Design technology to help us make better decisions

I regularily read Dan Ariely`s Blog, I particpated in his MOOC and can only recommend everyone to do so. Why? It really helps you to understand human irrationality and why we repeatedly and predictably make the wrong decisions in many aspects of our lives.

This part of his latest blog articles about the Apple Pay question he answered is particularly interesting for the entire industry of technology and innovation. We need to think about designing technology in a way that helps us make better decisions.

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Dear Dan,

Apple recently announced Apple Pay, which will allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to simply wave their gadgets to pay for purchases. How might this technology change our spending habits? Could Apple Pay and other such hassle-free payment mechanisms (such as Amazon’s “1-click ordering”) lead us to spend more—particularly on stuff we don’t need?

—Nikki

The essence of payment is opportunity cost. Every time we face a purchasing decision, we should ask ourselves if getting this one thing is worth giving up the ability to purchase something else, now or in the future.

Different ways of paying make us think differently about those opportunity costs. For example, if we have $20 in cash in our pockets, we will have a hard time not thinking about opportunity cost. If we consider buying a sandwich, we realize that we won’t have money for coffee; if we get a cab, we realize that we won’t have money for dinner. But when we use a credit card or gift certificate, our thinking about opportunity cost will be less natural and prevalent—which means we’re likely to spend more without fully thinking about the consequences.

This is why the general answer to your questions is both yes and no. As you suggest, electronic payment mechanisms can easily lead us to think less about opportunity cost and spend more recklessly. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Electronic payment could be designed in ways that get us to more fully understand our opportunity costs and make more reasonable decisions. Apple Pay and the like could be game-changers, helping us think about our spending much more rigorously than we ever could with cash.

So the questions are: Who is designing these electronic wallets, and for what purpose? Will they be designed to get us to spend more money—or to help us make better decisions? Right now, electronic payments seem to be going down the path of less thinking and more spending—but I hope that at some point, some of the payment companies will change their approach, adopt the perspective of their users and offer electronic payment methods that help us make better financial decisions.

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Why do powerful leaders not do more good?

Check out this very interesting report from the University of Lausanne:

The most interesting finding for me is

“Honesty does not shield a person from mis-using power.”

Thanks to Dan Ariely’s Blog

SOME STUDIES ON POWER AND CORRUPTION

John Antonakis, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and his colleagues just came out with a new paper on power and corruption (and Testosterone).

Important and fascinating — and for sure worth the 14 min of this video

 

Start of the 2014 Creativity Engineering class

October 1st is the day when the Creativity Engineering class starts every year. This one is the 8th time. The registrations for the class have been growing since the first time the class was offered. This year we received almost 250.  Thank you for your overwhelming interest.

Students interested come from various backgrounds and study focuses with national backgrounds from all over the European Union and a few from beyond.

The first phase is the IDEA and TEAM FINDING phase where people present ideas they would like to develop and find team members who want to join them on this path. This year we are running a pilot to check out if the use of the MakerSquare platform is useful for us.

Why do I decide to do this? I wanted to see how the this statement
“By bringing together teams of passionate, curious, like-minded people and enabling crowd-sourcing of under-utilized resources, we aim to create new paths towards innovation, discovery, and entrepreneurship.”
taken from the MakerSquare “What we do” page does really apply to reality.

The best is that feedback from all participants will be fed back to the MakerSquare developers team.

Excited to see how this will work out. A new adventure and twist to our pathway!

I am happy to have had Martin Asmus on my side to support such a large group of participants every year. Thank you very much, Martin.
This year I found another supporter, Carina Müller, who will be supporting the pilot with me.

All the best for the course, have fun in what you do!

Jutta Jerlich