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How Nametag Day is a Lean Validation for Connecting Communities

Saturday, June 6 was Nametag Day in San Francisco, New York, and Pittsburgh. At various locations in these cities, volunteers handed out nametags for people to wear. The goal of the day was to “converse with people we haven't met yet, enjoy spontaneous and silly moments, and appreciate the humanity of the people we normally pass on the street.” They successfully raised $2,500 through a Kickstarter campaign to fund the event. So how does this day tie into Lean methodology?

photo from @ericboromisa

It’s hard to say how successful Nametag Day was. The Nametag Day website states they handed out thousands of nametags, and I did see many people walking around the city with nametags. Their Twitter shows pictures of people meeting, but it seems like those are mostly the volunteers handing out nametags interacting with strangers. When I asked a volunteer about her experience, she said she was meeting a lot of nice people, but wasn’t aware of how people with nametags were interacting with each other.

After unsuccessfully finding the nametag volunteers at the Union Square location (too many tourists!) I went to Dolores Park where I finally got my nametag. From my experience, the nametag didn’t make much of a difference. I didn’t get harassed like Joyce Wadler of the NYTimes feared, but I also didn’t walk down the street with people saying hello and greeting me by name. The one time it sparked conversation was when I went to Urban Putt and the cashier asked me if there was some kind of party going on since he’d seen a lot of people with nametags. Wearing the nametag reminded me of customer service employees who wear nametags at work. I wonder how effective those nametags are; even though they’re ubiquitous in those types of jobs, I’m not sure how many people actually address them by name.

From my perch atop Dolores Park, I noticed people who wore nametags generally seemed clustered together, but homophily seems like a likely reason for this observation. The nametags were hard to read from afar; only when you were up-close to someone were you able to read their names. However, from a distance I could see who was wearing a nametag, and this did signal a certain openness to communicate. The nametags didn’t provide much common ground for conversation. Just because I knew a person was more open to talking, that didn’t give me any starting point for conversation except that he/she was also participating in nametag day. I also wonder if this effect would last if people wore nametags everyday as opposed to opting into a particular event. Perhaps similar to service-job nametags, people would become desensitized to others wearing nametags at all.

But it’s also possible that wearing a nametag could inspire people to share more about themselves, as shown by @koaorquia, and this kind of personal sharing could inspire connections between strangers. I wonder how many of the Instagram users who liked/commented on his post were also in Dolores Park at the same time.

While the success of Nametag Day is unclear, it did validate a key part of my research. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries talks about the importance of testing assumptions experimentally. He uses the example of Kodak Gallery testing a simple event album prototype even though it lacked many of the features that were needed to make it a successful product. Ries claims that releasing this prototype was essential because it validated the assumption that customers want to create albums online (p. 65). Similarly, Nametag Day can be considered a prototype of sorts, testing out the hypothesis that there is a real desire to connect with others in urban public places. Even more so, Nametag Day proved that people are willing to display this openness to connect in a public forum, both online and in the physical space. 

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CHI Play 2014

Last week I attended CHI Play in Toronto, a new ACM SIGCHI on games and play. While the conference was still primarily an academic one, there was a strong industry presence including several speakers who have spoken at GDC in the past. As the first CHI Play conference, it was much smaller in size than CHI. There were around 150 attendees as opposed to CHI's 3000+ size.

In some ways, CHI feels like the New York City of HCI conferences while CHI Play felt like a small suburb of NYC. Being published at CHI is a sign of having succeeded (despite its questionable review process), similar to making it in the competitive landscape that is NYC. CHI Play does not have this kind of reputation (yet), and is a much more intimate conference. Instead of attendees staying siloed into their academic cliques, people were much more open to conversation, one of the main purposes of these types of conferences. Despite having attended CHI four times, I have never actually met people that I reached out to after the conference, but this was not the case at CHI Play. Because CHI Play focuses on a specific subset of CHI, it was much easier to find people who have similar research interests. The single track also meant that everyone was always watching the same talks without constant shuffle in and out of rooms and had a shared experience to discuss.

But enough of the meta-discussion. Onto a discussion of the content of the talks.

One of the highlights of the conference for me was the emphasis on the importance of understanding player psychology in gameplay. The workshop entitled "Beyond Gamification" included references to Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to design behavior change games that fulfill people's needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Using lenses with questions on them that prompted us to think about what might influence people's capability, motivation, and opportunity to play a game (Com-B Model by Susan Michie), we designed game mechanics that would engage players on a deeper level than achievements like badges. 

Similarly, Jason Vandenberghe's keynote mapped the Big 5 personality traits onto different domains of play. His talk followed player motivations from Discovery of a game to Evaluation to Use to Affinity. The first two involving starting to play, Discovery and Evaluation, are influenced by people's personalities on the Big 5, whereas continuation of play, Evaluation and Use, are influenced by SDT. He argued that the Big 5 provides extrinsic motivation to play, while SDT is motivated intrinsically. I'm not sure that I'm fully convinced on this last point- people wanting to try a game may not be extrinsically motivated, though it can be. Trying a game so that they could talk about it with their friends would be extrinsic, but trying a game because they wanted to see if it was fun still seems like it would be intrinsic. This model also seems a bit simplified since it seems highly possible that people's personalities could influence their use and affinity for a game. Even if a game satisfies someone's need for autonomy, for example, their personality factor that prefers novelty could influence whether they continue to play a game or not. Jason's theories are well known amongst games in industry, but there have not been extensive publications on his ideas. It would be great to see some studies conducted testing these models and create more of a bridge between the academic and industry game designers.

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The Beauty of the Ephemeral

This is the first of my blog posts on Burning Man as a personal reflection on the week I spent in the desert. 

One of the key tenets of Burning Man is not to leave a trace. A city of 70,000 awakens the desert and just as quickly disappears into the sand, as if swept up by one of the dust storms. The giant, climbable art installations like Embrace are burnt at the end of the week. All the hours spent designing the structure, preparing material, building in the desert, pairs of feet climbing up to see the view, memories written on the walls, become ashes. The art cars ranging from full-sized pirate ships to individual Pacman are somehow dismantled and driven back to their garages. The thunderdome where people fight in a cage with foam bats, the French Quarter where one can get a personalized set of bath salts, the creepy abandoned outpost in the deep playa, the steam bath, the observatory where I saw the Andromeda galaxy, all turn to dust.

Like the city and structures themselves, the relationships are temporary. People adopt playa names, preventing them from being able to identify people in the real world. You chat with some Australians while waiting in line for a lemon vodka drink, knowing that you’ll probably never see them again. At Burning Man, money is replaced by gifting. People spend immense amounts of time, money, and effort giving for the good of the community. It is incredibly rewarding to see the kindness people bestow upon one another, and it makes you want to give more freely in kind. While community is undoubtedly the main reason people are more open to each other, the lack of connection to the rest of the world seems to contribute as well. Being separated from technology, I felt so much more present. The only distractions available were the space and people around them. Trying to meet with someone was near impossible, and serendipity determines whether you happened upon your friend at 2am by a giant slide. Connections are made knowing that they will likely exist only in Black Rock City, and that’s part of what makes them so special. 

Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think the gifting economy is partially possible only because the event lasts a week. The festival would not function if not for its temporariness. Like a drug, Burning Man itself is ethereal but its impact can echo long after the man has burned to dust. There may be no physical trace of a city that existed, but people’s experiences are carried through photographs, memories, and conversations that remain alive in the real world.

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Airport

After a long day at work, a man in a suit enters the local bar for a pint. Exhausted, he slumps into an empty chair at the bar. Except for a few other patrons scattered throughout, the bar is relatively empty. The man turns his attention to the screen affixed in front of him; identical ones are placed in front of every seat. He presses the button on the screen to turn on the display, and then scrolls through the list of beers on tap. The beers have descriptions next to their photographs. A pale ale? No. He wants something more substantial than that. He settles on a chocolate stout and taps to add it to his tab. With a single swipe of his credit card in a card reader next to the screen, he has placed his order.

  He waits impatiently, tapping his foot against the cold metal bar that lines the wooden frame of the bar. Even though the bar isn’t busy, the bartender is taking his time, checking his phone instead of tending to the ordering screen. Eventually, after probably sending a text message or updating a Facebook status, he glances at the screen behind the counter to see that an order has been placed. He grabs a glass, fills it with the chocolate stout, and wordlessly places it on a coaster in front of the man in a suit.

  The man acknowledges his beer with a nod, and the bartender reciprocates with a similar tilt of his head before returning to his prior phone endeavors. The man picks up the beer, condensation forming on the glass, and takes a gulp of his long-awaited salvation.

  The bar is silent except for the occasional clink of glasses being placed down on the counter in between lonely sips.

 This isn’t a dystopian imagination of how technology could be implemented and used in the future; it already exists in airports. Terminal C of LaGuardia Airport in New York City is an example of one of these realizations, where screens line the bars, shared tables, and individual cubbies. An image in the screensaver on the iPads shows a man laughing with a blond woman sitting in front of the screen across from him, but in reality, strangers point at screens, their fingers inches away from each other with the divide of technology keeping them worlds apart.

  I don’t have the idyllic vision of strangers jovially chatting and realizing shared connections while they wait for their flights without these screens, but the screens create a physical boundary, an excuse not to have to engage with anyone or anything else around them. My main concern is that it removes the human contact of ordering food and turns it into an online transaction. If we continue to view human contact as an undesirable and inconvenient interaction to eliminate when possible using technology, what will the future of public space be?