Social Stairs: Taking the Piano Staircase towards Long-Term Behavioral Change

Abstract

This paper addresses the development of Social Stairs, an intelligent musical staircase to change people's behavior in the long-term to take the stairs in favor of the elevator. Through designing with the Experiential Design Landscape (EDL) method, a design opportunity was found that social engagement encouraged people to take the stairs at work in favor of the elevator. To encourage this social behavior, people who involved each other and worked together whilst using the Social Stairs were treated with more diverse orchestral chimes that echoed up the stairwell. In this paper we reflect on the differences between the persuasive system of the well-known Piano Staircase and the Social Stairs. We report on the deployment of the Social Stairs for a period of three weeks in the public space within the university community and identify opportunities for triggering intrinsic motivation, social engagement and how to keep people involved in the long-term.

Psychological Frameworks for Persuasive Information and Communications Technologies

“…Examples that are conceptually similar, but less structured, include the Piano Stairs and Social Stairs projects. 25 Both systems modified public staircases to play noises when stepped on. The Piano Stairs played notes corresponding to a piano keyboard, whereas the Social Stairs played a richer range of sounds depending on the configuration of multiple users on the staircase.…”

Data-Enabled Design for Social Change: Two Case Studies

“…The description of the method is accompanied by the presentation of two sample projects, Social Stairs [27] and [Y]our Perspective that will highlight challenges and opportunities of data-enabled design. The projects explore data-enabled design from two different perspectives.…”

Introduction to the Handbook of Behavioural Change and Public Policy

“…This is one of many reasons why behavioural public policy and approaches on policy design are closely interlinked . Today, many behavioural designs are commonplace: the rearrangement of food in cafeterias to focus our attention on healthy options; graphic warnings on cigarette packages; the fly in the urinal -these and other interventions have become part of everyday life (Peeters et al 2013;Alemanno 2012;Shafir 2013). The taken-for-grantedness, even banality of some behavioural public policies suggests that ideas and instruments of behavioural change are already more widespread than it might seem.…”