Before this class, I thought behavior change was mostly about motivation and willpower. How do we get people to make good choices for themselves? I thought: if you want it badly enough, you’ll do it. If you don’t want it enough, you won’t. I found myself thinking about how I really wanted to make a change, but somehow it was still hard to actually do something about it. I’d fall into bad habits or lose motivation quickly. What intrigued me about this class is that I could learn the actual psychology behind why we form habits (especially the bad ones we have right now) and how we can work to build new better long-lasting consistent habits. I knew about gamification and streaks, but I hadn’t really thought about how or if they really do work. The idea that design could systematically nudge behavior, independent of willpower, was something that really interested me at the beginning and I’m so glad I learned in this class.
Unrot grew out of a problem we have seen emerging in ourselves and in the broader education community. AI is such an incredible tool for learning, but only if you want to learn. In this day and age, we are coming to understand what it really means to “want to learn.” Many of us say we “want to learn” our physics homework so that we become smarter and more skilled people, but what happens when you feel that way, but you use AI to do your homework? You’re interested in the content enough to take the class, and set time to fill out the problems, even read and understand what’s going on, but unknowingly you cheat yourself out of the actual learning which is actually doing the problems yourself without help. Homework grades surge while exam scores plummet. It’s not enough to want to learn anymore. Now that we have AI, if we truly genuinely want to learn, we have to do extra mental work to avoid cheating ourselves. We built Unrot to lessen the temptation to take the path of least resistance and default ask for answers on homework. I thought it was awesome to get the opportunity to work on a project that I could relate to and actually want to use in real life.
While learning about how to build this and how to influence behavior change, one of my favorite lessons was about variable reward schedules. I never realized how important it is that rewards are unpredictable for habits to be reinforced. It makes sense, the highs and lows of gambling, alcohol effects, sugar consumption. I also loved thinking about anchoring. Using an existing habit to form new ones. Still, I think my favorite part of the class was getting to draw so much. I really found drawing sketchnotes useful and I liked doing them well and getting good scores. The manga workshop was fun. I learned a lot in that class. It was cool to work on a different kind of problem solving than usual CS classes.
It was also cool to think about ethics and design. One interesting conflict our team ran into was how to make a pretty dry and blunt humor personality type for our brain character not be offensive or accidentally worsen people’s mental health. We really liked the moody brat aesthetic and tone, but the consequences of that kind of vibe could be negative. We decided to keep the cool branding we liked, but create a setting for adjusting to make the character nicer or even more cut throat depending on what kind of feedback works well for you.
I also really liked interacting and interviewing my friends and hearing about how they use AI and how they want to see their habits change. I had a lot of interesting conversations in interviews, on the record and off. It gave me insight to the project and to my own personal interactions with AI. In the comparative analysis I was also interested to see how many solutions are already being built for more sustainable AI interaction for education. It was nice to see that there are people trying to harness the power of AI for the incredible benefits but also adjusting the design so that it is less easy to offload crucial cognitive work for learning.
Ten years from now, I’m going to remember all of these techniques and psychological tricks for habit change because surely I will be working on letting bad habits go and building good ones for the rest of my life.
