understand it in relation to design in general. Using examples from a variety of areas of design discourse, the first part of the paper presents the idea that design is inherently persuasive. Following a discussion of what this might imply to the identification of ‘persuasive design’ as an emerging research are...

Visual feedback is an important approach in persuasive technology. We present four significant design dimensions of persuasive feedback systems. We investigate several previous notable projects and find out the underlying metaphorical structures within them. We analyze the meaning of metaphor in the persuasive feedback design, and examine how metaphor is being used. The results tell us that met...

The application of persuasive technology has been shown to be effective in a weight management context. However, it has been observed that the impact is not as significant as predicted. The aim of this project was to investigate whether a Design Thinking approach could generate new insights that could be used to drive the development of an innovative application to help people on their weight m...

Numerous scholars study how to design evidence-based interventions that can improve the lives of individuals, in a way that also brings social benefits. However, within the behavioral sciences in general, and the persuasive technology field specifically, scholars rarely focus-on, or report the negative outcomes of behavior change interventions, and possibly fewer report a special type of negati...

This paper examines the persuasiveness of ten commonly used Persuasive Technology (PT) strategies with respect to the effect of gender. The results of a largescale study suggest that males and females differ significantly in persuadability – with females being more receptive to most of the PT strategies. Some PT strategies are more suitable for persuading one gender than the other. Contribution...

The paper develops ethical guidelines for the development and usage of persuasive technologies (PT) that can be derived from applying discourse ethics to this type of technologies. The application of discourse ethics is of particular interest for PT, since 'persuasion' refers to an act of communication that might be interpreted as holding the middle between 'manipulation' and 'convincing'. One ...

This paper looks at the concept of transformation in digital games and posits it as a core pleasure of digital games that can be positioned within a new discourse of “transformative play”. The poetics of transformation are uniquely suited to particular forms of narrative play, and the power of transformative play has significant implications for the design of persuasive games. Transformative pl...

While work in interaction design, human-computer interaction (HCI) and the games literature begins to address experience beyond positive, it just scratches the surface. By turning to drama, literature, music, art and film that has shaped experiences and emotion beyond the positive and fun for many years, we describe what experience beyond positive looks like, show how it is not always “uncomfor...

This article develops a basic tool for stylistic metaphor analysis to assess the role of creative metaphors in a corpus of political speeches. Starting with a general discussion of creativity in political discourse it provides a definition and six basic strategies of creative metaphor uses. This definition and the strategies allow the identification of creative and conventional metaphors in spe...