Too Cool at School - Understanding Cool Teenagers

Cool can be thought about on three levels; the having of cool things, the doing of cool stuff and the being of cool. Whilst there is some understanding of cool products, the concept, of being cool is much more elusive to designers and developers of systems. This study examines this space by using a set of pre-prepared teenage personas as probes with a set of teenagers with the aim of better understanding what is, and isn’t cool about teenage behaviours. The study confirmed that teenagers are able to rank personas in order of cool and that the process of using personas can provide valuable insights around the phenomenon of cool. The findings confirm that cool is indeed about having cool things but in terms of behaviours cool can be a little bit, but not too, naughty

"Working with Teenagers within HCI Research: Understanding Teen-Computer Interaction"

There has been limited consideration of teenagers (defined as 12-19 year olds in this work) as participants and end-users in Child-Computer Interaction and mainstream HCI communities. Teenagers reside in a fascinating and dynamic space between childhood and adulthood, and working more closely with teenagers within HCI may bring great insights and benefits. This paper provides an overview of teenage development from a psychological perspective, and then reviews existing work considering teenagers within HCI. Teenagers have long been identified as unique and studied within the field of developmental psychology, and the overview we provide in this paper highlights key understandings that should be carefully considered when working with teen participants. The paper concludes by presenting a set of key research questions that need to be explored in order to effectively work with teenagers within the field of HCI and provide a roadmap for future research within the Teen-Computer Interaction area

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this chapter, two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The chapter concludes: (i) teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, (ii) teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors most often to describe emotions and (iii) teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe ‘negative’ emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable three-dimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. A focus group evaluation of a prototype mobile app is described, which suggests that teenagers place more importance on an affective systems ability to support social relationships than they do its ability to support psychological development. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child-Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this paper two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The paper concludes that teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, that teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors the most to describe emotions and that teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe 'negative' emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable threedimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions. The contribution of this work is a categorisation of the visual metaphors teenagers use to express different emotions

It’s Cool to be Healthy! The Effect of Perceived Coolness on the Adoption of Fitness Bands and Health Behaviour

Contemporary technology success is frequently associated with the competitive advantage of being cool. A fitness band is one of the smart wearable devices promoting health behaviours, which is one of the cool lifestyle trends in modern societies. Although past research established the profound effects of coolness on user technology acceptance, the influencing role in fostering health behaviour remained obscure. To bridge the existing literature gap, the current study aims to examine the perception of coolness as a higher-order construct with multiple dimensions, namely originality, attractiveness, and sub-cultural appeals, by investigating the direct effect on fitness band adoption and indirect influence on users’ health behaviour. An online survey was conducted on 280 fitness band users, and the data was subsequently analysed via the Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The study results demonstrated that the perceived coolness of fitness bands significantly affects users’ device adoption levels, which subsequently influence personal health behaviour. This study thus contributes to health communication research by testing the coolness concept and developing the diffusioninnovation framework from current human-computer interaction literature. The findings would guide future developers of fitness bands to emphasise the coolness functions for higher degrees of adoption and positive impact on society

Brand Coolness

Marketers strive to create cool brands, but the literature does not offer a blueprint for what “brand coolness” means or what features characterize cool brands. This research uses a mixed-methods approach to conceptualize brand coolness and identify a set of characteristics typically associated with cool brands. Focus groups, depth interviews, and an essay study indicate that cool brands are perceived to be extraordinary, aesthetically appealing, energetic, high status, rebellious, original, authentic, subcultural, iconic, and popular. In nine quantitative studies (surveys and experiments), the authors develop scale items to reliably measure the component characteristics of brand coolness; show that brand coolness influences important outcome variables, including consumers’ attitudes toward, satisfaction with, intentions to talk about, and willingness to pay for the brand; and demonstrate how cool brands change over time. At first, most brands become cool to a small niche, at which point they are perceived to be more subcultural, rebellious, authentic, and original. Over time, some cool brands become adopted by the masses, at which point they are perceived to be more popular and iconic.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Influential Factors In Consumer\u27s Adoption Of Innovative Products

This dissertation addresses the challenges involved with the process of diffusion of innovations in the contexts of innovative educational materials and technological innovations. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss building and using Online Brand Communities (OBCs) to disseminate innovative math educational materials. OBCs are known to be important platforms where consumers can communicate with the brand as well as other consumers. Through the effective use of these platforms, brands could accelerate the process of diffusion of their innovations. However, OBCs will not survive if consumers do not get engaged and participate in these communities. The purpose of this section of the dissertation is to investigate how customer engagement can be increased in social media based Online Brand Communities (OBCs) so that these communities could be effectively used as platforms for disseminating innovations. Different hypotheses are suggested based on the consumer engagement literature and well-known organizational and psychological theories. These hypotheses are then tested in different studies in order to better understand the drivers of customer engagement behavior. Since one of the important factors that can impact the success of OBCs is the size of the communities, chapter 3 discusses Referral Reward Programs (RRPs) as a means for growing the OBC size. In this chapter, different hypotheses are proposed based on well-known psychological theories. These hypotheses are then tested in 3 different research studies to understand the impact of different rewards on customers’ likelihood to participate in the referral programs. The next section of this dissertation which is presented in chapter 5 uses the context of technological innovations, particularly Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (ARSGs). The purpose of this chapter is to understand the factors that would impact consumer’s decision to adopt a particular type of ARSGs: Microsoft HoloLens. The results of the studies in this dissertation have important theoretical and managerial implications in the areas of customer engagement in OBCs, Word-of-Mouth marketing, and consumer’s adoption of innovations