Persuasive Systems Design (spring 2020)

Attitudinal theories from social psychology have been quite extensively applied to the study of user intentions and behaviour. These theories have been developed mostly for predicting user acceptance of information technology rather than for providing systematic analysis and design methods for developing software solutions that aim at attitude or behaviour change. At the same time a growing number of information technology systems and services are being developed for these purposes.
This course will focus on persuasive technology. It will address the process of designing and evaluating persuasive systems, the types of content and software functionality in such systems, the underlying assumptions behind these, methods for analysing the persuasion context, and principles for persuasive system design. The course also looks into the methods and techniques of gamifying persuasive content.
The course is primarily geared towards analysis and design tasks using the Persuasive Systems Design model as the main approach. Gamification forms another segment of the course, introducing topics in the role of games and game-like experiences in supporting persuasion.