PhD Candidate Marlen Promann Successfully Defends Dissertation Proposal

https://rcodi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ACM-CHI-2018.jpg At the end of last year, on 20th December 2018, Marlen Promann, a Purdue Independent Interdisciplinary PhD candidate (IIGP) , defended her PhD dissertation proposal wherein she asked normative questions about how social data charts support collective awareness and encourage sustainable action in the personal home context. no-repeat;center top;; Promann is interested in the explosive rise of personal data and how they are visualized to end users, nudging them to change their everyday behaviors. Inspired by Elinor Ostrom and her theory of Collective Action, Promann is passionate about leveraging technologies to empower people to collectively manage societal well-fare. Hence,her dissertation explores how charts that depict social data may encourage cooperation around societal issues like recycling, energy conservation, sustainability, social inclusion, etc. that often present users with social dilemmas about doing good in the long term or benefiting oneself in the short term. Ms. Promann uniquely blends her 10+ years of design experience (BA HonsDesign, 2005) and her social scientific research training(MSc Media and Communications, 2010) to integrate perceptual theories of design with social psychological theories to develop theoretical assumptions about how charts may convey the semantics of ‘socialunity’ that may enhance contributions to group goals. Her controlled perceptual experiments confirmed her first hypotheses that particular visual chart structures can indeed enhance perceptions of group unity;however, she found them to have particular semantic meanings of unity (room for more intriguing research). She is now working on a series of behavioral game experiments to see if such perceptual interpretive differences by chart designs can also lead to variable conservation behaviors. no-repeat;center top;; Her dissertation will make three major contributions to three different fields: (1)Pertinent to the Visualization community, Marlen’s findings highlight the importance of encoding data with appropriate visual structures and cues that support rather than contradict the message of the underlying data and/or the goal of the data feedback. (2)Uniquely to the HCI and design communities, Marlen deep dived into the psychological and perceptual theories to inform her chart designs and to empirically measure the causal effects of her designs on the end users. This empirical rigor is what has long been needed to truly test the many novel ideas that emerge within the HCI and design communities. (3)Despite prior efforts to connect the design (HCI) and behavioral science (environmental psychology, smart buildings, energy, etc.), Marlen’s work is at the forefront of connecting theory driven design with empirical evidence of specific visual cues in a design affecting behavior change. (4)Last, but not least, her efforts to leverage behavioral games to test how visual chart design may prime users to cooperate more in social dilemma situations is new to the present games literature that has largely focused on text based feedback. no-repeat;center top;; If you found this interesting, feel free to check out more about the opportunity that positive nudging can have in this article. no-repeat;center top;;