The Second Showing

In the lecture before the second showing I had the strangest prototype that would test to see if people would actually respect a docking system without it being strictly policed.

I set out three pens. A cheap BIC pen, and two nice art pens. The BIC and one art pen was ‘dockelss’ and the other art pen had a home/dock. I simply asked participants to write on the piece of paper in front of them. They had the choice of picking up any of the three pens. Interestingly, the most commonly picked up pen was the BIC followed by the dockless art pen. The two dockless pens were never put back in their original position and at one time the BIC pen had been taken all together. As for the docked pen, it wasn’t used until the end of my experiment, when I decided to placed it in a more convenient position. Even then though only one out of the two people to use the docked pen put it back in the dock.

So the comparisons I took from this was that the BIC pen represented a bike that was obviously mass produced and had a lower perceived value in the eyes of the participants than the two art pens. The dockless art pen represented a high end dockless bike and the docked art pen represent a high end docked bike. So when a pen went missing it wasn’t a surprise to me that it was the BIC. It is interesting that so few people used the docked pen and even when they did use it, it was only docked 50% of the time. The dockless pens confirmed my hypothesis that states “the fact you can leave them anywhere means they are left everywhere”. Even though the docked pen was put back correctly only once this is still seen as a victory. The pen was unaccounted for only 50% of the time whereas the dockless pens were unaccounted for 100% of the time.

Going forward I would like to expand this prototype and work on it. It is interesting to see the subtle changes in how people behave psychologically towards objects when they are presented in different way. It could be interesting to see what people would do with different words of encouragement/discouragement, friendly typefaces/aggressive typefaces, warm colours/cold colours ect… Perhaps if the ‘dock’ specifically asked for the pen to be returned to its original spot people would be more inclined to do so. I just want to keep iterating this prototype for now and see what learnings I can take from them.