Fred Truman

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NYC Subway Turnstyle Observation

October 29, 2010

Hey there. Glad to be back. Especially glad to move my post about Linda Stone off of the top. Yeesh. Anyways, yesterday I spent a little bit of time with a classmate Genevieve observing and discussing people’s interactions with the New York City subway turnstyle. Reading of Don Norman’s “Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better” offers some insight into the behaviors and interactions observed here. In Norman’s piece, he points out the differences between the positive affect and negative affect of a design and how that influences our behavior and thought processes when interacting with the design. Particularly,

Just as negative affect can make some simple tasks difficult, positive affect can make some difficult tasks easier. In a clever set of experiments, Alice Isen has shown that if people are given small, unexpected gifts, afterwards they are able to solve problems that require creative thought better than people who were not given gifts. The positive affective system seems to change the cognitive parameters of problem solving to emphasize breadth-first thinking, and the examination of multiple alternatives. It also has the side effect of making people more distractible.

Anxiety has just the opposite effect: it biases the processing to be depth first, to focus and concentrate. Here, people are less distractible. Anxiety and fear squirt neural transmitters into the brain that narrow the thought process. In general, this is good for focus upon a specific threat or problem.

Both modifications to the normal state of cognitive processing have advantages as well as disadvantages. Negatively valenced affect narrows the thought processes – hence depth-first processing and less susceptibility to interruption or distraction. Usually, this works just fine: when danger strikes, we need to concentrate attention, to avoid distraction by irrelevant, extraneous matters. Tunnel vision is often the correct approach. Positively valenced affect broadens the thought processes – hence enhanced creativity. This is useful when in a positive situation, with no time pressures. Then, it is often profitable to be distractible, to follow side thoughts, to release creativity. Sometimes, of course, the tunnel vision can lead to harm, just as sometimes the broadening of the thought process can distract can prevent solution.

I can see evidence of both of these thought processes in this video. Around :58 of the video an older woman appears and heads to the station manager’s booth and spends nearly a minute and a half there – presumably buying a ticket or asking for directions. @2:25 she makes her first attempt and fails to make it through. Slowly, but surely, @3:15 she tries a different turnstyle and meets a similar fate. @3:37 she begins soliciting help from other turnstyle users, ignored with her first attempt and then unsuccessfully aided by another woman. After this she then heads back to the station manager’s booth and finally makes it through @4:30. This took her about 3.5 minutes to complete what took most others only a brief moment of time. I would imagine, with all due respect, that time is not as urgent for her at her age as other users of the turnstyle, allowing her to explore a breadth-first thought range of options without getting too frustrated in dead ends – at least not enough for her to abandon the task altogether.

In contrast, @3:17 you’ll notice a man in a suit approaching the turnstyle and unsuccessfully swiping his card twice before succeeding on the third try. The rigid delivery and unflinching focus on the repetitive task of swiping leads me to believe that time is much more important to this man which created his evidently depth-first thinking. Hammer through the difficulty.

To build further upon Mr. Norman’s insights about affect and his thesis that attractive things work better, I would say that a cheap design facade can easily be torn down by those willing to challenge. Beeping with only the subtlest indifference between its user’s success or failure seems to say “yeah, I look tough – but I really don’t give a $#*! if you want to thumb your nose at my authority. I’m really quite apathetic.” Watch the couple @4:53 and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Maybe the turnstyle could benefit by being a little more emotional?

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