Does technology need personality? By Cennydd Bowles (Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 social innovation. Edited by jérémy dumont, strategic planner in FRANCE)

If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change I believe this must apply two ways. While it’s true that design can influence users and engender cultural change, this is always a product of our more tangible work: changing the behaviour of technology. As a user-centred designer of technology my goal is simple: to make its behaviour humane. But how should I approach this?

Humanity implies emotion and, beneath that, personality. These areas lie beyond the frontiers of classical HCI and usability. Fortunately, as often happens, we view the distant summit and see others have already planted the flag. Toymakers, for instance, have explored the art of bestowing personality on products for years. The results are fairly crude, but I defy anyone to watch the torture of a Pleo and successfully suppress a twinge of guilt. Even in its moments of crisis, Pleo has a distinct personality; that is to say, it conveys emotional information

Channels for personality

Perhaps the most obvious conduit for emotional content is appearance.

From BMW's grill to Pixar's Wall-E, they all have a personality

From BMW's grill to Pixar's Wall-E

The designs above show acts of visual anthropomorphism, where gesture and expression alone convey personality. They create empathy through closure, a projection of the self as explored in Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics. Pareidolia, the brain’s propensity to recognise faces everywhere, is a powerful trick. Even an oval, two dots and a line create an unmistakable expression; with detail we can add further emotional nuance.

Closure: excerpt from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

We can also convey personality through message. In the words of Russell Davies, the rise of devices with personality will lead to a surge in “bubbly writing and objects talking to you in the first person”. Here, an Innocent smoothieprudishly asks us to avert our gaze from its most vulnerable area.

Innocent drinks carton with text "Stop looking at my bottom."

But anthropomorphism needn’t be visual. Consider how R2D2 conveys personality through sound alone – his shrieks and bleeps mapping to human expressions of emotion (See Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff at dConstruct 2009[mp3, 43 minutes]). Similarly, IM programs happily announce incoming messages with a rising fanfare and send replies with a descending farewell.

These can be effective ways to communicate personality, but I’ve recently been reflecting about the fuzzier area of expressing personality through behaviour.

According to psychologist Kurt Lewin behaviour is product of the person in question and his environment (check out Lewin’s equation). Our behaviour changes with context. This suggests that we can only form an opinion about someone’s personality through exposure to various scenarios; a single interaction isn’t enough. However once we’ve formed this mental model, we believe it so thoroughly that we become blinded by it, believing that someone’s personality causes their every action – the fundamental attribution error.

Behavioural variance – acting differently according to our environment – is a celebrated part of being human. Anyone who lacks it is boring. Myself, I act quite differently as a Cardiff City fan than as a grandson, since the contexts are very different. At a party you’re expected to drink beer and flirt with girls, not quietly read a library book, if you expect to be invited back.

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