Fresh from the Pan

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2011-08-04T16:38:00.005+01:00

'Fresh from the Pan' has now been incorporated as a Blog in our new Prospectory website. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

How far can I go?

2011-05-26T18:10:00.005+01:00

We are just getting our first experiences of novice users driving the b-bug (electric buggies) as part of the trial we are running this summer.

The first question everyone (inevitably) asks is "how far can I go?" and that is a remarkably difficult question to answer!

In the case of the b-bug, a marketing executive (if The Prospectory included such beings) would tell you "oh, 25 miles for sure". A pessimistic engineer (having summed up your weight, the likely terrain on your chosen run and your probable driving style) might say "15 to be safe". Because with a battery-powered vehicle, it does "all depend".... To be fair, it's not simply an electric car problem, if you always drove your petrol car with only 2L in the tank, it would be very hard for anyone to tell you exactly how much further you could drive.

For the b-bug trial, we have signed up about 20 b-bug charge points in pubs, cafes, tourist attractions, etc across the Brecon Beacons National Park. These places welcome a weary b-bug and will happily plug you in for a 1-2 hour top up which will extend your range by..... um well, that's hard to say because batteries (I'm learning) take on charge at different rates depending on how empty they are (bit like people really). So, we estimate and tell people 4 miles/hr of charging maybe.

Then the problem gets worse - someone has topped up their battery for a "short while" and is now trying to figure out "so how far can I go NOW". It's not too bad if they plan to return exactly the same way as they came but even that's not true if the out journey was mostly downhill but drivers, unlike walkers or cyclists don't necessarily notice such facts! It's a bit like sailing out to sea with a pleasant offshore breeze and then turning and remembering that beating back to windward is much harder work and will take you a lot longer.

So being data hounding Prospectors, we've installed a Cycle Analyst in both b-bugs. This clever device displays every number you can imagine both as you drive along AND at rest - voltage, kWh, Wh/mile, Ampere hours and miles. I didn't even know what an Ampere hour was but now it's my main guide for how much power I might have left for my journey - I know if I've used up 30 Ah, then it's time to turn for home because the batteries can only produce about 60 Ah. It's become part of my everyday travelling vocabulary as have volts as the b-bug and I climb up a long, steep hill.

But the array of numbers seems more likely to bewilder rather than clarify the energy situation for our poor triallists. They weren't expecting to need an 'A' level in physics to get themselves home from a day out in Hay on Wye. Our best shot so far, is an empirical approach. We give them a graph (based on the 30 or more b-bug trips of all kinds we have done) and encourage them to check what the Cycle Analyst says the rest voltage is and read off the miles that has typically taken us (but notice the fact that the points on the graph are somewhat scattered!)

So, the trial IS an adventure and driving the b-bug is great fun. We have to hope that the holidaymakers taking part discover, like us, the thrill of the "epic" 20 mile journey and that they also share some of the fascination of how much energy is actually involved in moving our bodies and vehicles up and down the hilly lanes of the Brecon Beacons. With modern cars, we have no clue.

So, b-bug travel has something for everyone - the countryside lover, the explorer, the engineer, the physicist, the environmentalist or even (like me) the cognitive psychologist.

If you'd like to stay a few days in the Brecon Beacons and take part in the trial, then check out the details here.

Taking the brain on a new route

2011-04-05T10:21:00.003+01:00

This summer we are running an experiment in the Brecon Beacons to encourage visitors to ‘do something different’. I borrow that phrase from Professor Ben Fletcher whose work has shown how simply 'doing something different’ can break ingrained habits and set up new thought pathways.

In our case, we hope to entice holidaymakers out of their cars to try travelling around the National Park in a funky, open-air, electric buggy or ‘b-bug’. Green activities are often worthy but rather dull but riding up and down the Welsh lanes in a b-bug with the wind in your hair is both exhilarating and fun.

Dragon Electric Vehicles has designed and built two b-bugs, Boris and Blodwen. They have a top speed of 30 mph and a range of 20-25 miles depending on the terrain and the weight they are carrying. Visitors will have a chance to pre-book a b-bug for 3-5 days with their holiday cottage or hotel room.

The b-bug experiment will explore some ‘green psychology’ questions….

Can we disrupt the car-centric mindset of the outdoor holidaymaker by giving them a fun experience using an alternative form of transport? Here in the National Park, we are fortunate that many of our visitors come here to walk, cycle or canoe, but our research shows they still average 14 miles by car each time they engage in one of those green activities.

Unfortunately, people think of walking and cycling purely as leisure activities and not as a car-alternative to get from a to b. Out of 400 visitor trips we recorded in the Brecon Beacons, only one involved cycling for a functional purpose (shopping) and 75% walkers and cyclists still hopped in the car to reach the local shops or pub only 1 mile away from where they were staying. Could using a b-bug break that automatic ‘hop in the car’ habit?

We are also interested in whether people could embrace the concept of a ‘not-car’ for short local journeys. Mainstream car manufacturers are seeking to develop electric cars which match the comfort, range and performance of a petrol or diesel car. Consequently, these cars are phenomenally expensive (as well as energy intensive) putting them well beyond the reach of the ordinary consumer.

The majority of journeys in Wales are less than 8 miles, could people be persuaded to do some proportion of these in a lightweight vehicle which was slower than a car, didn’t keep them dry but covered those local trips without physical effort and at a fraction of both price and energy consumption – 20 miles in a b-bug uses 3 kWh (roughly equivalent to 3 miles in a petrol car). We want to explore if people will happily make those kind of ‘not-car’ trade-offs.

Finally, driving any electric vehicle brings home the harsh realities of energy consumption. Powerful, modern cars hide the energy consumption involved in climbing hills, stopping and starting around town, driving fast and carrying passengers or heavy luggage. In contrast, driving an electric vehicle up a hill or calculating whether you have enough battery juice to get you back home changes the whole way you think about the energy involved every time you shift your body a couple of miles.

So, book a holiday cottage in the Brecon Beacons this summer and you can try a b-bug and return home with slightly different thought pathways!

The Future of Personal Travel

2011-02-10T11:32:00.003Z

The Welsh Assembly Government has launched an initiative to try to make personal travel more sustainable, essentially by encouraging us to use our cars less for local travel. Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones said:

“Personalised Travel Planning could become an important part of our transport system, challenging all of us to consider how we could benefit from alternative modes of travel other than the private car and contribute to greater accessibility, social inclusion and sustainability.”

The initiative is about finding ways to encourage more of us to walk, cycle, use public transport or share cars for local trips which tend to be no more than a few miles on average. Even here in rural Powys, the vast majority of our car journeys are under 8 miles and it is these short journeys on cold engines that offer the least efficient use of dwindling reserves of fossil fuel.

The sad fact is that most people regard walking and cycling as leisure activities. At other times, we have become used to moving around without physical effort, and short of having a personal chauffeur, the private car offers the most flexible solution in terms of source, destination, and timing, albeit an expensive and unsustainable one in terms of money and environment. The challenge for the government is to tempt us to take alternatives without coercion. They can do that by making sustainable alternatives more attractive, unsustainable alternatives less attractive, or a combination of the two.

The Welsh Government initiative will try to make sustainable local travel more attractive. It should give city-dwellers, those who have access to public transport, and those who live within a reasonable distance of most of their local destinations, a financially attractive alternative to the private car for local travel. But what’s likely to be offered will probably not be viewed by many as very attractive in other respects. If and when the fossil fuel does run out and/or we decide that burning more of it is going to be really hazardous, we will switch, reluctantly, to viable and more sustainable alternatives. But we may not see these as an improvement over what we have now.

The effortless alternatives to the private car are unattractive in three critical respects:

They tend not to start from where you are,
…they tend not to go to exactly where you want to go, and
…they don’t go (and come back) when you want to.

Since these requirements are likely to be unique to each traveller, it is tough for any shared transport system to deliver them. And to a very large extent, the widespread availability of private cars has created this situation as well as just benefiting from it. If we all had the good sense to live near a bus stop or railway station, and to work, shop, and entertain ourselves near a bus stop of railway station, we would only lose the convenience of travelling just when we wanted to. As it is, our private cars enable us to live miles away from anywhere we might take advantage of the economies of scale that a decent public transport system depends on.

So what’s to be done? If the car industry is to survive and prosper, it needs cars to offer a more sustainable solution to the local travel problem, while retaining as many of the benefits that today’s cars delivered. And that is where the electric car are supposed to help, but general purpose electric cars have a very difficult act to follow.

Electric cars are currently being set an almost impossible set of objectives which become more impossible year by year as conventional cars work on the apparent problem –delivering ever more efficient long range vehicles. To make a feeble first stab at replacing regular cars, electric cars are going to cost twice as much as conventional ones for less than half the “performance” as measured by car industry and the consumers it has educated. The only benefit of electric cars – if you ignore (as most consumers will) congestion charging, pollution, and noise – is that they are cheaper to run. And even then they are only cheaper to run than the most efficient conventional cars because of road and fuel tax they don’t pay. It is hard to see why a normal car customer would switch to buying a first generation electric car.

Everyone will wait for the day when improvements to battery technology and refuelling infrastructure enable electric cars to go as far and as fast as current ones, and to be refuelled in a couple of minutes. But although a few generations of electric car development will undoubtedly improve the performance, that day will never come – or certainly won’t come before the fossil fuel runs out. So although I have little doubt that in a hundred years or so (if we haven’t fried ourselves into extinction) we will be moving around in electrically powered vehicles, I am as positive as I can be that they won’t be moving long distances on battery power.

But having said all that, electric power can meet the local travel needs of most drivers today – the same problem that the Welsh Government is trying to address. For journeys up to about 30 miles round trip – 15 miles each way – it doesn’t make much difference how fast you go. And the battery power you need for a local bus speed trip of 15 miles can be replenished quickly enough for it not to inconvenience you. And the simplest electric vehicle that can deliver that in a reasonably weatherproof way can cost much less than a conventional car. It will satisfy most of your local travel needs as well as the auxiliary problem of transporting you to the nearest mass transit hub for longer journeys.

To start with, a vehicle like this will be a useful second car. You’d use it to go shopping, and to eat out. You’d be happy for your kids to use it, and happier to buy them one if you can afford it. Your “main” car would be used for longer trips, to carry more people, or more cargo. Over time, and for many people, a vehicle like this might become the only vehicle they buy for themselves, because it would fulfil all their local travel needs. They would be happy to rely on shared transport systems – either public bus, train or tram, or perhaps a shared car pool – for everything else.

And we’ll be able to experiment with this kind of “car” very soon. The Renault TWIZY, pictured above will launch in France in 2011, and the U.K. in 2012. It looks like fun, and although the price is rather vague at the moment, Renault intend it to be price competitive with a (high end) motor scooter. This could still be quite expensive, but less than a third of the true price of a “full feature” electric car and critically, competitive with entry level conventional cars. And if Renault find they have a winner here, it does not require any major break-throughs in battery technology let alone battery physics to drive that price down - industrial competition should be enough. The Twizy carries two people in “tandem” formation, so we won’t have to wait for a right hand drive version!

Now the Twizy is clearly not a car, so it hasn’t saddled itself with a specification that competes with today’s cars. There will no doubt be a sport version, but the standard model to be sold in France (where you don’t need a licence to drive it) should deliver a 40 to 60 mile round trip for two people at just less than 30mph. It will completely recharge itself in less than 3 hours, and because of the way batteries work, about half its capacity in less than an hour. That electricity will cost about a pound at today’s price.

If you can’t wait to try the Renault Twizy, you can sign up to try one of our b-bugs this summer in the Brecon Beacons. In exchange for your comments and assessment of the concept, you can have one for three days to see if something like this really could meet your local travel needs. The b-bug isn’t quite as weatherproof as the Twizy, but the ride should be more exhilarating!

Happiness in 2010

2010-12-21T16:54:00.003Z

I am doing some research into sources of happiness in 2010 - it could be things you bought for yourself or were given or things you did or experienced.

If you have 5 minutes, please help by completing this online survey

I will explain the purpose of the study and publish the headline findings on this blog in due course.

Psychological Dilemmas of Community Companies

2010-12-14T11:18:00.001Z

As well as a Prospector, I’m also a Director of Talybont-on-Usk Energy. We’re a community company with our own 36kW hydro electric turbine which has been running since 2006. We sell the electricity it generates via Good Energy and this provides us with an income of around £25k-£30k which we strive to spend on energy saving and sustainable living projects for the benefit of our small, rural community in the Brecon Beacons.

This has been my first experience of being involved with a community, rather than a commercial, company. It’s very rewarding and enormous fun. At the same time, it creates dilemmas and tensions which are intriguing from a psychological perspective. And these appear to be common in other community companies. For example:-

1. All the Talybont Energy Directors are volunteers - there is no financial remuneration for any of the work done. This is obviously different from my own company, The Prospectory, where we charge for the work we do. But, once my food and housing needs are covered, I find any surplus income is only motivating to me if I can translate it into something else which I value or enjoy. I am lucky, especially as most Prospectory projects are interesting and enjoyable activities in their own right. Similarly, “working” for Talybont Energy on innovative projects which we have dreamed up is both valuable and enjoyable in its own right. It would feel very odd to get paid for it and, once there was any financial remuneration, one might be forced to measure its value in a different way.

2. However, if any of the Talybont Energy Directors were paid or we employed someone in the community whom we paid, then the dynamic instantly changes. Similarly, we are often approached by academic researchers wishing to study us or wishing to do some community research for us. Again the dynamic becomes awkward. The academics are financially rewarded to study us doing work for which we are not paid or, in some cases, they are bidding to carry out research projects in our community which we currently do for free. Arguably, nothing changes for us (we weren’t being financially rewarded anyway) and yet something subtle but powerful certainly changes.

3. Employing people poses other problems too. Deploying our Talybont income on sustainable projects in the community requires ideas, money to fund the projects and energy and time to set them up and run them. At the moment, we have no shortage of ideas and the income to realise a reasonable proportion of them. What we lack is enough energy and time to run all the projects we’d like. One solution, which some communities adopt, is to use their income to employ someone full or part time to run the projects. But people cost money and suddenly a significant proportion of a £25,000/year income disappears as salary. So, you now have the manpower to enable you to do a lot more but, ironically much less money to do it with! What happens? Well, you find that you now need to use the person you have employed to attract more money (in the form of grants or consultancy) in order to still afford to do the projects you had in mind. But now the manhours (which you were paying for to run your projects) are being used up attracting more money to compensate for the project money which has been redeployed on a salary! Hmmmm…
It might sound funny but we have watched this play out in other community groups. They seem to end up in a cycle of employing more people and attracting more money but spending less and less on making actual projects happen!

4. So, Talybont Energy is now exploring an alternative route – offering some proportion of our income as community grants which anyone in the community can bid for to fund a sustainable project they wish to run (as volunteers). But we have to ensure that the projects are all for community (not individual household or business) benefit. And, that creates yet another dilemma – what does “community benefit” actually mean? Almost every project we can think of benefits one segment of the community rather than another. We wonder if this is why so many rundown village halls have been transformed by community companies into all singing all dancing eco centres offering every modern facility imaginable – it’s probably because, in many cases, they are the only asset which is 100% community owned!

Cycling and walking - the greenest of green holidays?

2010-11-19T10:10:00.008Z

Walking and cycling are highly popular pursuits here in the Brecon Beacons. Visitors flood here all year around with their boots and their bikes ready to head for the lanes and hills. How much greener could you get?

Well, unfortunately, it's not as green as it looks because the irony is that keen walkers and cyclists don't actually use their legs or pedals to replace car journeys. Here in the Brecon Beacons, walking and cycling are leisure activities not a means of transport. The rest of the time they use their cars to ferry themselves to the start of today's walk or bike ride (14 miles average round trip) or to visit the local shops or pubs 1 mile or less down the road. You can read more about the results of our recent research here.

We hope to run some experiments to see if we can change this pattern at all in ways which are fun....

b-bug project progress

2010-09-22T10:12:00.007+01:00

Our b-bug project, in partnership with Dragon Electric Vehicles, has been keeping the Prospectors busy all summer hence the lack of posting on this blog. We apologise.

The b-bug project, part-funded by the Welsh Assembly Government, involves us building two lightweight, electric buggies for a trial with visitors to the Brecon Beacons National Park next summer (2011). The idea is to offer an alternative to the car for short journeys that's funky and cool and is powered by 100% pure Welsh rain (thanks to electricity locally generated from our Talybont Energy micro hydro scheme).

This summer, we've been collecting data from holiday cottages and caravan sites within the National Park on the actual travel which visitors undertake whilst staying in the area. We will be analysing the data and writing our report in the next month. We've been surprised and slightly horrified by the amount of car travel which visitors do whilst staying here on holiday. It looks as if those staying in holiday cottages cover as many miles in a week here as they do in their return journey from home! (about 310 miles). In one case, a family from Germany visited Worcester, Bath and St David's from their holiday cottage near Brecon and then fitted in Bude and Torquay on their final day (600 miles in one day).

We've also been evolving the b-bug concept and value proposition by running demonstration sessions with the prototype b-bug at caravan sites and tourist attractions within the National Park. The b-bug logo and strapline (see above, designed by Jon Dixon, grew out of feedback from these sessions.

New B-Bug Project wins award

2010-06-09T14:12:00.006+01:00

The B-Bug project is born.

For a while, we have been toying with idea of a lightweight electrically powered vehicle for use for short journeys in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Electric car manufacturers are busy trying to match the performance and comfort of today's petrol cars and this is making the early electric cars very expensive. 64% of car journeys in Wales are under 5 miles (and these are the journeys with the highest fuel consumption). Such journeys do not require a high performance, high comfort car. Our experience with trialling a low-end Mega City Electric car this year is bearing that out.

Anyway, as of last week, we have been given the chance to test our electric buggy ideas for real.

In partnerships with Dragon Electric Vehicles, The Prospectory has just won the 'Green Dragons Den Sustainable Development Challenge’ which ran all week at the 2010 Hay Festival .

We will use the £10,000 award from the Welsh Assembly Government to develop two lightweight, open-air, electrically-powered buggies (B-Bugs) for a trial with visitors to the Brecon Beacons National Park in 2011. Dragon Electric Vehicles has recently built the first B-Bug prototype (see photo above) and we will be testing this out ourselves over the coming months.

The B-Bug project has its own blog here with videos of the B-Bug in action.

The project reflects our hedonistic rather than hair shirt approach to encouraging more sustainable behaviour patterns.

Experiential products make you happier

2010-05-21T15:37:00.006+01:00

The Prospectory’s main interest is in experiential products – especially eco-friendly ones.

We may be facing a world where we can no longer afford the rate of material consumption which has sustained our consumer economy to date so it’s good news that a growing body of research shows that experiential purchases make consumers happier for longer than material purchases. In fact, there is no evidence that increased levels of material consumption in recent decades have increased happiness levels at all.

Obviously, experiential purchases are not necessarily any more environmentally friendly but they have that potential as they don’t necessarily involve consuming materials or the energy required for constant construction, waste and recycling.
We’ve written before about how experiential products are more satisfying because they leave more room for individual creativity in expression and interpretation. They are also more social and they provide good stories to tell our friends and family so tend to grow in value with the repeated telling whilst their material equivalents decay in value from the moment of purchase onwards.

A recent research study suggests that experiential purchases provide much more satisfaction because they are less open to comparison with other non-purchased options. With material purchases, such comparisons are easy to make and there’s nearly always a better or cheaper option you could have chosen – if not now, then certainly in a few month’s time. These comparisons leave one less satisfied with the product you actually bought. With experiences (holidays, restaurant meals, a rugby game or a sailing trip), one tends not to be looking for “the best option” and one tends to evaluate one’s enjoyment without reference to comparable experiences one might have spent money on. This leaves the consumer much happier and this happiness, it seems, is sustained over time.

The fun of real world experiments

2010-04-26T10:14:00.000+01:00

Taking a bit of a breather between projects, I’ve been reflecting on how the very different research projects we engage in throw up a surprisingly similar array of experiences. It’s not that the experiences themselves are exactly the same – that would be dull – but they always feel very familiar.

For example, we’ve just finished setting up a 1 year trial – this time an experimental community car share scheme using zero carbon cars. It took the team 4 months to design the trial and get all the necessary pieces in place – electric charging points, a biodiesel tank, a community insurance policy, an online booking system and an electric car which could cope with hills.

Over the years, I’ve been involved in designing, setting up and running behavioural experiments and real world technology trials. Every time, I am surprised by how much time and effort you end up spending on the small infrastructural issues and the odd set of new skills you have to acquire on the way.

It all started in the 1980’s when I was doing my PhD. A colleague and I wanted to run some experiments recording people’s convergence eye movements. We knew that the critical factor was holding people’s head absolutely still during the experiment so we spent 4 months designing and building an eye recording set up from scratch. This involved acquiring and modifying an ancient leather dental chair (solid base and adjustable height), combined with a motorbike helmet sawn carefully in half and filled with sacs of polystyrene balls. Finally, we fashioned a set of fearsome bite bars by paying (I seem to recall) cash-strapped 1st year students a paltry sum to fill their mouths with putty!

One momentous day, the entire kit was ready for action. We proudly called in our PhD supervisor to try it out. We sat him in the dental chair, pumped him up to the right height, popped his head inside the motorbike helmet, screwed that tight to the back of the rigid seat and then invited him to bite firmly on the bite bar.

Unfortunately, at that precise moment, my colleague accidentally stepped on the dental chair foot pedal – the chair immediately plummeted leaving our PhD supervisor suspended only by his head and the bite bar and at a strong risk of hanging! We were never allowed to forget this incident.

But it’s the wonderful surprises of doing real world experiments and trials which gets you through these stages. How the triallists behave, what they like or don’t like and the creative uses they find for technical artefacts always produces surprises. You gain a new perspective along with fresh ideas and inspiration for the next round of product design. And, within days, you’ve forgotten all the trials and tribulations of the set up period and are wondering what the next, even more ambitious trial might be…..

Another Year in the Sun

2010-03-31T11:18:00.003+01:00

We’ve now had our Llanisolar solar panels for two complete calendar years, and this blog is a belated report on 2009. Our impression was that 2009 was a bit duller than 2008, and our panels agree. By their own estimate they managed to input a little over 1550kWh of heat compared with over 1700kWh in 2008.

But in other respects, the overall performance for the year was remarkably similar. My rather complicated calculations conclude that in 2009 the sun contributed 76% of my hot water heating compared with 78% the previous year. The month profiles look pretty similar, if you compare the figure above with last year’s blog.

As you can see, in 2009 February and July were a bit “out of line” compared with 2008, but otherwise the picture is satisfyingly similar when you average over a complete month. The day-to-day plot is, as before, more chaotic, and in 2009 our first oil-free day was on March 15th, beating 2008’s March 27th by 12 days. In 2010, that happy day was March 21st, which probably shows that length of day and height of sun above our hilly southern horizon are the critical factors. If we had our time over again, we would move to the northern side of the Usk valley, which is in sun for hours longer than we are in winter.

By contrast, the last oil-free day of 2009 was on October 18th, while 2009 closed down in this respect on October 12th. But even in the depths of winter, over a complete month the sun still provides about half the energy going into our hot tank. Some of this is because the cold water feed is colder – the oil boiler would have to work harder in the winter months to keep the hot tank at the same temperature. It still surprises us when, after a night when the roof temperature dropped to perhaps -10 Celsius, the solar panels can start heating the tank before the ice has completely melted from them.

The minimum recorded temperature on the roof panel sensor was -12.1 degrees Celsius, and the maximum a whopping 139.7 degrees. While the minimum (on January 6th at about 7:50) probably does match the air temperature at the time, the maximum (on June 2nd, at about 17:15), is definitely the temperature of the fluid in the panels after a day in the baking sun. We could probably have done some solar cookery on that day.

A "Do something different" Project

2010-02-15T14:56:00.006Z

If we simply start doing something differently, can it change the way we think and behave?

I've been interested for a while in Professor Ben Fletcher's "Do Something Different" (DSD) technique. He encourages people simply to do something differently each day as a way of breaking ingrained habits. It can involve simple (and unrelated things), e.g. eating something different for breakfast or driving a different way to work.

In Talybont-on-Usk, we've just launched a 1 year long community research project to see if "doing something different" in relation to our cars and how we travel around will change our attitudes to owning and using cars, their environmental impact and our ingrained habits in relation to them.

The project involves 11 volunteer households sharing access to two "zero carbon" cars - one 100% electric and one 100% biodiesel. The trial group has the challenge of attempting to replace 10% of their personal car miles by booking and using one or other of the zero carbon cars. It also allows us to experiment with the practical and social challenges of sharing vehicles within a rural comunnity.

The electric car also challenges one's perception of "normal" driving - it's fun and quirky but it will only travel at around 30mph (and even less when it encounters one of our many hills) and it will only go about 30 miles before it needs recharging. If it's cold (as it certainly has been) and you put the heater on to keep warm, then the car will go even less far! It's an interesting experience to drive along with your accelerator pedal flat on the floor but only be doing 30 mph!

It makes you very aware of the energy required to transport ourselves a few miles to the shops - especially in a hilly area.

At the start of the project, we carried out a detailed survey of the 11 households taking part - the current cars they have, how they use them, what aspects of owning a car are most important to them (e.g. identity, independence, storage space) and how they think about the environmental impact of driving them. We are running the same survey with a control group of households and then repeating it with both groups in a year's time to see whether participation in the "Do something different" car trial has had an effect on people's attitudes to owning their own cars,how they use them and the energy they demand.

Cognitive Dissonance and Climate Change Scepticism

2009-11-17T15:04:00.003Z

According to a poll conducted recently by The Times, 83% of people in the UK “accept.. that the Earth’s climate is changing and that global warming is taking place.” However, according to the same poll, only 41% agrees that this climate change is linked to human activity.

I find this disparity between the two percentages intriguing. I’m guessing (possibly wrongly) that the majority of the people surveyed are no better informed about the actual scientific evidence (for or against) in either case. So how does one explain that so many accept the scientific evidence of climate change but not the scientific evidence for the effects being largely man-made? It could simply be that the media give more coverage to scientists who dispute the link between climate change and human activity.

I think a more likely explanation is cognitive dissonance. When there is a contradiction or inconsistency between the way we behave and our underlying attitudes or beliefs, we tend to alter our attitudes (often unconsciously) to bring them in line with our behaviour, rather than vice versa.

To pick a particular example, if people’s environmental attitudes and their personal car use are at odds, then they are more likely to change their attitude to the environment than change their car use. A study showed that people who were environmentally aware and who were heavy car users actually showed a reduction in their environmental awareness when informed of the impact of their car use on the environment!

So, we can quite happily accept the fact of climate change without creating any dissonance with our own behaviour patterns as long as we reject the claim that climate change is caused by what we do. Once our beliefs about the environment are at odds with our behaviour (as they have to be if we accept that the climate change is linked to human activity), then cognitive dissonance theory predicts that people’s belief in that link will weaken to reduce the contradiction with their behaviour.

So, a more sophisticated piece of research by the Times might show that those whose personal behaviour is the least green will be those who are most sceptical about the link between human activity and climate change.

Unfortunately, the government’s reaction to this kind of poll is to work harder and spend more on “informing the public” about the link in the hopes that they can change the attitudes and thereby change the damaging behaviours. To quote Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary “we know that we still have a way to go in informing people about climate change and that is why we make no apologies about pushing forward with our new Act on CO2 campaign.” If cognitive dissonance holds true, then better information might simply heighten the internal inconsistency with everyday behaviour and result in strengthening, rather than weakening, people’s scepticism about the scientific evidence.

We are involved in a couple of small-scale research projects which are exploring a different approach. Can we find interesting or fun ways to attract people to behave slightly differently (irrespective of attitude) - in ways that are more environmentally responsible? If we can change (or at least disrupt) some habitual behaviours, then cognitive dissonance theory predicts that these people’s attitudes will come into line with, and ultimately strengthen, the new behaviours.

We are encouraged by the findings that some people, who are not environmentally aware, but happen to find themselves living in an eco house, change both their attitudes to the environment and their wider behaviours to bring them into line with the house they now occupy.

Will our approach work? I don’t know but it’s a lot more fun for all concerned than government information campaigns.

An Electric Experience

2009-11-11T16:21:00.006Z

Last Saturday I had my first chance to drive an electric car albeit only for a couple of miles along a country lane near our home in the Brecon Beacons. But it was an interesting experience. The car in question was a Mega City E (see top photo)supplied by John Lilly who has been developing electric cars and battery technology for many years just up the road (or should I say hill?) from here.

Not having a clutch or gears felt weird as did the total lack of engine noise. Had I even successfully started the motor? The car began moving when I pressed down the accelerator so I had to believe it had. We happily picked up speed to 40mph but again it felt weird the way the car slowed down when encountering the first hill – everything suddenly felt heavy – you become very conscious that hauling any large weight (a car plus two adults in this case) up even a slight incline takes significant energy –something one has long ago stopped noticing when driving a modern car unless you have an mpg gauge, then you certainly notice. Travelling back downhill, I was hoping to coast but the regenerative mechanism makes you too slow for that.

The Mega City itself feels cheap and tinny – it took me back to student car days – that didn’t bother me particularly for the kind of short runs at that this car would provide. However, it sits uncomfortably with the £12,000 price tag.

Manufacturers of these cars seem increasingly keen to make electric cars as much like a regular car as they can. This might be a mistake when, for a while, they will actually be much slower, more clunky and won’t go as far as people’s ordinary car.

From a psychological perspective, I wonder if the golf buggy evolution is a more promising starting point. If people think it’s a buggy, then their expectations are different, the designs are funky and they will perhaps be impressed if it can go as fast as 25mph and tackle a hill. They may even think it’s a quirky novelty that rain can come in the side!

How much online choice is good?

2009-07-22T16:26:00.004+01:00

A big attraction in selling products online is the possibility of being able to offer consumers a much wider choice of products than can be stocked and displayed at any one time in a high street shop.

The widely-held assumption is that the greater the range you can offer on your site (provided the options are well laid out and easy to search), the more likely that any individual consumer will be able to find a product to match their particular taste and therefore the more likely they are to purchase. In other words, it’s often assumed that the conversion rate will naturally increase in direct line with the number of products offered. This seems to be true in cases where consumers know the specific product they want. Certainly, Amazon and other online retailers are now demonstrating the economic advantages which accrue from accumulating small numbers of sales of multiple less popular products in the so-called ‘Long Tail’.

Our Prospectory research has mainly concentrated on ‘hedonic’ products, i.e. products bought primarily for the purpose of one’s pleasure (e.g. art, boats, holidays or gourmet food) rather than products bought out of a functional necessity (e.g. washing machines or computers).

With hedonic products, consumers often don’t know the exact product they are looking for and browse websites hoping to find something they might like enough to buy. In this case, more choice does not necessarily help.

Indeed, a number of recent psychological experiments have demonstrated that larger product selections (of effectively fairly similar hedonic products) actually reduce the probability of purchase.

In one study, a U.S. supermarket featured 2 special promotion displays of gourmet jam which customers could browse and taste. One display consisted of only 6 varieties of jam and one of 24. The larger array attracted 20% more customer interest but only 3% of visitors actually purchased a product. In contrast, the 6 jam display attracted less initial interest but 30% of customers (i.e. 10 times more) purchased from it! Those who purchased from the smaller range were also happier with the purchase they had made!

The Prospectory ran an online experiment where we showed 400 consumers arrays of artworks and asked them to indicate whether or not they could spot an artwork they liked enough to buy. A third of the consumers were shown an array of only 12 artworks, a third were shown an array of 24 and a third were shown an array of 48. Each consumer saw only 1 array but the contents of the arrays varied with each array reflecting as diverse a range as possible of the artworks sold by a particular online brand. The 12 and 24 arrays sampled all possible subsets of the 48 array.

The startling result was that the consumers who only saw 12 choices of artwork were as likely to find one they liked as the consumers who were presented with 48 choices. In fact, 5% more of those who only saw 12 found a product they liked – even though they were only seeing ¼ of the choices presented to the others.

Further analysis showed that the larger the choice set, the smaller the number of artworks that people were likely to look at (i.e. double click on).

We suggest that the results may have been due to a number of interrelated factors:-

1. Cognitive limitation - people are extremely limited in the amount of information they are able to consider when deciding between options. This is particularly true when the options vary along more than one dimension (because that obviously involves more information). If the task is ‘choosing the picture I like best’ then it maybe that people can only consider as few as 3 or 4 pictures at a time unless they are able to clump the choices in some meaningful way (e.g. colour or style) thus removing the need to consider individual pictures and changing the level of decision to one between categories. Any number of products which exceed people’s limits will act as noise and will disrupt, rather than aid, their decision making. One subject remarked, for example, on how she found the array of 48 artworks simply overwhelming because “I have to start by working out what to ignore”.

2. Variety as a shifting concept - when consumers walk into an art shop (or a restaurant) for the first time, it’s possible that the first decision they make is to identify the ‘style’ of art or cuisine on offer and whether that is to their taste. And as with any concept formation, they don’t do this by exhaustively considering each individual item in turn and deciding whether they like that and then summing up all the individual judgements. People are able to form such concepts fairly reliably on the basis of very few examples. In fact, a host of examples only makes the formation of the concept more difficult.
If consumers decide that the product range matches their taste, then they can probably relax to a certain extent about finding an item they’ll like enough to buy even if the number of variants on offer is fairly small. If they like the general style (or cuisine) then they don’t need a huge range of options to choose from.
If, on the other hand, consumers decide that the product range does not match their taste, then showing them 36 more variants within that style will not help them anyway! They want to see an entirely different style instead.

3. Satisficing versus maximising - Studies have shown that decision makers vary along a continuum from ‘satisficers’ to ‘maximisers’. Satisficers are happy to pick an option which they deem ‘good enough’ given their current situation and available resources. They don’t feel it necessary to consider all the available options and they tend not to look back on decisions they have made and worry about whether they got it right. In contrast, maximisers consider all the available options in order to ensure they select the optimal choice for their current situation and resources. Understandably, maximisers become very stressed as the number of options increases and they tend to review (usually unhappily) past decisions they have made in case they got it wrong. Unfortunately, we do not know the percentage of the population who fit either profile nor do we know which type dominates when buying hedonic products.

Certainly, in the case of an experiment (where little rides on the outcome), satisficing behaviour is likely to predominate and we believe that was happening in this case. If they liked the style of art on offer, consumers could easily choose a picture ‘good enough’ for the purpose even when the range was very small. So, for satisficers, small choice ranges are fine and, even for maximisers, very large ranges of options may simply stress them out.

So, online retailers of hedonic products should avoid the temptation to offer vast arrays of fairly similar options in order to attract more sales. This approach might actually work against them.

If consumers like your style, there may even be an optimum number of variations to offer them at any one time.

Electric Bike Trial Progress

2009-06-17T11:08:00.006+01:00

The Prospectors are currently running a trial for Talybont Energy of electric bikes in the Brecon Beacons National Park. The trial is jointly funded by Talybont Energy and the Sustainable Development Fund. The aim of the trial is to give locals the opportunity to try an electric bike for commuting to work or to the shops.

The trial began in April and the two electric bikes - a Monark Eco and an Ezee Sprint - have now been tried by 90 different people and travelled 1500 miles between them. 25 local people have tried them for a day commuting to work or to the shops.

580 of the miles travelled have replaced journeys which would otherwise have been taken by car – saving 168kg of carbon (roughly equivalent to the electricity used by 25 households in a day). Given that our trial bikes are part funded by the revenue generated from Talybont Energy's own 36kW Hydro crossflow turbine, these two electric bikes are arguably "water powered" or it's fun to think of them that way.

Each triallist has filled out a pre-trial survey which collects data on their previous cycling miles and experience and a post-trial survey collecting their impressions on using an electric bike. Nearly everyone loves the experience regardless of whether they are keen cyclists or not. The winning factor is being able to enjoy riding up hills without sweating. 10 of the 25 triallists say they are now considering buying an electric bike – in some cases as a replacement for a 2nd car.

Typical post-trial quotes include:-

“Fantastic for short journeys to work and shopping for groceries”
“It takes the rough edge off cycling. You don't groan at hills on the way home from work”
“I thought they were a fab bike to use considering the hills in Wales. It felt like you could ride the bike for hours and not feel completely knackered.”
“We hope to get rid of our 2nd car.”
“....the only time I’ve been able to overtake my partner going uphill”

The two different bikes continue to elicit rather different reactions from people. The majority (men and women) prefer the Ezee Sprint (which has a throttle) but the Monark (a Pedelec) definitely performs better on some of the very steep hills (1:5) around here. We are impressed by their range of at least 25 miles in our hilly terrain.

Anyone who lives in the Brecon/Crickhowell/Abergavenny area is welcome to contact us to take part in the trial.

Early Electric Bike Experiences

2009-03-24T17:44:00.006Z

We are running a trial of electric bikes for Talybont-on-Usk Energy here in the Brecon Beacons National Park from April to October this year. The two trial bikes, a Monark Eco and an eZee Sprint arrived here 2 weeks ago, courtesy of Onbike in Presteigne and we (the Prospectors) have now pedalled them (or should I say e-pedalled them) about 160 miles in preparation for the trial proper when local residents will be invited to borrow the bikes to try commuting to their workplace or shops and provide us with feedback on their experiences.

160 miles and several hills behind us, we still feel we are learning about the pros and cons of these two very different bikes. Their user models and riding experience vary hugely depending on the context.

The Monark only provides power when you are pedalling. The rider can select one of 3 power modes at any time but how much assistance you actually get is dependent on how fast you are pedalling. If you are pedalling really fast, the Monark “assumes” (to anthropomorphise for a moment) that you don’t need much help. So, rather strangely, if you feel the Monark is not helping you as much as you would like (on a steep hill say), the trick is to change up a gear or slow down and then you feel the delightful surge as the Monark kicks in with maximum power assist – the slope flattens before you – a magical sensation. Once you get used to the Monark, it feels very natural (we find) to settle for a default power mode (‘medium’ in our case) and then bowl along happily up and down the hilly lanes around here without getting out of breath or thinking at all about the controls. Occasionally, you hit a steeper hill and switch up to maximum power but, most of the time, you can simply forget it’s an e-bike and just enjoy those hill-flattening power surges when they come!

In contrast, the eZee Sprint has a throttle and the rider has to turn the throttle to determine how much power he wants at any point in time. When people first try the bikes, this seems to have instant appeal because the model is simple, they feel in control and they happily whizz up a short slope at a gravity defying speed. The response invariably is ‘wow!’

However, on longer and more challenging rides, we are finding that the eZee model is far from straightforward. For a start, it’s up to the rider to select how much throttle you want at any moment in time – there isn’t a default, ‘set and forget’ mode as seems to happen on the Monark. Also, the main perceived effect of turning the eZee throttle is a sudden increase in speed (regardless of the slope) whereas the effect of power assist on the Monark is a sudden reduction in effort. You only realise later that you are going faster than you normally would. The result is that you tend to speed along on the eZee faster than you need to and it’s difficult (on a 20 mile trip say) to pick a level of power which “feels right” and will make effective use of the battery life over the entire trip. Instead, you feel you are picking a speed which feels right and that somehow is more difficult to gauge. Instead of asking yourself, ‘how much assist do I need for comfortable trip?’, you find yourself asking ‘how fast can I afford to go?’ – two very different questions.

When it comes to hills and battery power, the Monark has a binary model – it gives you exactly the same level of power assist regardless of its current battery level right up to the moment when the battery runs out. When that happens, the power light goes off and no more power is available at all. Fortunately, we’ve found that our Monark will do another 6 or 7 miles of hilly terrain with the low power light flashing before it runs out of juice. During that period, the assist you get is just as good as with a fresh battery.

The eZee actually has a larger battery but it tends to exhaust itself sooner - partly because of the speed you are tempted to travel at as described above. More problematically, the eZee provides you with less power going up hills once the battery is half drained. We have now been caught out twice faced with a steep hill half way through a ride where the Monark happily chugs its way up it (albeit at a steady 5 mph and maximum assist) whilst the eZee will simply no longer provide the rider with enough power to move fast enough not to wobble. And boy those e-bikes (both of them) are heavy to push up a hill. So, with the eZee, you never quite know how much assistance it’s going to be able to give you if and when you encounter a steep hill during a ride and it’s hard to judge how fast to ride the bike to conserve the battery for such eventualities.

In the eZee’s favour, however, it will beat the Monark hands down if you have a short (hilly or flat) commute to work against the clock. On the eZee (if you know your ride is short), you can go for maximum throttle, pedal hard and whizz along at a 15 mph (or more downhill) without losing any pace on the uphill stretches. And, if you are feeling particularly lazy after a hard day at the office, it’s not even necessary to pedal!

These are still early impressions. In 6 months' time, when our Talybont e-Bike trial has run its course, we should have a large and varied numbers of riders who have experienced one or other e-bike for commuting to their workplace or shops. It will be interesting to see how reactions to the two bikes vary. We’ll be busily collecting detailed data, so watch this space.

Talybont e-Bike Trial

2009-03-02T11:08:00.002Z

Talybont Energy is running a trial of 2 electric assist (‘pedelec’) bicycles in the Green Valleys region – starting in April. We plan to loan the bikes to individuals, communities and employers in the Green Valleys area so people can try them as an alternative to commuting short distances by car – e.g. to work or the local shops.

Early analysis of the Green Valleys carbon audit data suggests that car transport accounts for 40% of our domestic energy consumption – i.e. about twice that of our electricity consumption. Living in our rural, hilly region with sparse public transport, most of us are heavily reliant on the car.

We are interested in exploring sustainable alternatives to short car journeys (i.e. 5 miles or less). In Wales, these account for 64% of all journeys and, unfortunately, have the highest (relative) fuel consumption. For those who commute less than 1 mile to work in Wales, 44% use the car and this rises to 77% for those who commute between 1 and 3 miles to work. Very few people cycle.

The proposed trial will explore whether electric ‘pedelec’ bicycles can change that at all. Pedelec bikes provide electric power assistance when you are pedalling, giving the rider the sensation of bionic legs. They effectively level out hills which reduces the human effort and extends where and how far people are willing to travel by bike.

The aim of the trial is to test whether electric bikes could replace a percentage of short car journeys in our rural and hilly environment and to explore the psychology of using such bikes compared to ordinary bikes or cars.

For example, a survey conducted by Leeds University found that the average user of an electric bike covered 1,200 miles per annum compared to only 120 miles for a traditional non-electric bike. The bikes replaced 3 car journeys a week on average – mostly commuting to work and shopping.

The market for electric bikes in the UK is growing fast. 15,000 were sold in 2008 and sales are forecasted to rise by 50% in 2009 to 23,000 bikes. So far, the penetration in Wales has been low but the first dedicated electric bike shop opened in Presteigne in March.

We are hoping to have an Open Day in Talybont-on-Usk in early April to launch the trial. On that day, a whole range of electric bikes will be available and all members of the Green Valleys communities will be very welcome to come along and try a bike and see if they would like to take part in the trial.

e-biking the Long Mynd

2009-02-03T15:25:00.005Z

How feasible are electric bikes in a hilly area?

Two weeks ago we hired some Kalkhoff Algattu electric bikes from Church Stretton. As it was our first time, we chickened out of tackling the Long Mynd – a 1 in 5 climb straight up from the west side of the town – and headed eastwards instead.

As Prospectors, we like theory and experiment – sometimes we get to combine the two. First of all, we worked out how much energy (in theory) it takes to propel yourself and your bike up the Long Mynd (a 900 foot climb up a 1 in 5 slope) (a) on a regular bike and (b) with full power assist on the Kalkhoff.

At 4mph on a regular bike our model said we’d need about 350w. Even as an experiment, I reckoned that would be beyond me. On a Kalkhoff Aggatu (with full power assist), the model predicted I would need only about 150w at 4mph. That is the same energy as is required to pedal the same bike at just under 20 mph on the level in still conditions. I thought I could do that, though whether I could keep it up for the whole climb remained to be seen.

So we returned to Church Stretton for a practical test. Our model said we ought to be able climb the Long Mynd at 4mph, but would our legs agree? We were also interested in how long the batteries would last if we tackled that kind of hill on full power. As it happened, the rental folks at Central Garage had forgotten to put the batteries on charge so we found ourselves setting off with the batteries already down to their last third and ominously flashing their indicator lights. That certainly focused our attention on battery drain! - we didn’t think we would get very far but were still interested to see how far, and what it would be like.

Fortunately, we were wrong! Firstly, we happily pedalled (at a fairly steady 4mph as it happens) all the way up the steepest hill I have ever attempted on a bicycle. The power assist meant that we never found ourselves going so slowly that we wobbled and although one of us stopped a couple of times to admire the view, it wasn’t strictly necessary and the power surge made it delightfully easy starting off again up the slope.

We reached the ridge in about 25 minutes – much more quickly than we could have walked it – and were amazed looking back down the valley to the town to see how high up we were.

Free-wheeling back down to Church Stretton was, however, alarming. I had not realised just how steep the hill actually was until then. But, back at the bottom, we still felt amazingly fresh and since the batteries (whilst still flashing) seemed to be holding out, we did another few miles to explore Cardingmill Valley below Long Mynd, to see what happened when the power finally ran out. But in the end, we had to deliver the bikes back to Central Garage with some power still left in the batteries. Amazing!

So, we are now fairly happy that these bikes can manage hilly terrain at least for a short duration and the novel experience of ‘cruising the hills’ (for a couple of ‘amateur’ cyclists who aren’t looking for a workout) is compelling. Even with a 27 gear mountain bike, we reckon you would have to be pretty fit to tackle the Long Mynd without getting off and walking. You need to travel at 3-4 mph just to keep your balance, and if you stop to get your breath back, you would have trouble restarting on the more extreme parts of the slope.

Bring on the Brecon Beacons…..

e-Biking – A surprisingly different experience

2009-01-23T15:55:00.003Z

The Prospectory specialises in researching experiential products and electric bikes fall right into that category.

At the moment, we’re interested in whether electric bikes might offer an attractive transport alternative to short car trips in this part of rural (and fairly hilly) Wales. Apparently, 64% of the UK population own (ordinary) bikes but only 2% use them. Certainly in our case, our bikes only come out in good weather for rides along the canal to buy our newspaper and the very occasional ride (4 miles) into Brecon to shop (on a warm, dry day). And once the weather warms up, they compete (in our case) with doing the same trips in our pedal boat instead! Pedalling on water is easier because it’s flat!

The question is - would a bike with electric assist reduce car use on short local journeys for us or others in our community?

In order to experience an electric bike for ourselves, we travelled to (a comparably hilly) Church Stretton to rent their Kalkhoff Agattu bikes on a rainy, cold, January afternoon. We were accompanied by a fellow Director of Talybont Energy who is a keen, experienced and fit cyclist (unlike us).

As soon as you step on the bike and press the pedal, it sets off with a surprising and rather pleasing ‘ooomph’. We liked that. But overall, the experience was surprisingly different from riding a regular bike.

Riding on the level, I liked it. It felt like having surprisingly fit and ever fresh legs – even after 12 miles. Riding up the hills worked fine too as long as one managed to get the right combination of gearing and pedal rate. The hills were effectively flattened out beneath your wheels – an odd feeling. Watching the speedometer, as I cycled up a hill, certainly enhanced the sense of lift. And it was great to look forward to the next hill rather than dread it.

On the downside, I (and my companions) struggled all afternoon with finding the right balance of gears and power settings at any moment in time. The bike had 7 gears and 3 different power settings (low, medium and high). When the combination was wrong, your legs either whizzed round and you felt unstable or you found yourself struggling up a hill with little apparent assist.

With experimentation, I found that the slower and more sedately I cycled the better and smoother the whole experience became. As soon as things didn’t feel quite right, I learned to change up a gear or simply slow down my pedalling. When going uphill and struggling, it felt odd to change up a gear but that seemed to work. This fits (we learned later) with the technical model of how the Kalkhoff Agattu Pedelec system works. As one technical review states “In practice it's just a matter of slowing the pedal speed when more assistance is wanted, either by going slower or by changing up a gear The fastest cadence (pedalling rotations) for the maximum assist at 9.4 mph in top gear is a very leisurely 39 per minute, or 1.5 seconds per rotation.”

So, the riding experience seems rather dependent on having the right (somewhat counter-intuitive) user model. To get the bike operating smoothly and efficiently all the time in hilly terrain would, I think, take some practice.

Interestingly, out of the 3 of us, the keen cyclist least enjoyed the Kalkhoff experience – in fact, he didn’t like it at all! This may be because he owns a quality bike and normally finds cycling up hills less effort than we do. Or it may be because of the different usage model which the Kalhoff requires. For example, he pedalled a lot faster than we did both up and down hills but I noticed that he didn’t go any faster as a result! It seemed like wasted energy and, ironically, his battery signalled it had used 1/3 of its power 4 or 5 miles before the other two bikes! So, he had both put more effort in himself and drained more of the battery as a result – again, that’s difficult to get your head around.

By the end of the afternoon, I decided that the best e-bike experience was to emulate Agatha Christie’s venerable Miss Marple pedalling in her stately, unhurried way regardless of terrain and thinking of other things (murders in her case). Keep to that pace, enjoy the countryside and time to think and everything works well.

But would we use e-bikes to replace more of our local car journeys? Unfortunately, it’s hard to say without actually experimenting in ordinary life although it’s encouraging that some satisfied Kalkhoff customers clearly do. I certainly felt comfortable cycling twice as far as I would on a ‘normal’ ride.

And it’s left us keen to have another go.

A YEAR IN THE SUN

2009-01-13T16:49:00.002Z

We've just had our first calendar year of solar thermal water heating, and courtesy of our instrumentation, I have the spreadsheets to prove it! Our system, installed in November 2007 by Llanisolar, has functioned flawlessly.

So does our system do what the manufacturers say it should? Yes, it does. In gross terms, the panels delivered just over 1700kWh to our hot water tank over the course of the year. But it would be an exaggeration to say that they replaced 1700kWh of oil input, and thus 200 litres of oil we would otherwise have burned. The net output, which is in any case difficult to calculate, is a fair bit less than that, and the discrepancy poses problems for anyone challenged to explain why solar thermal is cost-effective.

To see how the discrepancy arises between what the panels produce and the oil we don't burn as a result, take a look at the figures above for oil versus sun input.

The day-to-day figures are "chaotic" but averaged over each calendar month the graph shows the average kWh input per day into our hot water tank. We reckon we use about as much hot water each day, but from April to September we're:

a) heating the water more and
b) getting much more (in July, nearly all) of that heat from the Sun.

And that means that in summer our hot water is quite a bit hotter than it is in winter, which paradoxically means we use less of it since the use temperature is always lower than the tank temperature. Some of this is by choice, because we set the hot water thermostat for the oil boiler relatively low at about 55°C, while the solar panels, given enough sun, will heat our entire (200l) tank to their limit of 75°C.

Our hot water tank is well insulated and we use most of our hot water in the morning when we shower or wash clothes. Ideally, the sun replenishes that hot water during the day, but the boiler will come on at around 18:00 to bring the tank up to temperature if necessary. For much of the summer it isn't necessary, and the tank insulation is good enough for a clear sunny day to provide hot water for more than just the following day, particularly since there are only two of us.

Our daily consumption in January 2008 - when we had least help from the sun - can be taken as a measure of our actual hot water needs, and is around 3½ kWh. Our system is designed for a family of four, who might need 7kWh a day. Our solar panels could provide that extra 3½kWh for most of the summer - their maximum output in a day was 10½ kWh - but in winter we would probably burn (roughly) twice as much oil.

So you could argue that our solar panels - whose output is about the same no matter how many users there are - would replace twice as much oil if there were four of us as they do when there are only two. But it's probably more accurate to say that the panels are designed for 4 people - because if there were 6 of us, they wouldn't save three times as much oil as they do today.

One of the frustrations of a solar thermal system is that there is little you can do with any solar "surplus". We have longer showers, and time our hot laundry washes to coincide with thermal plenty, but there is really not much we can do with plenty of hot water in mid-summer. For the camp site opposite us, on the other hand, masses of hot water on a hot summer's day is exactly what you need.

Hedonic footprint of boats

2008-11-11T16:11:00.003Z

Sailing (in its purest form) is arguably one of the greener pursuits which people (well 2-3% of the UK population anyway) engage in. But what of the boats themselves?

We’ve recently been studying the consumer boat market on behalf of the Wooden Boatbuilders Trade Association. From an eco point of view, it’s striking that, whilst boat owners change their boats at frequent intervals (every 4 or 5 years), this is not to get a newer one but rather to get a larger, smaller or simply differently performing one. Nearly all the 5 yearly purchases are 2nd hand. Indeed, sailing boats appear to have a lifetime of 30 years or more with multiple owners enjoying the same boat during that period.

So, just speculating for a moment....if each owner enjoys, let’s say, 30 sailing days a year, then on average a single boat might deliver 800 days (10,000 hours) worth of pleasurable experience (perhaps some aspects more pleasurable than others!) during the boat’s lifetime.

Not bad as hedonic carbon footprints go – especially for the significant segment of sailing boats still made from wood.

Hedonic Footprints

2008-07-31T09:50:00.004+01:00

Our small research company, The Prospectory, studies the psychology of ‘experiential products’, i.e. where consumers are purchasing an experience rather than a function.
We’ve explored the psychology of ‘pure’ experiential products (e.g. live rugby, museum visits and education), as well as material products whose primary value is experiential, rather than material (e.g. contemporary art and boats).

In analysing the language consumers use when talking about their experiences, we have found that the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences involve 3 facets –

(i) stimulation (either of one’s physical senses or intellect),
(ii) self expression, and
(iii) social bonding.

Other research studies show that experiential products bring people more lasting happiness than material products. It’s argued that this is because:-

(i) Experiences are open to positive reinterpretation – the more you reflect on or talk about them, the better they get, whilst the value of material possessions tends to diminish over time.

(ii) Experiences are a more meaningful part of one’s identity than possessions. As Leaf van Boven says, ‘a person’s life is a sum of their experiences, not their possessions’.

(iii) Experiences contribute more to successful social relationships than possessions.

In view of our current environmental and economic problems, it would be a good thing if we could encourage consumers to satisfy their hedonic needs by purchasing experiential products rather than new material goods. The latter often have a high carbon footprint both to manufacture and deliver. Some (cars, motor boats, large screen TV’s) are also carbon-intensive to use and, for many, the pleasure they deliver is relatively short lived. In some cases, the product starts to decay from the moment of acquisition.

Can we switch the balance of demand to those hedonic goods whose production (and inherent value) involves zero-carbon factors like human ingenuity, individual (or group) creativity and skill rather than carbon-intensive materials manufacturing or processing? This would mean a shift away from mass produced goods to one-off creative products.

It would be fun to figure out a way of assessing the ‘hedonic footprint’ (if you will) of any consumer product – i.e. the degree of pleasure experienced (multiplied by the number of people experiencing the same product) divided by the carbon footprint involved in manufacturing or deploying that product. If it wasn’t for the travel and the thousands of burgers consumed, a rugby game or pop concert might do quite well.

Perception of similarity in art

2008-05-26T16:57:00.006+01:00

According to a recent study, when we encounter a new piece of art, we register its content first (within a startling 10 msec) and process its style within 50 msec.

Students who weren’t art experts were presented with pairs of paintings that differed in their content, their style or both. Content variations included trees, flowers, a house or a man. Different styles were represented by one of four artists: Cezanne, Chagall, Kirchner or Van Gogh.

The pairs of paintings were presented for either: 10msecs, 50msecs, 200msecs, or 3000msecs (3 seconds). Participants had to judge how similar the paintings in each pair were to each other.

After just 10 ms exposure, pairs of paintings were rated as more similar to each other if they had identical rather than different content, but style had no bearing at this brief viewing time. This suggests content but not style was already being processed after 10ms exposure.

Paintings which have the same content tend (not surprisingly) to share a similar visual structure and that might be the key to this early visual processing. However, in our own research some years ago, we found that when two paintings had the same ‘content’ (e.g. boats or flowers) but their visual structure was markedly different, then men (but interestingly not women) tended to judge them as dissimilar. (We had no time limits on exposure though).

Conversely, if two paintings had different content but happened to share similar visual structure (see example at top), men would perceive them as similar.
I don’t have access to the paintings used in the study but I wonder if similarity of visual structure was the key at the 10msec boundary, rather than people parsing the actual content.

(Incidentally, women were more likely to use colour and content as their basis for judging similarity and were more tolerant of differences in visual structure or style.)

The kWh - A Cognitive Challenge

2008-04-23T16:47:00.004+01:00

Simple, smart meters show you how much electricity you are using in your home right now.

We’ve just finished running a small-scale trial installing Efergy meters in 10 homes in Talybont-on-Usk. We wanted to explore the psychological effect of such feedback – how does it affect people’s understanding of electricity, their attitude towards it and their electricity consuming behaviour?

The effect was quite dramatic on people’s understanding and awareness of the electricity they were using doing every day things. Seeing the huge ‘spike’ in readings as they switched kettles, toasters and hairdryers on or off had the biggest effect on their thinking and stimulated conscious changes in the ways they used such devices.

9 out of the 10 households reduced their electricity consumption (by an average of 9%) compared to a pre-trial period (see above). A control group of 10 households increased their consumption by an average of 5% over the same time period.

However, we also found some shortcomings with the existing smart meters. People struggled to monitor their consumption over time – they had no idea what they were using before the trial so had no reference point. Their initial reaction to seeing the current (kW) reading was “1.3 - is that good or bad?”. We found they tended to react to the spikes in use (such as switching the kettle on) whilst sometimes failing to notice the bigger consumers which didn’t show a significant spike but were on for longer periods.

The Wattson meter glows red when your use is ‘high’ and blue when it’s ‘low’ (compared to ‘average’). This is certainly eye-catching and the ecogeeks love it but what does it tell the user? That depends over what time period the Wattson computes and compares its averages.

For example, a kettle will send the meter sky ‘high’ (and presumably turn bright red) but it’s only on for 2-3 minutes. The risk (as our trial showed) is that people focus on the dramatic jumps in consumption whilst missing identifying the appliances which create no dramatic spike or sudden colour change but use far more electricity over the hour or more they are on.

A kWh is a difficult concept for most people to get their heads around (including me). It reminds one of the old Punch cartoon of the lady stopped by police for exceeding the 40mph speed limit. “Nonsense officer”, she retorts, “I haven’t been out an hour!”.

You can find read the results of The Talybont Trial here.

Sunshine Showers

2008-03-31T10:04:00.003+01:00

It’s March (well, the end of…) but for 3 out of the past 4 days we have washed, showered and washed up the dishes in water heated purely by the sun. For the first time since we had our solar panels installed last November, we have achieved zero oil consumption for 3 whole days.

And the showers feel different. The experience becomes surprisingly exotic when you know that the hot water sluicing all over you has been heated purely by the sun – not even today’s sun (it’s still only 8am) but yesterday’s.

As a lifelong lover of sailing, it’s somewhat akin to the satisfaction of travelling from one harbour to another propelled by wind alone.

As a psychologist, I’m just glad that it “feels good”. If we are going to have to live this way more in the future, it’s reassuring to discover there are primitive emotional pleasures in being solar-connected.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (or ‘winter depression’) is thought to be caused by lack of sunlight – maybe we also suffer from lack of sun-heat? – a burst of the latter certainly feels like it triggers a serotonin release similar to the one thought to be triggered by sunlight.

Solar Performance in February

2008-02-25T11:33:00.006Z

Observing our solar panel monitoring software last Wednesday, Llanisolar chief, Chris Lord-Smith remarked on our accumulated solar input since he’d installed our panels last November. “Wow - you’ve reached 172 kWh already!”

He was pleased and we felt ridiculously proud of “our” achievement given the shortness of the winter days and the variability of weather here in the Brecon Beacons. We even proudly showed Chris that “we” had averaged 7kWh a day during the fine weather the previous week (see graph) and were now (in February) averaging 64% of our water heating with solar (see chart).

The odd thing, from a psychologist’s perspective, is that “we” have achieved nothing! The sun and the panels have done all the work – but it’s still interesting that we feel so personally involved. Obviously, the money we have so far recouped is minimal but the novel sense of almost druidic engagement with the sun’s behaviour has been rewarding and fun.

However, we’re not sure that we would be as engaged in “our” solar performance without our monitoring software. It’s the generation of live, moment by moment graphs which connect our daily energy use (showers, washing up, laundry, etc) down here and that of the sun (up there) so directly.

Somewhere along the line, our modern Western culture lost awareness of the direct connection with earth’s natural energy sources and our day to day behaviour. We are now being forced to rediscover that. The good news is that the reconnection is (or certainly can be) more interesting and fun that I’d thought.

Ten Minutes to Kick-off

2008-01-18T16:44:00.000Z

The Llanelli Scarlets have decided the time has come to leave their famous Stradey Park, where they’ve played their rugby for the past 135 years, and move to a brand new stadium currently being built the other side of town.

The time is right but, along with thousands of other Scarlets fans, we will sorely miss Stradey Park. It’s old, it’s scruffy but it has atmosphere and memories. You can hear the crowd singing the haunting ‘Sospan Fach’ on a cold, rainy Winter’s night as the mercurial Scarlets play exciting, running rugby and surprise a much-lauded English team.

So, we decided to commission a painting of Stradey Park (for our own enjoyment) and then to print a limited edition run of them to sell to other Scarlets romantics like ourselves.

After browsing the Oriel Pen y Fan Gallery in Brecon, we chose Nick Holly as our artist and approached him about the commission to which he happily agreed. Nick has become widely known in Wales for his Lowry like depiction of industrial street and dockland scenes around Swansea, his native city. Nick’s style is ‘naïve’ and colourfully captures evocative scene with local characters and a slightly nostalgic atmosphere.

‘Ten Minutes to Kick-off’ (see above) is the result. For our taste, Nick has done a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of Stradey Park (or any traditional Welsh rugby match for that matter) in the minutes before kick off when the anticipation is building and the supporters are trickling in, greeting friends, chatting about how the match will go and debating whether the coach has made the right selections. It’s a unique time - arguably, the best part of a match (especially if we end up losing).

Nick Holly’s picture breaks new ground in the category of ‘rugby art’ and it obviously won’t suit everyone’s taste. Most of this rather strange genre of “sports art” consists of realistic, photographic style, water colour depictions of an empty stadium, famous players or a moment in a famous rugby game. The limited editions are usually signed by the players as well as (or even instead of) the artist. Personally, they leave me cold. They accurately reproduce the place or the moment of play whilst somehow missing the emotional impact.

It’s interesting that, ‘Ten minutes to kick-off’ is the first ‘rugby artwork’ I’ve encountered which captures the rugby matchday experience from the supporter’s viewpoint. Mackenzie Thorpe (another naïve artist) has done this very effectively in recent years for football but L.S.Lowry (arguably the father of naïve art) was maybe the first to depict the supporters’ experience in his painting ‘Going to the Match’. But again, in Lowry’s case, it was soccer and it was (Northern)England.

To me, there are a number of tricks that Naïve art can pull off. In ‘Ten minutes to kick-off’, you can see far more of Stradey Park than would actually be physically possible from any single limited viewpoint. (Maybe that’s why prints of sports stadia tend to be taken from the air – a 'complete'viewpoint never experienced by any of us!) Secondly, your eye is drawn to the individual characters – you can guess their thoughts and almost overhear their conversations and, best of all, you recognise them (or it feels that way). Finally, there’s an intriguing ambiguity about the time depicted – is this 1958 or is it 2008? – and that’s powerful because Welsh rugby matches still have that intriguing timewarp. I hope, as the Scarlets move to a brand new stadium, we don’t lose that.

Meanwhile, paint on, Nick Holly.

Dirty plates? - or "matter out of place"

2008-01-15T17:38:00.000Z

Our attitude to food can be somewhat schizophrenic. According to one study, American consumers considered food as ‘clean and healthy’ when first put on the plate but as ‘gross and unhealthy’ when left on the plate at the end of the meal.

Are we that schizophrenic?

The answer, it seems, may be ‘yes’. The Prospectory ran an online experiment where we showed 566 people a selection of 26 photos of food at various points in its lifecycle and asked them to rate their reactions to each image on a scale from ‘attractive’, through ‘neutral’, to ‘repugnant’.

We included 4 photos of food served and ready to eat on a plate and 4 photos of food left on the plate at the end of a meal. An example pair of such photos is shown at the top of this blog. In the case of the ready-to-eat meal, 84% of people rated it as “attractive”. When it came to the leftovers from such a meal, however, 51% of people rated them as “repugnant” – even though they were clearly still edible. Obviously, we had not imagined that people would find the leftovers attractive but assumed that they would mostly be at least neutral towards them.

It seems we call them “dirty plates” for a reason. The anthropologist, Mary Douglas argued, in her book, ‘Purity and Danger’, that ‘dirt’ is not an absolute. The concepts of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ are culturally determined and can change over time. Obviously, we call some things ‘dirty’ because they are a genuine threat to our health or well being but many are not a threat, including leftover food on the plate. Douglas contends that dirt is not necessarily a category of material polluted by germs or microbes, but is simply “matter out of place”. In other words, ‘dirt’ is the by-product of how we happen to order and classify matter, in this case, food.

With reference to our study, food is clean and healthy, ‘good’ (if you will) when arranged on a plate in the form of “a meal” but once it’s left on the side of the plate or (worse) dropped on the table cloth, it immediately becomes ‘dirty’.

But, if the food leftovers are converted (albeit over time) into dry, crumbly, rich and odour-free compost, do they stop being considered ‘dirty’ and ‘repugnant’? Unfortunately, our experiment suggested not. Images of compost, ready to spread on the garden, were considered ‘repugnant’ by even more people (80%). Maybe, if we had shown the compost images in the context of the outdoors and gardening, then (in Douglas’ terms) the compost would have become matter “in place” and would therefore not have been considered as dirty or repugnant. We might test that next.

Why does any of this matter? Well, to cut the UK’s 6.7 million ton waste food problem, we need people to start viewing food waste differently. From nature’s point of view, there is no such thing as ‘waste’ (or ‘dirt’ for that matter); there are only nutrients at different points in their natural cycle. So, could we alter the cultural perception of food matter so that leftovers are (rightly) perceived as part of the natural, regenerative cycle (or ‘order’) of organic matter (like fallen leaves in autumn) and therefore no longer perceived as ‘dirty’ and ‘repugnant’?

Or maybe, like our grandmother’s generation, we simply need to learn to transform today's leftovers into tomorrow night's supper!

Power Shower Kilowatt Hour

2007-12-03T13:52:00.000Z

Everyone knows that showers are “better” than baths because baths use more water, and also require more energy to heat. But that’s not true of “power” showers – the ones that pump the hot water from your tank to give you a high pressure shower. These can easily use 10 litres of water a minute, so a 5 minute shower can use just as much water as a small bath.

So if you have a power shower, and you want to lessen your environmental impact, you should reduce the flow rate, the temperature, and the length of your shower. You might even consider adopting the U.S. Navy procedure for showering (ships and submarines have limited fresh water) by turning the shower on just to wet yourself all over and to rinse yourself off afterwards. In between you lather (and shave) with the shower off. In North America, you can buy domestic systems which transfer waste water heat to the incoming fresh water supply, and there are now shower designs which will recycle the shower water by cleaning and filtering it, while retaining much of the heat.

But how much difference is this going to make? Since we moved into a house with a hot water tank, we have power showers. Before that, we had a “combi” boiler which heats the incoming cold water supply in real time and provides a shower at full water mains pressure. It needed a 30KW boiler to do this, which tells you a bit about the heat energy required. An electrically heated shower, by contrast, uses only 8 to 10KW, but the flow rate is much lower than full mains pressure could deliver.

Before our new interest in energy, I thought a power shower was better for the environment than an electrically heated one, because the cost of heating the water with a boiler would be less than the cost of doing so electrically. And to an extent I was right, but only because electricity is currently largely generated from fossil fuels such as coal and gas, which incur significant losses due to the efficiency of the generation and transmission process. Today, if you’re going to use fossil fuel to generate heat, it is better to do it directly, at home, than indirectly via the electricity grid. But as more of our electricity comes from non-fossil sources, this balance may change. In the mean time, the more of our hot water heating we can do without burning fossil fuel, the better.

So it is no coincidence that our interest in all this coincides with the installation of our solar panels. And not just the solar panels, but the control system that came with them, with which we can monitor and log the temperature of the top and bottom of our hot water tank, and the temperature of the fluid in our solar panels. We can now see very directly the effect on our hot water store of having a shower, laundry or even washing up. By transferring the figures to a spreadsheet, we can roughly calculate the energy we now require to heat our water, and how much of that energy is used by power showering.

Our tank holds about 200 litres of water, and our boiler is set to heat the middle of the tank to about 45°C between 6pm and 8pm. This is the regime we have adopted to take maximum advantage of any solar input we might achieve – a little hopeful in early Winter, but there you go. The mean temperature of the tank – the average of the top and bottom temperatures – is thus about 42°C at the start of the night and has dropped to about 40°C by break of day. When we both have a shower, we see a further spectacular drop in mean temperature to about 30°C. So two power showers drops the mean temperature of our hot water tank by about 10°C. How much energy is that?

Using the most advanced physics available, we can calculate the energy required to raise a 200 litre tank by 10°C. As everybody knows, you need 1 calorie to raise 1cc of water by 1°C. So 1000 calories will raise a litre by 1°C and 10,000 calories by 10°C. We thus lose about 2,000,000 calories of heat when we both power shower – or 1 million calories each. (These are actual calories as distinct from dietary calories which are really kilo-calories). A million calories translates to about 1.16 KWh.

Just as an accuracy check, 1.16KWh is about 3 minutes’ burn time from a 20KW boiler, and we do indeed shower for about 3 minutes. Since until the sun returns we reheat our water with an 85% efficient oil boiler, this uses 0.136 litres of oil per shower, costing us about 5.75p at today’s terrifying prices. We aren’t on a water meter, although this man is, and he pays £1.75 for every 1,000 litres, so if our water was metered at the same rate that would be another 5.25p, or a grand total of 11p for each shower – assuming the cost of the pump electricity is marginal.

A 3 minute shower using a 10KW electrical heater uses .5KWh. Power shower aficionados might argue that a shower takes longer at the meagre flow rate of an electrically heated shower, but I very much doubt that the duration of a shower is determined by the total quantity of water used. We adapt our behaviour, and our appreciation of the experience, to what we are offered, and in my own experience an electrically heated shower is a functional and efficient process rather than a sensory experience. Our electricity supplier charges 11p a KWh, so the energy costs of an electrically heated shower would be slightly lower in our case. If our water supply were metered, the total cost would be significantly lower because we’d use less water.

The challenge for us, therefore, is to adapt our power showering behaviour to retain as much of the sensory experience as we can while reducing our energy costs – especially those derived from fossil fuel usage. And in this respect, (at least in our case) the power shower might not turn out to be the environmental villain it first appears. We do need to cut back on shower usage in the darker and colder periods of the year when we are dependent on fossil fuel but we can relax during the sweltering hot summers we are promised, when our showers will be heated by yesterday’s sun.

The Power of Psychology or the Power of the Sun

2007-11-30T14:06:00.000Z

Last week I wrote about the startling effect which the feedback from our Efergy smart meter has had on our electricity consumption. When we installed our solar water heating panels 3 weeks ago (yes in November!), little did I realise that the same might be true.

Llanisolar (the excellent Welsh company who installed our panels) told us about a software package which allows you to download the sensor log data directly to your PC. Being the dedicated data hounds we are, we couldn’t resist this and signed up for the Winsol package. We can now collect temperature data from 3 sensors (top of the tank, bottom of the tank and solar panels on the roof).

Unfortunately, our first week with the solar panels coincided with an almost total eclipse of the sun. However, we still derived hours of fun and fascination by studying the sensor graphs during the course of the day. When the sun eventually broke through the Brecon Beacons’ rain clouds, excitement was unbounded and avid graph-watching became the major occupation of The Prospectory for the rest of the day as we watched the panels “pull up” the bottom tank temperature (see 2nd graph). You can even spot the moment the sun disappears over the hill behind us.

Forget the sun though, the 1st graph shows the huge hit which our morning showers and breakfast washing up have on the system. Ouch! As cold water flows into the bottom of the tank, replenishing the hot we’ve deployed, the temperature plummets alarmingly. Seeing that blue line drop brings home to you the energy which you’ve just consumed and the fact that that it all now has to be recovered.

The good news is that, on sunny days (even in November), we’re finding our solar panels do this recovery work for us (see 2nd graph again) which is enormously rewarding but, on rainy days, no such luck and we can see the hit at 6pm when the oil-fired boiler comes into action hiking the temperature back up to its morning start point.

Just as with the Efergy meter, the visual feedback alone has had an unexpected impact. Haunted by the tumbling blue line (1st graph), we’ve turned our shower temperature down a degree or two and cut the length of time we spend in there. We now wash our hands in cold water only and prepare the washing up dishes in the same way. Just to show how obsessive a couple of graph-driven junkies can get, we've even tried heating the washing up water in a large pan on the top of the wood burning stove. The latter works a treat but is not a practice I sense will last and certainly not on sunny days!

So, after 3 weeks, our spreadsheets tell us that the solar panels have generated 1/3 of our water heating input (which is impressive given the poor weather and the short days). However, there is the intriguing possibility that we’ve saved more money so far as a result of graph-induced behaviour than from the solar panels themselves….psychology is a wonderful thing....

The ups and downs of rugby success

2007-11-27T17:47:00.000Z

Apparently some people view their abilities as fairly fixed whilst others view their abilities as changeable. Why is this interesting? Well, because new research suggests that the way you view your abilities may affect how you respond to sudden, unexpected, success.

Experimental evidence suggests that people who think their abilities are fairly fixed can become anxious and disoriented when faced with dramatic success and their performance often plummets as a result. In contrast, those who view their abilities as changeable cope with sudden success much better and continue to perform well.

The reported experiment involved a test of intellectual ability but it makes one wonder whether the same phenomenon might be true for rugby players.

Here in Wales, we suddenly pick on and elevate a regular club player to the dizzy heights of international rugby on the back of a few good performances. In some cases, they play brilliantly for Wales for a few games (enhancing their god-like reputation in the media and support base faster than you would believe) but then their performance plummets. It doesn’t happen to all players and this recent research leaves one wondering whether it might depend on whether they view their rugby talent as relatively fixed or as fairly changeable. It would be an interesting test to run.

The Startling Effect of Feedback

2007-11-23T14:49:00.000Z

Two months ago, we bought an Efergy smart meter to monitor our electricity use and to check out how useful these new smart meters actually are.

The Efergy meter (see picture) is a small, portable device which tells you (every 6 seconds) how much electricity you are using right now. So, if you turn the kettle, the toaster or the TV on, you know immediately what the hit is. You can opt to get the readings as instant or accumulated kW, in £’s or as estimated carbon emissions. The device also has a memory so you can see what your usage has been over the past week or month. We have been (slightly tediously) copying our daily rates into a spreadsheet so we can do some analysis over time.

From a psychology point of view, we were keen to know whether such instant feedback would actually work. The answer (at least in our case) is a resounding ‘yes’. In fact, we feel slightly embarrassed by the dramatic effect this little meter has had on our lives. According to a recent report, the norm is for savings to range from 5-15%. Here at The Prospectory, in the past two months, we have consumed 30% less electricity per day than we did in the same period (October/November) last year and 20% less per day than we did over the summer! The accepted wisdom seems to be that such reductions will persist if they are down to new habits forming which last for a period of 3 months. We have yet to see whether that will be true in our case….

On the first evening we had the device, we were horrified by the kW readings for our kitchen spotlights – we opted to eat by candlelight rather than have to watch the accusing numbers on the Efergy display. We’ve been eating by candlelight ever since which has saved a bunch of kW and is a lot more relaxing although I fear our wine consumption has gone up as a result……

Aside from the candlelit dinners, we’ve been struggling to work out what exactly we’ve done which has reduced our daily consumption by such a significant amount. It looks as if it’s simply the cumulative effect of increased sensitivity/vigilance to all the small things which the eco guys bang on about, e.g. switching lights off (when we leave the room), switching PC’s off (when we are not actually working) and only filling the kettle with the water we need.

Keeping a spreadsheet also makes one eager to beat the previous day’s levels and to record “all time lows”. Inevitably though, the all time lows correlate with us going out all day which means we’re busy consuming diesel instead!

How well do we read others?

2007-10-30T11:43:00.000Z

With one or two puzzling (and even alarming) exceptions, I guess I have always felt reasonably confident in interpreting other people’s emotional states and their attitudes towards me. But, my confidence is growing increasingly shaky in the light of the number of recent studies which demonstrate that our judgements are mainly influenced by our own emotional states or attitudes at the time.

Firstly, there’s a study suggesting that the fact that we mimic someone else’s facial expressions as we talk to them might actually be necessary in helping us interpret what they are feeling. In the study, subjects were asked to hold a pen between their clenched teeth. This makes it difficult for them to use the facial muscles they would need to express emotions. The interesting thing is that holding the pen significantly impaired their ability to correctly identify happiness and disgust in a series of faces they were shown. Holding the pen only lightly in their teeth (and thus allowing some facial movement) did not have the same impairing effect.

Then there was a study showing that the extent to which people rated faces as ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ was affected by whether they had first listened to sad or happy, mood-inducing music. The results look rather tenuous but the indications are that if you are in sad or depressed state of mind, you are more likely to read others’ expressions as sad or depressed. And the happier your state of mind is, the more likely you are to see others as happy.

Maybe the poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s famous line, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone” is only half true?

Finally, the most remarkable study explored how responsive people felt their partners were towards them. Responsiveness, in this case, meant “anything a person does that promotes the partner’s welfare, such as helping with tasks, providing comfort and information, encouraging a person to strive toward goals, including a partner in desirable joint activities, and providing symbolic support, such as words of affection, hugs, and sending greeting cards”. It transpired that people’s assessment was more affected by how often they practised any of these behaviours towards their partners than how often the partners practised them!

The authors dubbed this a “projection of responsiveness,” i.e. you see your partner as behaving in the same manner towards you as you behave towards them, regardless of their true behaviour.

So, the next time you’re feeling low, you shouldn’t be surprised if everyone you meet looks somewhat gloomy too. And, if you feel your partner could be more responsive in caring for and helping you, the trick is to start doing some more for them!

Measuring the Yuk factor

2007-09-25T11:47:00.000+01:00

The ‘yuk’ factor of used or decaying food is a big barrier to people’s willingness to manage simple organic recycling within their own households. The more repugnant we find our food remains, the more likely we are to wish to dispose of them as fast as possible and with minimal interaction. Hence the practice of dumping food remains into plastic bags or bins (out of sight and reduced smell) and expecting someone else to remove it from our premises as soon as possible and to ensure it decays (however unpleasantly and ineffectively) somewhere well away from where we live or ever have to encounter it again.

But, if the UK is to reduce the 6.7 million tonnes of food waste that is going into landfill each year, then this needs to change. At minimum, householders are now being asked to separate food remains from their other, non-organic, rubbish for collection by the council. Preferably, though consumers need to manage food’s natural, organic transformation back into an environmentally beneficial form – compost.

As part of exploring the barriers to such changes in consumer behaviour, The Prospectory is running an online experiment to gauge the reactions of different consumers to food in its various states, e.g. fresh and raw, cooked and ready to eat, left over on the plate, in a compost bin, wrapped in plastic, decomposing and fully composted.

We are interested to discover at what point people’s ‘yuk’ factor kicks in, how strong it is and how reactions vary depending on the food involved and whether the respondents are active gardeners and/or cook their own meals from raw ingredients.

If you would like to take part in the online experiment (it only takes 3 minutes), click here.

The results of the study will be available to interested parties.

Consumer Psychology of the Unconsumed

2007-08-10T14:26:00.000+01:00

Recent research suggests that around 6.7 million tonnes of household food waste is produced each year in the UK, about half of which could have been eaten. Most of this waste ends up in landfill where it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas and a significant contributor to climate change.

As Prospectors, we are interested in experimenting with alternative ways of disposing of our food waste and the ‘consumer’ psychology associated with doing that. Our first experiment was with a Green Cone in the garden. Digging a hole deep enough to install this was hard work but dumping all our food waste in it (chicken carcasses the lot) went like a dream for the first year. And, as a side effect, we really appreciated the novelty of a clean, dry and almost empty rubbish bag because absolutely no food waste was going into it.

Unfortunately, after about a year, the food in the green cone turned grey and sludgy. It began to smell horrible and no longer rotted away. We contacted Green Cone who explained that the process must have “gone anaerobic” (maybe due to poor drainage?) and we would have to dig it out and start again. 15 months on and we still haven’t had the stomach to tackle this job – the food in there is still smelling and, amazingly, almost recognisable in some cases. Needless to say, that rather put us off the Green Cone Method although we may try again at some point in the future.

We are now experimenting with a Bokashi bin which you keep in the kitchen and which will also take all organic food waste (although a chicken carcase might be simply too large). Bokashi is an anaerobic process so we thought we might do better! Once a day, you add your food waste to the bin and sprinkle it with a handful of the Bokashi bran containing EM bacteria which cause the waste to ferment thereby neutralising any nasty smells. After the material has fermented for a few weeks, it can be added to one’s regular compost.

The experiment is also allowing us to introspect on the user psychology of such a process. For example, why does one switch from feeling positive towards the food on one’s plate to negative about it the moment one scrapes it off? As a non-gardener, how does one develop an enthusiastic attitude to converting messy smelly waste back into good organic stuff? How good a model does one need of the biochemistry involved to operate these methods successfully and know what to do when they are not working? What kind of feedback or benefits motivate the extra daily effort involved?

We are interested because, if this process works for us, we plan to run a small-scale Bokashi trial which would be specifically designed to explore these psychological issues in some depth. For example, how would you motivate people to take part in the trial? What would the main motivators and barriers to participation be – especially when people are not dedicated gardeners? And how does intimately processing your own organic waste change your attitude towards it? Does it become less repulsive as you become involved in its conversion to ‘good stuff’?

Some councils have already run large scale Bokashi trials but none of these seem to have studied people’s reactions, their changing views and behaviour and the reasons why it works or doesn’t for people in different circumstances or with different outlooks.

Our own personal Bokashi experiment has been running for 3 weeks now, I can’t say that I am finding our food waste more attractive as a result but I’m certainly finding it much more interesting and so are our friends and family when they come round for meals. Maybe interest is the first step….

I also wonder what effect it would have if Bokashi deployed more attractive containers. In the UK, we tend to disguise waste disposal and composting using camouflaged containers and hiding them away behind bushes or fences. Our containers are, at best, functional in appearance. In contrast, an Indian start up in Bangalore is marketing a beautiful range of colourfully decorated ceramic pots for composting. There is no way you would hide these works of art behind bushes, you'd be keen to display them and maybe that is a powerful way to get us to think differently about our waste.

Men and Women Talking about Technology

2007-07-18T12:08:00.000+01:00

New Scientist reports a study demonstrating that, contrary to popular belief, men actually talk the same amount as women. A study by Matthias Mehl at the University of Arizona attached an “electronically activated recorder” to 210 women and 186 men for a period of 10 days. Although there was a huge degree of individual variation in loquacity (from 500 words to 47,000 amongst the men), the daily averages for men (15,669) and women (16,215) were not significantly different.

This reminded me of a study I conducted whilst working in HP Laboratories some years ago. At that time, there was a common perception in the IT industry that men were much more interested in technology than women and had, therefore, much more to say about it.

We happened (for some other purpose) to be running 8 discussion groups (4 male and 4 female) talking about the digital devices people personally owned or had in their homes. We analysed the discussions from all 8 groups (90 participants) and categorised every comment made. We found that, contrary to expectation, the men and women talked about the technology in pretty much equal measure. But there was one big gender difference. The men talked almost exclusively about the technical artefacts themselves (e.g. the model numbers and the devices’ capabilities, functions and features). We struggled to get them to tell us what they actually used the devices for at all! In contrast, the women talked enthusiastically and at length about all the different uses they had found for the devices and how their lives had been enriched by them. In their case, we struggled to get them to describe what devices they actually owned and many said they couldn’t recall the name or model numbers of the devices in question.

You can read a bit more about the study here.

Maybe Matthias Mehl’s next study could compare the different topics of conversation which use up the men and women’s 16,000 words a day…..

The difficulty of gauging the majority opinion

2007-05-21T15:16:00.000+01:00

When I conduct consumer interviews or discussion groups, I always record all the conversations, then transcribe them and enter the transcriptions into a spreadsheet tool. This is a lengthy process but, amongst other things, it enables me to count the exact number of times a particular opinion is voiced, by how many different people and whether these people have anything else in common, e.g. their gender or maybe some other behavioural trait.

It is sobering how often the results of such quantitative analysis are startling different from the impression I developed of the majority held opinion at the time of conducting the interviews or running the group. Revisiting the original transcripts makes me realise that my impression at the time was actually heavily influenced by 1 (or 2) particularly vociferous individuals who kept chipping in with the same view – albeit expressed in different ways.

So, I was not surprised to read of a recent study published in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study showed that hearing one person express the same opinion numerous times has almost as much effect on a listener's perception of the most popular opinion as hearing multiple people state the same opinion.

If, on the other hand, you happen to be the individual with the opinion and wishing to influence political or managerial action, then the trick, by the sound of it, is to keep talking!

Social conformity of Tastes & Distastes

2007-05-10T12:21:00.000+01:00

We’ve just completed an online experiment where we were looking for commonality in the contemporary art which people either like or dislike. 300 Consumers were shown 120 different art pictures and asked to say whether they liked a picture, disliked it or were neutral/didn’t know.

All 120 pictures were liked or disliked by somebody.

Amongst a number of interesting findings, we found that there was a significantly higher level of agreement in which pictures people liked than in those they disliked. 25 of the pictures were liked by more than half of the population whereas only 5 of the pictures were disliked by that many people.

In trendy ‘Long Tail’ terms, the dislikes had a much smaller head and a much longer tail than the likes.

This suggests that people’s tastes might exhibit more social conformity than their distastes. We are now intrigued as to whether this is true for other subjective assessments like music, films, books or even food.

The effect might simply be a function of people being influenced by some level of awareness of how popular certain pictures are in the general marketplace. A recent study at Columbia University by Salganik, Dodds and Watts showed how people’s taste in music could be influenced by knowing how many others had downloaded that piece (i.e. how many others liked it). Can people’s distaste be socially influenced in the same way, I wonder? In the case of our experiment, they would have no way of knowing which pictures were the most unpopular but they possibly could have recognised (consciously or unconsciously) some of the more popular pictures in our set and that could have influenced their choices.

I’m not sure of the commercial ramifications of this curious finding but it’s an interesting one to discuss over dinner sometime.

Demystifying Boating

2007-03-09T13:51:00.000Z

The Watersports and Leisure Participation Survey for 2006 shows only 7.2% of the UK population took part in any kind of boating activity last year (e.g. sailing, rowing, water skiing, windsurfing, canoeing, etc).

My gut feeling is that a much larger number of people would like to get onto the water – the same survey shows 4 times as many people enjoying waterside or water related activities (e.g. coastal walking or swimming). So, what are the barriers to boating?

My guess is that the two main ones are: (i) cost (or perceived cost) of boats and boating and (ii) the mystique that surrounds boats and boating with its own jargon, specialist skills and (even) clothing.

For the past 3 years, we’ve partnered with Swallow Boats of Cardigan to develop a 17 foot, pedal-powered boat (Winsome) – the idea was an eco-friendly boat that anyone could use to explore Britain’s hundreds of miles of rivers, estuaries and canals. The boat (now a product) is brilliant – she’s elegant, relaxing and cruises at 4-5 mph with the same kind of effort as walking. We’ve already explored the Thames, Severn, Windermere, the Welsh canals and Norfolk Broads in ours.

But, have we succeeded in designing a boat which demystifies boating and makes it more accessible to ordinary people? We think so. Here, for example, is a mother and son who’ve just encountered the boat for the first time and set off to explore Salhouse Broad with no instructions from us.

The taste of tea when you were expecting coffee

2007-02-16T11:51:00.000Z

For 16 years, I worked for Hewlett Packard Research Labs doing research on new technology from a psychology perspective. The environment was great and the research topics always stimulating. But, the subject matter was always fairly similar – i.e. computers or their (increasingly) interesting peripherals.

Now we run our own research company, The Prospectory, I still do psychology research but the subject matter is amazingly varied. For example, here is a list of some of my currently active research topics:-

1. What is the optimal number of contemporary art pictures to present to people in order for them to find one they like enough to buy? (Clue: more is not necessarily better!).

2. How do you create market pull for a new kind of eco boat which no-one (yet) knows they need or want?

3. How do you quickly convert a brand new rugby stadium into home territory (for both players and supporters) which they will then fight to defend? (Until you’ve achieved that, home advantage is severely weakened)

4. What can we learn from the powerful way in which people with dementia use metaphors to communicate?

I revel in the variety of Prospectory research life day to day, and the cross fertilisation of ideas across widely disparate domains. But, there’s a catch. It’s surprisingly hard, on a Monday morning say, to switch from one area of interest to another. If last week was a contemporary art or new boat concept week, then trying to start thinking about dementia or territoriality in rugby “tastes” all wrong (at least to start with). It’s reminiscent of when someone brings you a welcome cup of mid-morning coffee. You take your first taste and it’s most unpleasant – why? – well, because it’s actually a cup of tea. As it happens, tea is your favourite drink but it tastes unpleasant right now because it wasn’t what your brain receptors were expecting. Is that what happens on a Monday morning when my brain is ready tuned for thinking about art and I suddenly present it with metaphors and dementia? I don’t know but the new subject tastes ‘wrong’ for at least the first couple of hours.

The Consumer Data Gap

2007-01-16T17:13:00.000Z

Our research company, The Prospectory, often finds itself digging around deep in the bowels of the quantitative data which are collected (in ever increasing volumes) by the consumer companies we work for. It can be hard work as the fully laden spreadsheets start to creak and the RSI sets in from doing multiple filtering operations and pivot tables. But the reward is the occasional, well hidden but surprising insight about consumer behaviour which emerges from such exercises.

For example, did you know that your male customers may buy fewer products from you but spend 50% more on the products they do buy? If you run a professional rugby club, did you know that over half your revenue might well come from people who attend your matches maybe 1 or 2 times a year (a kind of metaphorical ‘long tail’ of sports consumption) and yet all your marketing attention is focussed on your customers who come every week? Do you know how the number of different versions of a particular product you offer on a web page affects the probability of selling any one of them?

We really enjoy the detective work involved in exploring such phenomena but sometimes puzzle as to why such work is rarely done by the companies themselves on a more routine basis. The problem (I think) is that, unless you have a natural curiosity about your business or the ability to ask interesting questions, then the data are simply dead – they either tell you nothing at all or, if you ask poor questions, they will cheerfully mislead you.

The people at the top of most organisations tend to be the ones with the interesting questions because they are thinking about why their business is the way it is and how it could be different. Unfortunately, too often these people don’t have access to the raw data or don’t have the time or skills to ‘play’ with a spreadsheet for an hour or two. In contrast, the people who collect and monitor the data (usually the I.T. folks) show little or no interest in what these data actually say – they are not curious about what the numbers might tell them and that is not their job.

Software packages attempt to bridge this gap by generating fancy summary charts and graphs automatically from the data. These are called ‘Executive Summaries’ and the idea (I think) is for the CEO to glance at them during his or her lunch break. Unfortunately, these charts rarely (in my experience) tell you anything interesting. They are simply dull which is not surprising given that they were created by an effectively ‘dull’ algorithm.

So, whilst the status quo is slightly worrying, it’s fun work for Prospectors – a form of open-ended, bottom-up Consumer Science… I love it. Consumers (individually and collectively) will always behave in intriguing ways.

In the Mood for Sprouts

2006-12-28T10:20:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog exploring how our body chemistry (in particular what we ate last night) might affect our mood and how we perceive the world today. In a pleasing twist on this, I read over Christmas that the mood we are in (or more precisely the current levels of serotonin and noradrenalin in our systems) can affect the way that the food we eat tastes.

Dr Jan Melichar, a psychiatrist at Bristol University, found that increasing the level of serotonin (a neurotransmitter controlling mood) increased people’s sensitivity to sweet and bitter tastes. Conversely, people who were suffering high stress levels had a diminished ability to taste salt and bitterness. For those who don’t like sprouts, the rather tenuous conclusion drawn by The Times journalist was that the more anxious you were about having to consume them for Christmas lunch, the less bad they would actually taste!

So, the next time I’m grumpy because an expensive restaurant meal is not as tasty as I’d hoped, I should remember that it might not be as tasty because I’m grumpy.

Actuality or Underdone Potato?

2006-11-20T14:56:00.001Z

“You don’t believe in me”, observed the ghost.

“I don’t”, said Scrooge.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because”, said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato…”

From ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens.

To what extent does our body chemistry affect the way we think and experience things?

My father suffered fronto-temporal dementia and I used to chat to him by ‘phone every couple of days. Some days, he’d have lots of positive things to tell me – how the breakfast porridge was just how he liked it, the sun was shining, the wind and tide were just right for sailing and the staff in the nursing home (where he lived) were all being helpful and kind to him. Other days, I would be hit with a storm of anger and distress from the moment he answered the ‘phone – the porridge had been cold, the staff had stolen his clothes and the police cars were keeping him awake all night – plenty enough to make someone really peeved.

I always found the latter ‘phone calls stressful but, until I got more used to them, they also used to make me panic – I clearly needed to drive straight over and help him get some breakfast, find his clothes and see what was happening about the night time police cars. By the time I got there, often things would be fine again - my father, fully dressed would look confused by my concern – “what porridge?” “what police cars?”

Was he mad? Well, in some senses yes he was (a little) but his condition made me think about my own reactions to things and my interpretations of everyday events. I guess I had always thought that the events came first and then my emotional reactions to them. If the porridge is cold, I’ll get irritated. If the book is well written, I’ll enjoy reading it. But is that always the case? – maybe the chemicals in my body vary in some unrelated ways (due to that undigested bit of beef perhaps) and the chemistry controls my emotions which, in turn, affect ‘what I see’ and how I make sense of it at that moment in time. If my digestion had done a better job on the beef, maybe my view on the quality of the porridge or the book I just read would have been rather different.

Picasso Portraits, Dementia and Identity

2006-10-09T15:47:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago, I spent half an hour chatting with an elderly lady with dementia. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll call her ‘Lilian’. One of the remarkable aspects of Lilian’s conversation was the way she moved fluidly between a range of different persona as she chatted to me. To start with she was ‘Lilian’ talking to me (a stranger) about the hot and sunny day we were enjoying. A moment later, she switched her tone and was admonishing ‘Lilian’, the young child, for some (unexplained) misdemeanour. Then, she took the role of her husband, talking fondly to ‘Lilian’, his familiar partner, about the goings on of the day and, still later, she was an anxious ‘Lilian’ discussing with her sister their worries about their ill father (long deceased).

Initially, I found the track of Lilian’s conversation hard to follow but, as I relaxed from trying to make it fit ‘the normal conventions of conversation’, I realised that, intended or not, Lilian was painting, much as Picasso did, a startling representation of herself with all her different persona overlaid. Just as Picasso’s portraits can appear confusing and odd, when first encountered, because multiple perspectives are present simultaneously, the same was true with Lilian’s expression of herself to me. As with Picasso, I needed to relax the restrictions of the “normal rules of expression” in order to appreciate the insights such a portrait of a person gives. Lilian’s communication wasn’t lesser – it was simply different and a powerful portrayal of a person’s multi-faceted identities – the view depends on where the viewer stands.

Now I reflect on it, something similar has happened with my parents who both died in the past 3 to 4 years. I realise now that my sense of who they were was a restricted, one-dimensional view bound by where I had grown used to ‘viewing them from’. Since they died, fragments of conversations with their friends and relatives, have introduced surprisingly different perspectives on who they were and slowly, as time goes on, my sense of them has become more like a colourful Picasso portrait. There is still (and maybe always will be) a dominant perspective (based on my experience of them) but now there are multiple views inter mixed with that and the portrait of them in my mind is both richer and more mysterious. Is it only possible to gain that richer perspective of someone you know and love when they are no longer present binding you to a single view? I don’t know.

Gears on a Pedal Boat

2006-09-02T00:01:00.000+01:00

Testing the Winsome pedal boat over the last 18 months we have tried different gear ratios. The gear box itself is fixed at 1:2, but by using different sized cog wheels on the pedal units, we can change the overall ratio from about 9:1 to about 6:1. The difference this makes is interesting - especially if you don't know anything about how boat propulsion works.

The "cruising speed" of Winsome is about 4 miles an hour. You can make her go at 5.5 miles an hour if you give it a bit of welly, and a very strong crew might manage the absolute maximum of about 7 miles an hour for a short time before exhausting themselves. The interesting thing - if you've only pedalled bicycles before - is that none of these figures is determined by the gearing!

Winsome goes at her 4 mph cruising speed at 300 rpm on the propeller. The effect of the gear ratio is simply to change how fast you have to pedal and how hard you have to push to maintain that speed. This is a personal preference for the customer. The first production boat, for example, will have quite a low 6:1 ratio. This means pedalling at about 50 rpm to sustain the cruising speed of 4 mph. For most of this year, we've been using a ratio of about 7.5:1, which requires about 40 rpm on the pedals to maintain cruising speed. The first ratio we used was about 9:1, and that needed only around 33 rpm, a leisurely pace that only I seem to have liked. Obviously, the work needed to keep the boat moving at a given speed is the same, so to cruise at 33 rpm you have to push harder than you do when cruising at 50 rpm.

We have had several cyclists try the boat, and most are convinced that what she needs is a decent set of gears. While impressed with how fast she goes, they insist that with decent gears they could have achieved twice the speed that they did. And with a proper gear box, they argue, you could start with a low ratio until you get going, then change up.

We'd rather not have variable gears, because any gearbox introduces drag into the system, and we don't have a lot of power to play with if we want a Winsome crew to be able to talk to each other and enjoy the ride. Gear shift mechanisms also introduce cost and complexity. But the main reason we're ignoring the cyclists is that they're wrong - the boat could not be made to go any faster with gears. Gears only control how quickly you have to pedal, and how hard you have to push, to sustain a particular speed, and the range of speeds that Winsome can achieve isn't wide enough to need a higher gearing to keep pedalling rates within human capability.
The "right" gear ratio is simply the one that is optimum for the crew in terms of rate and pressure at the speed they intend to go. There is an optimum speed where the pedals feel as though they are just about keeping pace with the boat. This speed, which I have referred to as the "cruising" speed above, is just over 4 mph.

The power Winsome requires to propel her at 4 mph is probably about 200 watts. The theoretical power curve in the diagram above is for a propulsion system with no drag at all - an ideal you cannot actually achieve. This ideal power system requires only 100 watts to maintain 4.2 mph, but the power-speed curve starts to head skywards above that. So, for example, it requires double the theoretical power to achieve 5mph, and nearly 4 times the power to achieve 6mph. Winsome's so-called "hull speed" - the practical limit on the speed of any boat whose hull is immersed in the water as distinct from planing on top of it - requires 6 times the cruising power. The theoretical 600 watts required to reach hull speed translates to well over a horsepower (765 watts) in the real boat, and it would require a couple of very strong men to deliver that!

This is where boats differ from bikes. The terminal velocity of a bike - the speed beyond which you require huge amounts of power - is determined by air resistance. If you can pedal fast enough, and push hard enough, you can drive a bike to higher and higher speeds with relatively small increases in pedal speed and force. Even so, a cyclist would struggle to reach half the terminal velocity of his bike, even with 21 different gears, whereas the Winsome pedaller can reach half the terminal velocity of his machine using only one gear, literally without breaking sweat!

Terrorists Who Help Old Ladies to Cross the Road

2006-08-29T19:11:00.000+01:00

Since the arrest of 20 or so suspects of terrorist attacks on transatlantic flights, the media have had a field day tracking down and interviewing the suspects’ friends and neighbours.

I’m not sure what the media expect but these people often express their total disbelief that “such nice, friendly, quiet” people who live just down their street could possibly act as suicide bombers. Quotes like “I used to play football with him every week” or “he’s lovely with small children” are common.

But numerous social psychology studies have shown that we are, in fact, lousy predictors of how other people (even people we know quite well) will behave in any particular situation. We are not even that good at predicting how we will behave ourselves!

It seems that our behaviour in any particular situation is, in fact, determined much more by the characteristics of the situation than by our ‘personality’. And then there’s the social group with whom we engage in any situation. These other people (be they colleagues, friends or even strangers) have a huge effect on how we interpret a situation, the judgements we make and the way we choose to act. In experiments, subjects will even grossly over- or under-estimate the length of a line as a result of hearing others misestimate its length.

So, arguably, there aren’t ‘evil’ people or people who are intrinsically terrorists. But there are ‘ordinary’ (to our eyes) people who play football, are kind to children and help old ladies cross the street whose bizarre (to us) interpretation of situations (shaped by their context and their peer group) will lead them to act in evil ways in that situation. The very next day (if they survive the bomb they planted which killed a dozen people) might even see them back helping another old lady cross the road!

Scrambled Brands and Mere Exposure

2006-08-01T16:20:00.000+01:00

According to a recent study, if consumers see a brand name in scrambled form (i.e. as an anagram) and resolve it, then they are more likely (i) to say that they are familiar with the brand and (ii) to express a preference for that brand. The authors explain the effect in terms of perceptual fluency – solving an anagram is cognitively difficult so the resultant word feels unexpectedly fluent or easy to process. It’s argued that people misattribute this apparent ease or fluency to prior familiarity with and preference for the target word. How one would create such a situation in real consumer purchase situations is not entirely clear!

However, this seems closely related to the phenomenon of ‘mere exposure’. Numerous studies have shown that if, over a period of days or weeks, you play snippets of music to people or show them visual patterns, they prefer the stimuli to which they have been exposed before more than the ones they have never previously encountered. And, up to a certain point, the more times they have been exposed to a piece, the more likely they are to like it.

The intriguing thing is that, when quizzed independently, they cannot reliably identify which stimuli are more familiar and they certainly don’t ‘recognise’ them. Indeed, subliminal exposure to the stimuli still produces the effect. This phenomenon has been dubbed ‘mere exposure’. Some argue that it’s a result of ‘perceptual fluency’ – i.e. the more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response and prior exposure simply increases fluency of processing. Unfortunately (at least for the theoreticians), there is also evidence that this works the other way around – i.e. if we like something, we are inclined to think we have seen or heard it before even if this is not the case!

We have not yet studied this phenomenon directly but certainly plan to as we keep encountering signs of it in other consumer psychology experiments we’ve run. We are certainly intrigued by it and its commercial ramifications.

Chronological Freedom

2006-07-26T13:30:00.000+01:00

I’m interested in the ways in which dementia gives us insights into the ‘strangeness’ of how we ‘normally’ think about things….

For example, the way we use time to order how we think about things and the significance we attach to them.

In the books they write, authors often play with the chronological ordering of events – sometimes time shifting between two periods of significance in people’s lives or starting with an event at the end of someone’s life and then working back to the outset, making connections through the use of flashbacks. Well used, it’s a compelling technique and can deliver much greater understanding of someone’s character and motivations and the overall meaning or ‘story’ of their life.

Chatting with people with dementia, they quite often do the same – talking one moment about the pleasure of seeing the flowers in the garden on this sunny day in July (2006) and the next moment about their wedding in June (1950) or the birth of their first child. Their conversation and expression of feelings moves fluidly between significant events in their lives which might be 60 or 70 years apart or only a matter of minutes or hours – childhood moments, yesterday’s visit, their first job, getting married, today’s lunch, having children, losing a parent, etc. As a listener, at first that feels confusing (like flashbacks in a novel or film equally can) but then it gives you insight by connecting life events by the similarity of the emotions, ideas or sensations involved rather than, necessarily, by their chronological order.

Some months ago, Chris Anderson (the now famous author of ‘The Long Tail’) talked about how dominated we’ve become by the newspaper model where significance of events or information or ideas is tightly correlated with their recency – nobody reads yesterday’s newspaper even if the articles are actually better than today’s. But, Anderson points out, this is changing as people increasingly use search engines to find information, articles and ideas online. This is because search engines are effectively, ‘time agnostic’- significance to them is measured in terms of the number of links a page has gathered rather than how recently it was written. People with dementia are a bit like this – i.e. they become ‘time agnostic’ in that the events they talk about are the ones with the most significance – as measured, maybe, by the number of links to other events, emotions and ideas in their lives.

We think we are the ones who are NOT confused – but if we always so strongly equate significance of ideas with recency, then maybe we are the ones who think ‘strangely’.

Pedalling the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

2006-06-22T16:01:00.000+01:00

Built by Thomas Telford in 1795, the famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carries the Llangollen canal at a phenomenal height of 126 foot above the River Dee. Walking over it is an experience you remember. The moment you step out along the 1007ft chasm and look down, your legs feel like jelly and (at least in my case), the only way to reach the other side is to hang tightly onto the railing and fix one’s eyes on the other end.

The British Waterways Canal Guide writes enticingly that “the excitement to be derived from crossing this structure by boat is partly due to the fact that, while the towpath side is fenced off with, albeit widely spaced, iron railings, the offside of the canal is completely unprotected from about 12in above the water level.”

So, inspired by this, we drove up to Llangollen last weekend with our 17 foot Winsome pedal boat on the roof. We launched over the bank at Chirk and pedalled Winsome the 3 or 4 miles to Froncysyllte and on across the aqueduct to Trevor. We had a great time but the actual crossing of the aqueduct was slightly disappointing. It was certainly a far less thrilling experience than crossing by foot – in fact neither of us felt even the slightest hint of vertigo at all. We were left puzzling why this might be. Our conclusion was that, from the boat, we couldn’t look vertically down, only at an angle and that doesn't induce vertigo. It’s also possible that, by sitting in a boat, we didn’t have any of the usual fear of falling.

I tried to find some commentary on this effect on the Net but, so far, have only found a bunch of aircraft pilots swapping stories about their fear of heights. They are quite entertaining….

“Any kind of flying, I'm fine. That includes open cockpit microlights, gyroplanes which are like aerial motorbikes, and even hang gliding (though I never got beyond tethered flight). But I have trouble climbing ladders, and when I went tall ship sailing I absolutely refused to climb aloft to the crows nest. No-one could believe a pilot would be almost the only person who never went aloft even by the end of two weeks, but just looking at other people up there made me feel sick. Fear of falling? I don't know, but it makes more sense than anything else.”

“Bizarre. I thought it was just me! I can't bring myself to ride my bike over the Dartford Bridge (I can just about get myself to drive over in the car), yet the other day I was quite happily doing a tight turn over it at 1500' whilst looking down the wing and thinking 'there's that bridge I can't ride over'.”

Meanwhile, I wonder what swimming over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct would feel like and whether anyone’s done it.

Winsome Pedal Skiff

2006-06-21T16:59:00.000+01:00

This is the 17 foot Winsome Pedal Skiff which we have been developing with Nick and Matt Newland of Swallow Boats of Cardigan. This is the prototype. The product version is due to be launched in August 2006. We've demonstrated her at 4 Boat Shows and pedalled a few hundred miles in her in a variety of locations including: Monmouthshire and Abergavenny canal, Llangollen canal, Norfolk Broads, Teifi Estuary at Cardigan, River Thames at Henley and the River Severn at Worcester. She was reviewed in Autumn 2005 by Watercraft Magazine.

Winsome, Gender and Technology

2006-06-13T12:24:00.000+01:00

We’ve spent the last 3 days at the Thames Boat Show marketing our pedal skiff ‘Winsome’ which we’ve developed in partnership with Swallow Boats Ltd.

Winsome (named after my late aunt) is a 17 foot elegant pedal boat which two people can propel in a relaxed and laid back fashion whilst sipping wine or reading the Sunday papers. You can see more about the product here.

The Thames Boat Show focuses on traditional looking wooden boats and kits and the clientele is usually fairly heavily dominated by men often trailing slightly reluctant looking wives and kids. However, we were delighted to discover that Winsome seems to appeal to women just as much as men – maybe even more. I was also intrigued by the fact that the visitors at the show revealed such marked (but familiar) gender differences in the kinds of questions they asked about the boat – both before and after they tried it out.

The men focussed on the technical questions – “What gearing ratio are you using?” “What size is the propeller?” “How many knots will the boat do?” and “What material is the gear box housing?” Meanwhile, the women (equally engaged) focussed on asking about the kinds of places you could go in such a boat, how many of the family could come along and the kinds of trips we had already done.

This is exactly in line with research studies I have done recording men and women conversing about a range of technical artefacts. Although the popular view is that men are more interested in technical artefacts than women are, we actually found no disparity in the levels of interest. The difference was that the men’s interest focussed on the technology itself – its features, its performance and how to operate it. In contrast, the women showed little or no interest in features or performance. They enthused about the uses they had found for an artefact – i.e. the interesting or useful things it enabled THEM to do.

We are hoping that coincidentally with Winsome, we have designed a product which engages the interests of both genders – it involves some novel and intriguing engineering AND can take you to novel and intriguing places!

Remembering "The Facts"

2006-05-17T18:04:00.000+01:00

I have to confess to being an avid follower (although rare contributor) to various Welsh rugby chat lines although I think it’s my love of psychology rather than my love of rugby which keeps me glued to these discussions.

I particularly enjoy the heated debates about “what happened at the game last night” – how can two parties who both (in theory) witnessed the same game (albeit wearing different coloured shirts) produce such wildly different “factual” accounts of what happened? I can understand there would be differences in interpretation between the two sets of supporters and certainly differences in the perceived significance of various incidents but it’s the differences in the reported facts about individual performances which intrigues me.

So, I was interested to read a few weeks ago about a study by David Pizarro at Cornell University. He told experimental subjects a ‘true’ story about a man who walked out of a restaurant without paying the bill. Half the subjects were told that the man left the restaurant because he was a thief who regularly stole. The other half of the subjects were told that the man rushed out because he’d received an emergency call on his mobile ‘phone. A week later, when recalling this story, those who had been told the man was a thief remembered the restaurant bill as being 10-25% higher than it actually was. Those who thought the man had rushed off to deal with an emergency recalled the bill as being lower than it actually was!

So, it seems our memory for facts can indeed be altered depending on the attitude we hold towards the key actors in any event.

My late father, who suffered from fronto-temporal dementia, used to relate to us increasingly distorted factual accounts of his day to day life. He once told me how the previous day “two young men grabbed hold of me so hard that one rib bone flew past my right ear and one past my left ear and I hit the ceiling so hard I stuck there by my hair”. In his case, my father seemed to have reached a point where his mind would fairly freely construct a ‘factual’ story out of nowhere to ‘account’ for his strongly positive or negative attitude towards individuals he had encountered. His memory for events seemed disturbingly bizarre at the time. But, on reflection, maybe it was simply a more extreme version of the way all our memories work – we start with a gut level emotional response (blood chemistry basically) and construct (or at least adapt) the ‘facts’ to match the feelings.

Now back to the rugby chat lines…

The old ones are the best

2006-05-05T11:42:00.000+01:00

I usually write this blog about once a week. But on those occasions when I feel that my last week’s blog was particularly interesting or well-observed ;) I experience some reluctance in “overlaying it” with today’s more recent offering…. It feels as though the articles “underneath” will now never get looked at – especially the ones right at the bottom of the pile.

But on his Long Tail blog this week, Chris Anderson was reflecting on the power of search engines in discovering archived content. As Anderson points out, our thinking about information has been dominated by the newspaper model – new information is the only thing which matters and the only thing we pay attention to. We don’t bother to read what it said in yesterday’s newspaper – however good the articles were. In contrast, Anderson points out that search engines like Google are ‘time agnostic’ – what matters to them is relevance as measured by the number of links a page of content has acquired. Quite rightly, this reflects the level of other people’s interest in that content and the significance they attached to it. And, obviously, the longer any information has been hanging around (if it was interesting or useful at all), the more such links it will have gained.

So, the blog I wrote some months ago (which I (at least) still consider to be the most interesting!) could well be the one which people (who have never encountered my blog) are the most likely to find via Google and read. And that could be true even in a year’s time. I like that.

Mind you, maybe, this model wouldn’t work for someone whose theories about the world and human nature evolve more quickly than mine do.

Buying art in TK Maxx

2006-04-27T17:41:00.000+01:00

Yesterday in TK Maxx, I watched a lady browsing art. The art, in this case, consisted of a selection of framed prints, limited editions and a number of original canvases. As one expects in TK Maxx, the subject matter, style and quality of art on offer was much more diverse than would be normal in other art shops or departments.

The shopper in question seemed really attracted by a Thomas Kinkade style oil original (unnamed artist) in a realistic landscape tradition. But suddenly she put that down and switched her interest to a signed limited edition print by a known contemporary artist which was semi-abstract and modern in style. As far as I could see, the two pictures had absolutely nothing in common (see above) apart from sharing roughly similar prices (~£25). The shopper happily placed the semi-abstract work in her wire trolley and moved on.

I was left wondering – had she come to TK Maxx to look for art? Did she know the kind of art she liked or was looking for? Did she have both kinds of art in her home already? Was she maybe swung by the fact that she could acquire a signed limited edition for a mere £25? – in terms of the art world, this certainly represents extraordinary value.

The research we have done suggests that consumers typically enter a shop (or website) and rapidly scan the range of products on display in order to locate “the kind of stuff they like” (be that art, furniture or clothes). They then ignore the majority of products on offer and concentrate their attention on that much reduced search space which matches their taste. This obviously minimises the cognitive load of shopping – especially for items which need to appeal to one’s aesthetic taste. But TK Maxx doesn’t enable you to do that. The store provides no grouping of the clothes, home furnishings or art by style, label, fashion or taste – only by functional category and size. Given the diversity of their sources and the rapidity of their turnover, it’s difficult to see how else they could operate.

So, I’m left puzzling over the following questions…

Do TK Maxx’s regular customers have a very different cognitive ‘sorting’ strategy when it comes to shopping for aesthetic items like clothes or art? or

Do they have or a much greater tolerance for large and complex search spaces? or

Do they possess a much more eclectic (or at least less rigid) set of aesthetic tastes? or

Are they more confident (than the rest of the population) in constructing their own unique taste combinations, i.e. their own personal ‘brand’?

I don’t know.

Maybe, it’s simply that TK Maxx actually reflects the essence of retail therapy – i.e. the goal is to browse, find and acquire “a bargain” – the nature of the product itself is not the goal.

I hope there may be a chance to explore this at some point and find out.

Enjoying the moment (or not)

2006-04-19T18:34:00.000+01:00

Having endured the Llanelli Scarlets losing 3 rugby matches on the trot in the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting (as I am forced to do from time to time) why I pay good money to “enjoy” such experiences.

Well firstly, I did enjoy anticipating each of these matches and the bigger the match, the more intense the pleasure of anticipation. So, I certainly got some enjoyment there.

Secondly, I know that IF we had eventually won any of these matches (and that was a real possibility in all 3 cases) then, having gritted my teeth for some lengthy parts of the match, I’d have revelled in the memory of it for some while afterwards (up until our next loss in fact).

So, paradoxically, maybe one’s enjoyment of the actual 80 minutes of the match itself is the wrong bit to focus on!

It turns out there is some truth in this – even for pleasurable experiences. A series of studies back in 1997 showed that people’s expectations of pleasurable experiences (such as holidays or day trips) and their recollections of them afterwards are both more positive than their experience of the events whilst they are actually happening!

And Kahneman, the hedonics specialist, argues that the “psychological present” only lasts somewhere between 0.5 and 3 seconds anyway – so maybe “how it feels at the time” is rarely the point! Most of our experience of life is either in anticipation or recollection – it’s very difficult (and maybe even somewhat disappointing) to live entirely in the present!

Also, according to the empirical evidence gathered by Csikszentmihalyi, the activities which people say they enjoy the most are the ones where they experience ‘flow’, i.e. they are so absorbed in the activity itself that they effectively lose consciousness of that present moment. Presumably, they can only really tell you how good it felt on reflection.

A Morning Dose of Bloglines

2006-04-04T14:06:00.000+01:00

One of the (many) enjoyable parts of my working day is the half an hour I spend sipping my morning coffee and browsing my Bloglines. My particular aggregation of RSS feeds includes headlines from the world of contemporary art, psychology, dementia, cultural trends, and technology gadgets. And the best thing about it? – the sheer, uncontrolled ‘mess’ of concepts and ideas with which I’m confronted every day.

One moment I’m reading about complex decisions being better left to unconscious, rather than conscious, deliberation – a study showing that consumers are happier with complex products they’ve purchased when their decisions have been made in the absence of deliberate attention. The next moment I’m reading about a California meat distributor cheerfully buying a Picasso original from Costco for $39,999.99 because (I quote) “they just sell the top quality — whatever you buy at Costco, whether it's a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. I just thought, if it's a Picasso, you can't go wrong." And then there are the 5 Islamic women in Saudi Arabia who, fed up with the severe male domination in their country, have opted to undergo sex change operations so that they can live (what we would consider) a normal life.

It struck me that I like Bloglines for the same reason that I like and need a messy desk – it’s fundamental to the kind of work I do. As I wrote about some while ago, the (apparent) mess of papers, books and magazines on my office desk and floor are actually a holding pattern of multiple, loosely connected facts and ideas - a material trace, if you will, of my current, constantly changing, model of the world. Even the distance between the piles and their position on the desk (or floor) has a loose semantics associated with it.

And now, every morning, Bloglines delivers a fresh, entirely unconnected ‘mess’ of ideas and observations from across the globe – these new bits of information can’t be filed (“where on earth would you put them?") but they get absorbed into the general mental mix for that day. This might result in new and surprising associations being made or significant new concepts being formed. Or it might not. Whatever, it’s certainly better than caffeine as a way of kicking the brain into gear for the day.

Why Llanelli Scarlets are the “Cup Kings of Wales"

2006-03-24T17:51:00.000Z

The Llanelli Scarlets have long had the tag of “Cup Kings of Wales” having lifted the Welsh Cup 12 times in 17 final appearances. This is almost twice as often as the cup has been lifted by any of the other top clubs in Wales (Cardiff 7 times, Swansea 6, Pontypridd 2 and Neath 2).

So, how have the Llanelli Scarlets achieved this amazing record? Well, maybe the colour they wear holds the clue. According to a recent experiment, if all else is equal, the opponent wearing the colour red is more likely to win. (I think we have to accept that, given the recent run of disastrous results for the Welsh national side, all else was probably not equal in their case!).

However, in the various Welsh cup finals over the years, it could be argued that the two teams have generally been of a roughly equal standard (for that season at least) given the competition to get there and the Scarlets have won on 71% of occasions.

In a recent article in Nature, Russell Hill and Robert Barton of the University of Durham, describe how they studied 4 combat sports during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games: boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling, where contestants were randomly assigned either red or blue colours. They found that, across the four disciplines, contestants wearing red won significantly more fights.

A deeper analysis of the data showed the colour advantage tipped the balance only when competitors were relatively evenly matched.

The influence of colour on such contests may have its roots in our evolutionary past. In the animal world, red is thought to be related to fitness, aggression and high levels of testosterone.

Male mandrills, for example, have red colouration on their faces, rumps and genitalia that they use to communicate their fighting ability to other males.

"Whether red suppresses the testosterone of the opponent or boosts the testosterone of the individual wearing red, we don't know at the moment.” Dr Barton told the BBC News website.

Watch this space to see if the Scarlets, Cup Kings of Wales can overcome the yellow (what yellow?!) Wasps at Twickenham on April 9th.

Dressing like "Old People"

2006-03-14T18:13:00.000Z

Entertaining some octogenarians to tea one afternoon, I found myself reflecting on “the way old people dress”. There is definitely a distinctive way in which many older people dress and it’s definitely very different from the way I and most of my contemporaries do.

So, I began to worry, now I’ve reached 50, how on earth I could possibly manage the drastic transition from my current stripey jeans, red boots and purple sweater to the traditional ‘old people’ look and when (and how!) would I make that vast transformation? Would I make it all at once (risking the mirth of my friends) or make it very gradually, adding first the button-up cardigan, the embroidered blouse and then maybe the A line skirt? And would it feel natural when I did so? This was all very worrying. I couldn’t imagine myself at all dressed like elderly ladies I see in the street … how could I look like that and still be me?

So, how and when did my elderly relatives make their transition to “old people’s clothes”? When, for example, did my late father start wearing battered tweed jackets, checked viyella shirts and muddy coloured ties? Suddenly, it dawned on me that he didn’t. I had got it all wrong.

“Old people” haven’t made some marked switch of wardrobes. They are simply wearing a mildly (and heavily individualistically) evolved version of what they were wearing when they were in their 30’s – maybe even in their 20’s, i.e. they are not wearing “old people’s clothes” but rather “evolved 1950’s style” clothes just as I (when I reach 80 plus) will be wearing my own individualised version of “evolved 1980’s style” clothes. Only, by then, people my age will see the latter as “what really old people wear”! Ouch!

So, my theory now is that there comes a point in most people’s lives (maybe when we are in our early 30’s) when we unconsciously stop bothering to follow the wild swings of fashion (if we ever did so) and the style of that particular decade stays with us (in rough and vaguely recognisable format) for the rest of our lives.

That’s a relief. I now know that clothes (like everything else) won’t feel “old” when I get there – they’ll just be normal for me.

St David's Day

2006-03-01T17:56:00.000Z

March 1st - St David's Day.

A good day to reflect on Wales and the Welsh.

Today, HM the Queen (of England) opens our new national assembly building, called the Senedd - the Welsh word for a parliament with the same Latin root as the word Senate. There was a flurry of objection (from within Wales - who else would give a damn) to the use of this particular word, because it suggests a level of sovereignty that Wales has not yet achieved. The Welsh Assembly doesn't (yet) have law-making or tax-raising powers, and is limited to setting the policy for and administering its own public health, education and transport services. But it will soon be able to draft laws specific to Wales for ratification by the Westminster parliament, and this constitutional arrangement has the capacity to evolve into full formal legislative power or (just as effective and rather more British) into a situation where Westminster would no more deny that ratification than Queen Elizabeth can fail to sign duly passed acts of the UK parliament. But is Wales a separate enough nation to require its own legislature?

Full national independence for Wales would until recently have been quite difficult to countenance. The country isn't big or rich enough to support the full trappings of a nation state, particularly a welfare state, while maintaining the same standard of living for its citizens. But Wales could surely survive as a sovereign member of the European Union, particularly a Union which took over responsibility for many of the more expensive aspects of large nation state government, as many of its member states seem happy for it to do. It is much easier to yield to Europe a sovereignty that you haven't, in practice, ever had.

And that might be the best future for Wales as a separate nation, assuming that's what it really wants to be. Unlike Scotland, Wales hasn't really been a politically separate nation state since the middle ages, when the defining characteristics of a nation state were rather cruder. The mediaeval Welsh, for a variety of reasons, never had the opportunity to evolve from a feuding collection of princedoms into a larger political unit with a common legal framework and the administrative machinery to go with it. They were effectively absorbed into an English state which had already been annexed by a Norman aristocracy.

Culturally, however, Wales has retained many of the differences it had at the time it was finally subdued by the English king. The most obvious cultural survivor is the language - the Welsh spoken in the 13th and 14th centuries is broadly intelligible to modern Welsh speakers, just as the French spoken by the Kings of England at that time would be to modern French speakers.

The 12th century commentator Giraldus Cambrensis, himself of mixed Norman and Welsh origin, wrote a book listing his countrymen's good and bad points, and many of these are recognisable today. Writing c. 1191, he applauded the Welsh for their religous fervour, individual military prowess, frugality, universal hospitality, lack of deference to authority, poetic and musical skill (especially their talent for multi-part harmony). He castigated them for their inconstancy and a tendency to internal strife and betrayal of their fellow countrymen rather than uniting against outside threat, rendering the Welsh too easy to subdue. But he also pointed out that while the Welsh might appear easy to subdue at a superficial level, eradicating or assimilating them would be very difficult. And as they welcome Elizabeth II to open their assembly building in Cardiff today, you'd have to say he got that bit right.

Why do the Brecon Beacons look higher when it snows?

2006-02-27T18:16:00.000Z

As often happens here at this time of year, we've had a fall of snow and it's stayed on the peaks around where we live. Each time this happens, I'm surprised by how much higher the mountains look when they have snow on them - they look like an entirely different (and considerably more impressive) range.

So, what I puzzle about every time is whether this visual effect is either knowledge-based (higher mountains have snow on them - that's how we know they're higher!) or sensation-based (bright objects appear closer (and therefore bigger)). Because of my more Gibsonian background, I'm inclined towards the latter model ... but it's a curious effect.

Art, Gender and Pigeons

2006-02-23T16:18:00.000Z

We’ve been exploring how people might 'naturally' categorise contemporary art pictures – not art connoisseurs but ordinary people who buy art prints for the walls of their homes.

Not surprisingly, we’re finding that people are reasonably consistent in grouping together pictures which see they perceive as ‘being similar’. However, there does seem to be a marked gender difference operating. Women have a tendency to group together pictures on the basis of similarity of colour and subject even if they have dissimilar visual structure or style (see example below).

Men, on the other hand, seem more inclined to group together pictures which share similar visual structure or style even if their colours or subject matter are very different (see example below).

And what about pigeons? We couldn't persuade any to do our experiment but they've certainly been shown to be capable of discriminating between Monet and Picasso and, once trained, can carry over this discrimination to new paintings by these two artists. Apparently, they can also generalise the behaviour to other impressionist and cubist works[1]. Impressive performance but were these arty pigeons male or female? It leaves us wondering....!!

I'll come back to this subject when I've discovered some more.....

Meanwhile, you can read a fascinating article about birds and colour vision here.

And one about possible gender differences in colour perception here.

[1] Wannabe, S., Sakamoto, J. and Watika, M. (1995), Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 63, 165=174.

Remote Cricket

2006-02-12T14:47:00.000Z

A recent edition of the Gadget Show on Channel 5 showed a wired-up operator remotely operating a mechanical hand. The presenter demonstrated how he could catch a ball in this remote hand by closing his fingers, and looked forward to the day when Andrew Flintoff would be able to take a catch in a test match being played in Sydney while actually staying in London. Already, he said, surgeons are able to operate remotely using similar techniques, and NASA is building special space suits so that the astronauts of the future will operate remote replicas of themselves while they stay safely on Earth.

The remote astronaut scenario is clearly going to be challenging to the point of ludicrous if they mean allowing someone to perceive and react to an environment on a planet several light minutes away. But the remote test match sounds more credible until you stop to work out how long Andrew Flintoff has to respond if he's going to take a slip catch. If the ball comes off the bat at 120km/h, it's going 33 metres a second. It will take around a third of a second to reach Andrew's Avatar in Sydney, but he would have to judge its trajectory (from the delayed remote video image) in much less than half that time, and then move to intercept it at the first point where it was reachable, knoiwing that his avatar would only move some time in the future. The satellite delay to Australia can be well over a second, and even if you ping Australia through the Internet you get a round trip delay of about a third of a second.

Playing cricket through a remotely wired avatar would be a weird experience. You'd be seeing and responding to the world as it was around third of a second ago, knowing that any response would only take effect in around a third of a second from now. Facing a fast bowler where the ball only takes about a seond and a half to reach you from the bowler's hand would therefore be tricky. The bowler - even if he's a remote one - wouldn't have quite the same problem. He wouldn't be able to respond to the batsmen's exact position, but otherwise his main problem would be guessing when to stop his run up to avoid no-balls.

Love, Truth and Prunes

2006-02-03T14:09:00.000Z

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
(from Metaphors We Live By, G. Lakoff and M. Johnson)

I was recently listening to John Killick on Radio 4 talking about his conversations with people with dementia. It reminded me of the amazing (and lengthy) ‘phone conversations which I used to have with my late father. My father had fronto-temporal dementia and spent his last couple of years in a specialist home in Oxfordshire. Too far away to visit each week, my brother and I used to call him every other day or so – just to chat. Actually, my father used to do most of the talking – sometimes holding the ‘phone to his mouth and, sometimes carefully placing it (mid-sentence) in the pocket of his much-loved, old tweed jacket. At this point the conversations would become inevitably more muffled (at his end) and shouty (at mine).

As a cognitive psychologist, I became fascinated by his increasingly creative use of language and metaphor. As his daughter, I just enjoyed connecting (where I could) with the eclectic mixture of meanings, pleasures, memories and humour which summed my father up perfectly. It certainly taught me that communication with someone you love is not about facts and coherent sentences but about the rhythm of conversation. Even though I often couldn’t follow his precise meaning, I could catch the drift and join in and I found that conversations which didn’t rely on (shared) logic and facts or even any standard notion of coherence were actually warm, fun and insightful and, above all, made me feel close to him.

My father’s conversation was increasingly dominated by a fixed number of interrelating ‘themes’ most of which had been important throughout his life – his Christian beliefs and life as an Anglican lay reader preparing weekly sermons and services, his loving care for his wife (my mother) during her long years with dementia – (had she eaten all the prunes he’d given her?, could he get her clothes dry before morning?). Then there was his lifelong love for sailing and the sea and finally his (recently acquired) fear of MRSA (which he contracted during an earlier stay in hospital).

For a while, prunes (and their consumption) were the single dominating theme ‘Love, Truth and Prunes’ became his recurring phrase – the subject (it seemed) of a sermon he was constantly looking for the right opportunity to preach. Meanwhile, he would devour these fruit by the dozen. Whilst in hospital in Oxford, we took to shipping tins of prunes in by the box load in the hopes of keeping the anxious ward staff abreast of his demand.

Below are some examples of my father’s metaphors which I jotted down as he chatted on the ‘phone and some thoughts on what I took them to mean…

“the idea is 18 prunes, followed by 5 cornflakes and then 3 hymns which is ideal in setting the stage” I guess the cognitive acts of planning a balanced meal and planning a balanced Church service are not that dissimilar – in both cases, my father knew he needed to hold the interest of a potentially distractible audience!

“in the last hour, they’ve been quietly wheeling out the less confident members of the congregation … they’re collecting them in special yellow bags and disposing of them by the lift” Here, I think, there’s a cross-over between the institutional process he witnessed for disposing of unwanted or unacceptable items and the process of ‘disposing’ of unwanted or unacceptable people. As he struggled with nursing home culture, did my father fear that he might be one of the latter?

“you need the confidence here to know how to respond to each eddy and gust… some good friends came alongside and gave me a tow to lunch” Living in a nursing home was a traumatic and difficult experience for my father – I liked this familiar sailing analogy of reacting to gusty, unpredictable wind conditions (over which you have no control) and then the concept of the friendly ‘fellow sailors’ “coming alongside” and offering a slightly slow (and increasingly unstable) vessel a welcome “tow to lunch”.

“so much detail gets increasingly important but it’s very very demanding on my back” Here maybe the increasing ‘pain’ of struggling to manage detailed information in his head became mixed with the physical pain of a stiff back?

“there’s a lot of literature in the bathroom which has not been properly aired .. I tried to build up in my library material about changes in underclothes” In the latter days of caring for my mother, the floors, tables and chairs of their house were always covered with a random selection of my father’s sermon notes, lists, ideas and correspondence together with my mother’s clothes which always needed drying. Maybe my father worried about his sermon plans not being ready (or ‘aired’ we might say) for use on Sunday morning?

“I’ve been towing the content of my origins but the ground is very uneven but I’m leaving literature in the thin patches”. In his small room in the nursing home, my father had a small number of his much loved boxes of ideas, lists, letters and sermon notes – he would constantly empty these out on the floor (and bed and chairs) as he sorted and re-sorted them, read and re-read fragments and tried to make further notes with his vast collection of coloured pens. It felt as if he might be trying to reconstruct his sense of his identity (or ‘origins’) from the paper fragments lying on his floor but maybe this process felt as stumbling and uncertain as his increasingly unsteady attempts at walking along the corridor to lunch.

“it’s very cold here – the heating arrangements were superb but now they’ve been deperbed” – And finally, this is just one of the many examples of my father’s playful use of language. I find it fascinating that a brain, sadly damaged by this stage, could still generate entirely original and consciously humorous turns of phrase.

I miss our conversations.

Video on demand

2006-02-03T00:34:00.000Z

Will broadband make broadcast TV redundant? I doubt it. Personal video recorders like SKY+ are already changing how many of us watch TV, and their future looks much more promising.

With cheap disc drives now down to below a dollar a gigabyte, the next couple of years should see the first terabyte SKY+ boxes. The cheap disc drives of 25 years ago held 5 megabytes, and if you plot their capacities you see them reaching the terabyte mark around now. That's about 500 hours of cinema, more than many of us watch in a year. If they maintain the same growth rate discs might manage another thousand-fold increase in the next 10 to 15 years. A petabyte disc can store 500,000 hours of video, which is more than all the professional film mankind created in the first 100 years of cinema.

So when the first petabyte Sky+ boxes hit the streets, they'll have to come preloaded with all the film created up to the time of manufacture, and use their remaining capacity to capture every new film as it is produced. At the moment, that's about 5,000 hours a year, or a mere 10 terabytes. With multi-channel decoders, these future generation SKY+ boxes will spend all their time storing new films, as it is broadcast 24 hours a day on high speed channels designed for recording devices. Most of this material will, of course, be encrypted, so you'll still be paying to view it - but you'll be paying to decrypt it off your own recorder.

Watching "real" time TV will then be the exception, rather than the rule, with news bulletins, weather reports and sports events being the only programmes transmitted for instant viewing. As far as professionally produced films are concerned, the Internet need only be used to carry decryption keys and credit card details. That will free up the available bandwidth for amateur narrowcasting and video telephony.

Can you categorise the kind of art you like?

2006-02-02T14:22:00.000Z

I’m interested in how people describe or even categorise the kind of art they like. I’d really like to know if there are any useful (i.e. common) ways to do it. I’ve now collected data from about 100 consumers talking about the art they like and I’ve found they very rarely use artists’ names or refer to official art movements or styles, e.g. impressionism or cubism. Mostly, the language people use is informal and it’s about colour, shapes, style and emotive content.

So, as an introspective exercise, I tried to see if I could categorise the kind of art I like. Browsing through art sites on the web, I was surprised to find how easy it was! Looking at the selection I’d picked, I discovered (for the first time) that I actually like 4 different ‘categories’ of contemporary art. After that, it was easy to find more examples of any category.

I then tried to describe each category in linguistic terms – this proved a lot tougher to generate (and for others to understand!). Anyway, here are my 4 categories – so, if you want to buy me a picture, you know what to look for!
1. Brightly coloured, semi-abstract landscapes

2. Perceptually interesting abstracts with bold shapes and colours

3.Industrial, evocative, Lowry-like scenes

4. And, finally, sailing boats.....

I’ve now become aware that, if I’m walking along a street and pass an art gallery with an example of any one of these kinds in its window, I’ll stop and go in to look around. If not, I probably won’t.

And, more intriguingly, where did these tastes come from? – the sailing boats are obvious (given my life long interest) but what about the abstract shapes – why do they need to be bold?

Anyway, can I tempt anyone into posting 5-10 examples which exemplify their taste in art? Maybe it’s only me that finds the exercise easy?

Knowledge Workers and the Business of Informing

2006-02-01T17:52:00.000Z

Ages ago, I wrote a paper about knowledge work called ‘The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker’. It excited a fair amount of debate at the time and another flurry of articles on the topic appeared a couple of years ago in The Economist and New Yorker prompted by the publication of Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper's book 'The Myth of the Paperless Office'.

I recently re-hashed some of the original thinking for a publisher who wanted to understand the kind of publication which would attract a knowledge worker … here it is…

Some years ago, we studied a selection of knowledge workers in different businesses: design, management consultancy, advertising, broadcasting, marketing, finance, I.T. and research and learned some interesting things about how these people consume printed information.

We found that knowledge workers use information (literally) to inform - to change the form of - their own and their company’s thinking, perspectives, assumptions and ideas so that they and the companies they serve will act differently (and more effectively) in their markets and beyond.

Business processes, in contrast, are designed to achieve the same output regardless of who does them and they rely on input consistency. For knowledge work, on the other hand, diversity of both input and output are the norms. A group of knowledge workers will select different magazines to read and even different articles within a magazine. They’ll underline different paragraphs, scribble different notes in the margin and make different sense of what they read. They will then use the information to achieve different effects on their business. Businesses should expect a different output from each of their knowledge workers – it is the value they add to the business. In fact, depending on them for consistency of output is a very bad plan!

Where paper embodies a business process, it’s vital to keep track of it, so filing is a critical element of any paper-based business process. Losing, or worse still disorganising, paper records can spell business disaster. Paper has a different role for knowledge workers. Once they have been informed by it, its value is discharged and they might as well dispose of it or pass it to a colleague who might be differently informed by it. Until that time, however, it might be very unwise to even put it away. Typical knowledge workers have no stable basis on which to file paper, and as soon as they do, they don’t need to! A knowledge worker’s filing cabinet does not contain knowledge; it does not even record knowledge in the sense that business files record the state of the business. Only the knowledge workers’ heads, and the new plans and procedures they propose, can embody knowledge. The important marks in a knowledge worker’s office are on the knowledge worker, not on the paper they keep.

So, if you walk into an office which operates a business process, you’d be right to be concerned to find piles of paper or messy desks. It would suggest that the processes were not being efficiently operated or were out of control. But you shouldn’t be so concerned if you find that a knowledge worker’s desk and floors are cluttered with piles of paper and magazines, often dismembered and annotated with scribbles and Post-It notes. It may look like a mess to you, but just try “tidying” it and the knowledge worker may rightly complain that you are disrupting his or her thinking.

For knowledge workers, the combination of individual sheets, piles of paper and post-it notes are a wonderfully flexible way to help them work out their ideas, create connections between things and re-create their state of mind if interrupted by a ‘phone call or a weekend break. Knowledge workers appear to use physical space, such as desks and floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use. Filing is uncomfortable for them because they cannot reliably say when they will want to use a particular piece of information or to which of their future outputs it will relate. Interestingly, none of the knowledge workers we spoke to seemed able to organise their thinking other than with material, like printed paper, that occupied physical space.

So what does this mean for publishers?

If your target readership is knowledge workers then:-

Recognise that knowledge workers primarily use magazine articles as stimulants for their own creative thinking. Employ writers who are skilled at this ‘think piece’ approach.

Recognise that knowledge workers seek diversity of inputs. For those knowledge workers who have the greatest impact on their businesses, it would be arrogant to try to decide what is relevant - it’s not something a publisher can predict (and nor can the knowledge worker!). So seek out and include miscellaneous or ‘off-topic’ articles alongside the mainstream ones. Knowledge workers appreciate that.

Recognise that paper, which may be no more than a medium of distribution and presentation for you, is a critical thinking tool for your readers. It’s part of their flexible visual vocabulary with which they create context, new meaning and new models of the world. Expect to see pages torn out of your magazine, scribbled on, covered in highlighter and Post-its, and even scattered on the floor! A neatly filed magazine is a dead magazine from a knowledge worker point of view!