Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
The Cabinut
October 1, 2011
Do you live with someone that is genetically predisposed towards leaving every cabinet door in your home wide open? Do you worry that your loved one may come home to you lying on the floor, having split your skull on one of these doors? Well my friend, you are not alone.
The Cabinut aims to create a framework with which we may encourage our loved ones to close those cabinets.
In order to trigger this behavior change, I came up with a couple possible ways I could do this:
If I really think about the specific use case I would like to design for, it’s probably best if I could get Jamie (my wife) to close any cabinet door that’s been left open. Regardless if it’s in the morning, or whether or not there are one, two or no people in the apartment. There are times when both of us are home, and she may be doing something in the kitchen and I walk in and nearly split my head – but then neither triggers 01, 02 nor 04 would account for this scenario. Trigger 03 (if installed properly) could account for all possible stray cabinet doors, but there’s the chance that there interval designated will not work for all uses of the cabinet and result in extreme annoyance, frustration and subsequent disposal.
Trigger 01 can’t account for these edge cases, but what I like better about this trigger is that it’s friendlier and there’s opportunity for more positive feedback. It would ideally use social acceptance / rejection as the motivator, whereas as Trigger 04 motivates through pain of the alarm sound and/or fear of being surprised by it.
Update
After doing some further research into the ability, motivation and triggers needed to affect the target behavior, I quickly found out some important things. Although ability to close the cabinets is quite high, the motivating factors were virtually non-existent. The “danger” posed by these cabinets to my head are perceived to be “not that big of a deal”, and the proposed triggers were seen to be “annoying.” Hhhmmm, not the effect I was going for.
First off I wanted to devise a trigger method that requires far less technology but will still serve the same function – and possibly even better. It’s just a sticky note on the door asking: “have you closed all the cabinets?”. It’s actually better than the text because it isn’t time contingent and considering the times that Jamie leaves our apartment varies slightly from day-to-day. The sticky allows me to remind her at precisely that moment when she is leaving the apartment and could do a quick check.
To increase the motivation in the model I’ve introduced some terms of reward which should hopefully remove the perceived annoyance of the trigger. They are:
If she is able to not leave a single cabinet door open for an entire 5-day work week, then I will promptly paint a wall in our apartment that I’ve been promising to do for a while. If she can successfully pull off two straight weeks (two 5-day work weeks) of no open cabinets, then I will also paint our entire bedroom (which I’ve also been promising to do).
This uses the pleasure of getting me to perform some functions as the motivator.
Day one starts tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Update: The Cabinut, Part 2