The Problem of Acceptance - The place of affect in the design of information systems : the prob

Chapter 7: The Problem of Acceptance

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How do designer imagine the users? How and why may certain assumptions about technology use be accepted or rejected? In this chapter, I will address how game designers deal with the problem of acceptance by examining the case of a serious game designed for elderly people, namely Elder Move. Elderly people constitute a new market for game

designers, and it is unclear whether, at this age, they would opt to play the game and enjoy it as young people do. I will first describe the aim of the chapter by positioning my framework within existing positivist and constructivist views on acceptance. Then, I will address the case of Elder Move, designed by the firm Totem, and the failure of the design team to gamify the product. Finally, this case renders visible the point that technology functions not so much as a technical issue, but as an empty signifier.

Aims of the chapter

Using my framework, my aim in this chapter is to demystify the practice of design, which is here understood as shaping a user’s experience in a way intended to conform him/her to a particular set of expected design patterns. While existing approaches adopt a positivist standpoint or a constructivist/institutional one, I will argue that design is rather an unstable arena involving speech, affect and identification.

The scientific approach to design holds that ideal game design features can be empirically tested, predicted and then applied. This heuristic approach is well exemplified by Malone’s PhD thesis, published in 1980, entitled ‘What makes things fun to learn? A study of

intrinsically Motivating Computer Games.’ Malone was a social psychologist from the MIT who was interested in developing a heuristics for the design of computer games by focusing on three specific features, namely challenge, curiosity and fantasy. This is also the ambition of the TAM model (see above).

A less predictive way to conceptualize technologies and the process through which they are accepted and institutionalized is by constructing an organizing vision. From this

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perspective, game designers envision (in their heads, on computer screens and on paper) the machine-to-be (Bechky, 2003), around so-called ‘organizing visions’ (Swanson and Ramiller, 1997), which can be defined as focal community ideas for the application of IT in

organizations. The development of the organizing vision is motivated by institutional forces and, among these forces, the community’s discourse plays a dominant role. In contrast with the scientific design approach, these authors shed light on the impossibility of predicting the future of these evolving technologies and of foreseeing the applications and situations which might emerge from the use of these technologies. Nevertheless, the notion of organizing vision, while acknowledging the social construction of design, still assumes that institutions producing visions have control over the actors.

In contrast, the subject-based approach to agency helps us to capture phenomena that are pre-institutional, psychosexual forces which are not yet symbolized. Design is enacted in situ, and unexpected forces emerge it is the designers’ job to assign them a meaning. Reframing how designers conceptualize technology acceptance involves looking at design as a more unstable micro-political scene involving power relations, identification and affect. In contrast with the scientific design or sense-making approaches, the Lacanian theory of act suggests that this process is driven by unconscious psychosexual events which are retroactively

assigned meaning by designers. How do particular terms come to be ordered in sequence, and how does a particular signifier come to gain a position of mastery and change the sequence of order? Members of a particular community or organization accept or refuse representations offered by important others. How and why does this hierarchization take place? How does the construction of master-signifier preside over the process of acceptance?

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Framing the case

What is Elder Move? What is Elder Move? What is Elder Move? What is Elder Move?

There are several reasons why elderly people are reluctant to travel or walk; the elderly tend to lack the confidence to cope with physical impairment, the fear of being lost and the feeling of insecurity. Even easy tasks such as purchasing a ticket for public transportation, withdrawing money from a cashpoint or paying for daily shopping (the bakery, supermarket, doctors, pharmacy) can be perceived as a risk or a danger. The project does not propose solutions to reduce physical impairments such as innovative wheelchairs, for instance, but seeks to provide home-based physical and cognitive training in order to increase the elderly’s self-confidence when addressing those everyday issues of life outside the home.

Elder Move do this by providing contextualized help, based on innovative gaming platforms such as the Wii and the Kinect, and specifically develop mini-games based on the game engine Unity3D. Solutions to track user behaviour and movements on different geographical scales (e.g. public transportation access and usage, etc.) are made available, as well as improved social inclusion and accessibility through Web 2.0 technologies and tools. Social networks, chat, voice communication, professional aid/support and other relevant services (e.g. theatre ticketing) are also made available.

I shadowed the development process of an EU-funded project featuring serious games designed for the elderly and using the Kinect with a threefold purpose:

1 To inspire confidence in users so that they are able to achieve and manage limited physical movement.

2 To inspire confidence in the users’ mental ability by asking them to perform cognitive agility activities, and by providing positive reinforcement via verbal and visual feedback.

3 To inspire social confidence to encourage users to go outside their homes and interact with other people both inside and outside their social circle.

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Finally, user acceptance appears to be a crucial challenge in this project because of the age of the target audience, a generation which is not necessarily technologized and are more vulnerable to the safety implications of using the Kinect for physical exercise. Hence, the project also features the issue of acceptance by medical staff and home care providers.

Elements of context Elements of context Elements of context Elements of context

Various elements of context regarding this participant observation are now required. Although I gained access to the field thanks to a contact inside Totem, the serious games specialist, two different entities were working together on this project from the same office located at the Coventry Innovation Park: namely Gamma (the project manager and the programmers) and Totem (the instructional designers and the 3D artists). In this context, members of these two organizations present their work to partners and consultants of the project. Thus, the case indirectly involves employees from a third company, namely the partner Omega, which is an Austrian company with a focus on providing learning and knowledge solutions, including consultation, training and guidance, as well as developing training content materials. Omega was mobilized to examine the social aspects of the Elder Move project and the human interface of devices.

I will therefore follow the process through which this signifier Elder Move is invested in by various actors of the firms and beyond the firms. In particular, my aim is to understand this signifier as the site (objective) where the designers’ rapport-de-force (subjective) takes place. How do designers imagine technology use (Imaginary)? How can subject-based

analysis be used to identify when gamification dysfunctions, when it does not work and when it resists predictions (Real)? Why do assumptions about users come to be rejected in fine whilst others are accepted (Symbolic)?

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A failure at gamifying

As I highlighted in ‘Methodology used for data collection and analysis’, the Lacanian approach to ethnographic observation should pay attention to the trajectory of the signifiers and the chronology of meaning. I will therefore analyse the findings according to the three phases which I have identified. Phase 1 includes the primary construction of the concept design and the demo release – at this stage, communication with the partner is non-existent. We can label this mode of attachment of the designers to their product and its technical properties as imaginary. Then, the meeting involving the partners in Austria transpires to be a ‘turning point’ towards a novel approach – phase 2 where the Real emerges, an event and even an act which produces social actors as subjects. Phase 3 is the consolidation of this novel way, the inscription of the product within the symbolic and its acceptance by the group.

In document The place of affect in the design of information systems : the problem of serious gaming (Page 175-180)