*Disclaimer: this post is intended to be an objective view on beahviour patterns in relation to subject v. object motivation... not a political commentary.
In light of all of the voting controversy going on, I have been privy to quite a few youtube videos, and other online articles. One in particular had me interested. Howard Stern [I am definitely not his biggest fan] discussed some research on his show. Someone [I'm not sure who] went out to Harlem to find evidence toward the hypothesis that black people would vote for Barack Obama just because he is black. Give it a listen...
So people who actually knew absolutely nothing about Barack's views, or choice of VP [his is Senator Joe Biden by the way], were adamant about voting for him because they agreed with "his" values. Aside from the obvious political implications, it piqued my interest in how people are motivated.
How is it that such a major decision could be made based on such little information? At the beginning of this project, it occurred to me that people may be objectively motivated, and important information and great detail may not work. People need something more simple to cling to. In my opinion, this small experiment definitely proved that theory. So if we can't reach people with the information, how do we bring them to a cause? The answer: connect with them on a basic level.
Once I've decided on the subjective focus of my project, the real challenge will be to connect people objectively to the cause. The people who want to know all of the information can get it and will find it. They will connect. But those hard to reach people are the ones who know very little, and won't try to know more... Just like the voters who don't know much about Barack Obama's stance, but feel they have connected with him and support him.
It does present another question though... how do we motivate AND educate people. In this case, the information these people apparently didn't know is rather easy to come by... so why didn't they know it? As a designer, we are responsible to the audience to motivate and educate... not just enlist lemmings to a cause.
