The theory of mirror: a unifying framework for persuasive interactive systems

Societal challenges such as energy or health trigger research in persuasive technology. This paper presents a state of the art in the field, and proposes TOM, the Theory Of Mirror, as a unifying framework for sustaining the development of persuasive interactive systems. TOM mirrors Norman's Theory of Action from the human to the system, thus modeling persuasion as an execution and evaluation process further refined into seven stages. This paper shows that TOM is valuable for structuring knowledge in the field. This unifying worth is exemplified on two systems from the state of the art.