Towards motivation-driven intelligent interfaces: formal argumentation meets activity theory

Abstract

Theories about human activity and motivation point out that motives are driving forces behind human activities and development of healthy and unhealthy habits. Activity theory is one of these that has been applied to develop activity-centered user interfaces. Activity theory differentiates between sense-making and stimuli-oriented types of motives that have a strong influence on our daily behavior. Two main challenges are explored in this paper: 1) the personalisation of graphical user interfaces to mediate representations of motivation-based activities to support behaviour change processes; and 2) the proactiveness of such visual representations.As methods, we use activity theory as a framework for defining the motivations’ dynamics, and formal argumentation theory as the underlying mechanism for interactive reasoning and decision-making in the process of generating the user interface.Our contributions are two-folded: 1) a dynamic graphical user interface where the background responds to behaviors linked to sense-making motives, and the foreground to stimuli motivation; and 2) a non-monotonic reasoning mechanism endowing the user interface with proactiveness (not only react to the user interactions but trigger and direct attention to potential conflicts), and a motive-based behavior conflict resolution process. Future work includes user studies to explore how triggering of focus may create increased awareness in an individual of conflicting motives in daily activities and how this may support changes of unhealthy habits.