Persuasive Cities for Sustainable Wellbeing: Quantified Communities

Abstract

Can you imagine a city that feels, understands, and cares about your wellbeing? Future cities will reshape human behavior in countless ways. New strategies and models are required for future urban spaces to properly respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics. Persuasive urban systems will play an important role in making cities more livable and resource-efficient by addressing current environmental challenges and enabling healthier routines. Persuasive cities research aims at improving wellbeing across societies through applications of socio-psychological theories and their integration with conceptually new urban designs. This research presents an ecosystem of future cities, describes three generic groups of people depending on their susceptibility to persuasive technology, explains the process of defining behavior change, and provides tools for social engineering of persuasive cities. Advancing this research is important as it scaffolds scientific knowledge on how to design persuasive cities and refines guidelines for practical applications in achieving their emergence.

Transforming Technology for Global Business Acceleration and Change Management

“…• Transformation Designthat blends technological innovations with human nature to empower sustainable and scalable changes (Stibe & Larson, 2016).…”

“…(1) Triangletriadic reciprocal determinism (Bandura, 2005), (2) Curveelaboration likelihood and behavioral modeling (Fogg, 2009), (3) Metricessential components for defining transformation (Stibe & Larson, 2016), (4) Circlessusceptibility to influence and change (Stibe & Larson, 2016), (5) Architecturekey layers of transforming technology design (Stibe & Larson, 2016), (6) Sociumfundamentals of socially influencing systems (Stibe & Cugelman, 2019), (7) Moderationtypology of computer-supported influence , (8) Ethicsdark patterns and persuasive backfiring (Stibe & Cugelman, 2016).…”

“…Another successful implementation was the Biking Tourney (Stibe & Larson, 2016), a largescale study designed by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Media Lab) and Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). The study engaged 239 employees from 14 companies around Greater Boston Area, including Google, iRobot, Boston Children's Hospital, Volpe, and others, who collectively rode around 30,000 miles in six weeks.…”

Smart Cities and Healthcare: A Systematic Review

“…Three articles were related to the promotion of healthy lifestyles, namely, physical activity for the general population [19,20,47] and two articles reporting the same project, [48,49], also aimed to promote physical activity, but for older adults, and therefore were also related to active ageing.…”

“…The study in [47] introduced the concept of "persuasive cities" by presenting an ecosystem for the future of cities. Supported in behavioral change through gamification, and considering the possible definition of behavior changes, the study provides tools for the social engineering of persuasive cities.…”