My dad just sent me this YouTube video of a Japanese “HappinessCounter” concept that teaches you to smile more. One of the concept illustrations is a refrigerator that behaves grumpily if you don’t smile at it. And that is a good thing because smiling is healthy, right? Not necessarily.
More and more companies scramble to increase brand loyalty by encouraging emotional bonds between products and end-users. And the more we move toward a Star Wars scenario where everything from your toaster to your protocol droid talks back to you (and expects some sort of curtesey), you’re really balancing the tight-rope between becoming a genuinely nicer and happier person, and ending up like the consumer appliance version of the crazy cat lady.
Popular science seems to indicate that even artificial smiling and laughing is good for you (because your brain actually doesn’t know the difference), which has led to some really weird stuff (remember how much press attention the Laughter Yoga movement got by doing flash mobs back in the 90ties?). But do you really learn to smile more, or just develop a reflex grimace sufficient to satisfy your refrigerator (a bit like when my little nieces are bodily caught while running around playing and made to say thank you for presents at birthday parties)?
Of course, this isn’t nudging, because it’s your own decision whether to buy the refrigerator or not. But personally, I would be really worried about what my household appliances tricked me into doing behind my back. Especially when it comes to smiles, because according to popular psychology, an “insincere” smile is more or less the most effective way to ruin a good first impression and damage later trust- and relationship building (short of malicious gossiping, cheating, or worse).
But wouldn’t it be good if it could make you a better person?
I kind of sympathize with this idea, and I’d probably be nice to my own stuff if I got some sort of emotional feedback. After all, I get less emotional feedback from letting a trapped insect out the window, turning off somebody’s forgotten bicycle lights, or slowing down to let a dove walk off the bicycle lane instead of forcing it to take off flying. I do these kinds of little impersonal courtesies all the time, because I feel it’s the right thing to do, and if I even stop to consider how silly it is considering the relative energy expenditure, I still feel it’s worth it, because I like being that kind of person.
There’s a strong tendency to animism in Japanese culture, and it would be really interesting to see how this affects the design process, and if this give Japanese designers an edge, as the increase in artificial intelligence in consumer products enable them to operate as actors. It might also be amusing in a cute way if more consumer products had a kind of personality, even if it was based on little quirks and unexpected behavior (like a refrigerator acting a bit offended). But most of the time, it’s actually quite nice that your stuff does what it’s supposed to do, and after all according to popular evolutionary psychology, we haven’t really developed to form personal relationships with more than 200 persons.
So the big question is: How many of those “persons” do you really want to be consumer products?
Interesting links:
- Read more about the Happiness Counter: http://www.damngeeky.com/2012/10/05/5908/happiness-counter-encourages-smiling-at-consumer-electronics-to-keep-you-in-good-mood.html
- Japanese developed therapeutic robot with emotional responses raising the quality of life for elderly people: http://www.parorobots.com/
- Many women would rather give up sex than their smartphone (this might say more about their partners than the quality of the handset, but it’s interesting that the figures are significantly higher among iPhone users): http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/survey-one-third-would-rather-give-sex-phone-121757
- According to Actor Network Theory (ANT), material objects can actually act by themselves or in networks with other objects and humans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory
- Isaac Asimovs three rules of robotics (in case your toaster ever becomes sentient): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics