« The long-winded answer.
Message v. subject: execution v. idea. »

The psychology of human movement.

img 0828 The psychology of human movement.

Yesterday was one of those amazing sky days that anyone who lives in the Midwest will know what I’m talking about. The clouds looked like they’d been painted by Van Gogh. My crappy iPhone picture doesn’t really do it justice unfortunately.

I started to understand Minnesota, by looking at the sky. Having moved here from San Francisco, I desperately missed the mountains and scenery. It was days like yesterday that made me realise that the sky, on the prairie, is a big part of the scenery.

The first American city I lived in was Los Angeles. In LA, the smog made looking at the sky quite depressing. As a result, most of one’s focus tended to be down or straight ahead. You can see the impact of this on LA’s architecture; on most streets, there isn’t a lot happening above street level.

I’ve often thought there must also be an impact on your outlook that comes from your visual perspective. Looking one way or another must colour how you think. Even from a physiological standpoint, the effect of keeping one’s eyes focused in close and of bending one’s neck to look downwards must have an effect on your well being.

As branding moves from the creation of imagery towards the creation of interactions, I think this sort of thinking is going to have to be embraced by marketers. Already, certain gestures are starting to become appropriated by brands. For example Apple now owns the swipe and pinch (sorry Tom) while Microsoft has long owned the “3-finger salute.”

It seems to me that a number of trends will speed this along:

  • The rise of gestural interfaces: things like Apple’s multitouch or Microsoft’s Surface, as well as control innovations like Nintendo’s Wii are making movement a much larger part of any brand’s iconography.
  • The spread of mobile computing places big limits on the utility of buttons and menus as the main interface paradigm. The applications and services that will gain the most traction on mobile devices will probably be the ones that deliver functionality through movements that are easy to execute on the go.
  • The rise of retail and or real-world experiences as an increasingly important channel for reaching cutomers. These spaces create opportunities for companies to think more broadly about interaction cues they send out. To use Apple again, the shift to handheld card swipers has enabled its staff to come out from behind their cash registers and walk the floor. This has an efficiency gain but it also has huge impacts on the experience. Queuing is a thing of the past, employees are freed to help me navigate the store, it’s quite literally a genius move that comes very clearly from values of the brand.

To me, one of the larger questions is how marketers can incorporate this kind of thinking into what they do? The typical stewards of brands – communications experts – are woefully ill-equipped for 3-dimensional thinking about the effects of human motion on perception and emotion. And it’s unclear that any of the existing disciplines that orbit around the marketing sun have that kind of knowledge either. That leaves various branches of academia who are studying the psychological effects of human movement from a number of different angles.

Personally, I think this is a fascinating area. I’d love to know if anyone is thinking about or working on this kind of stuff right now? I would love to collaborate with you – if there’s anything I can offer. Or has anyone cracked the code on this that I can simply steal borrow? Do let me know.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Related posts:

  1. Towards a framework for imagining mobile applications. From the Flikr of davidcrow Earlier this week, Helge...

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under interactions, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • As a consumer, one of the simplest customer service interactions a retailer can make after I've given them my money, is to come around from behind the counter, hand me my purchase and thank me for my business. Is this asking a lot? Nordstrom was doing this back in the day. I kinda expect it from shops, like Ted Baker, Theory, or Barney's Co-Op, but when I had this type of service at a Macy's I was kinda blown away. Maybe it's just something in the little bubble that I live in. But it was that experience that elevated my attitude towards Macy's. I wonder if more brand can learn from these small interactions with their consumers?
  • Your post made me flash back to when I was performing as a singer in nightclubs. Typically there is the stage, with the performers, and the audience. Here. And there. Not unlike the unilateral paradigm of old school advertising: sit back and read/listen/hear what we want to tell you . . .

    When I would venture off stage and enter the crowd, sitting at audience members' tables, walking around among them . . .the invisible wall was broken, and the rules of interaction were shifted. Sometimes I'd give them the microphone, or share it with them and the degree of bonding between my "brand" and my "consumers" was perceptibly altered. For the *much* better.

    Don't know that I've added much to your idea, but it performer/audience scenario seems an interesting metaphor for what's possible, and the potential outcomes, of brands changing the rules of engagement with people.
  • @Rick Julian

    In a similar vein, I find that when giving any business presentation, classroom lecture or professional seminar, the act of moving around the room is extremely powerful.

    By integrating myself into/beside/behind/around the audience, I've always thought it makes for a much more collaborative process. Generally it promotes more dialogue and a better experience for everyone.

    It may be that there is some psychological effect for the audience generated by my wandering that breaks down the walls you mentioned.
  • These examples are very much about putting viewer/customer on the same level as the presenter/seller. About creating a collaborative relationship rather than just a transactional one. This is simply good practice. The next frontier is to translate your brand promise into proprietary movements. I think that no one has really done that yet in a non-theatric Disney way.

    I agree with @windo, even basic stuff is beyond most brands' capabilities but I think things move forward faster than we imagine. It will only take one really smart company to embed movement into their brand experience for everyone else to start doing it. I think the likely culprits are the companies we always talk about - Apple et al.
  • As ever, very interesting thinking, A.

    In another part of the lake, I've been pondering about how brands can teach certain behaviours around consumption, drinking beer from the bottle or serving with a slice of lime in the neck

    Try find the gesture/behaviour/ritual in this launch I did last year....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoZvPD3H0_M

    Is this the kind of thing you mean?
  • Assuming you're talking about burning orange peel? If so, that's definitely part of what I'm talking about. In fact someone commented on this post on Facebook that organised religion have known about this for ages and we're all just catching on. I think ritual is open space for lots of brands and create reasons and rules for participation Herd-style too.

    (You're familiar with Blue Moon, I'm assuming - their success has been driven largely by using orange slices, and of course Magners succeeded by adding ice.)
  • this is awesome, love the point you made about Apple. The French theorist Michel de Certeau wrote some great stuff about spatial relationships, gestures and narrative. I also think the work by Project for Public Spaces can provide good thinking on this. And, uh, here a presentation I gave about how urban planning can inform brand planning. The way we move through cityspace is quite similar to how we negotiate brands/new media...
  • Thanks Michael, that's a really great presentation and a very cool blog you have there. I've added you to my reading list.

    I think the point you make (in your presentation) about leaving room for individual interpretation is spot on. Storytelling applied to a real world interaction or experience often results in a Disney-like attraction where you are shepherded from one place to the next. To me this is even more evidence that this kind of thinking lies way beyond the realm of current marketing thinking.
  • Mark Wagner
    Adrian, a little late to the conversation on this, but I think you're dead on about physical movement and behaviors as the next extension for brand experiences. For the most part, movement as a ritual can communicate just as much (sometimes more) as pictures, text, audio. Anthropology and ethnography have a lot to teach us in this department. As far as interaction design reading is concerned, I'm sure you're familiar with Dan Saffer's research and writing in gestural interaction design: http://www.designinggesturalinterfaces.com/
  • @Adrian - thanks for the kind words on the presentation and flattered to be added.

    continuing your thought about real world interaction with narrative or brand, we've been working on a project that aims to stretch story as far into the physical realm as possible, less Disney, more DaDa.
  • Very interesting. I currently study human movement and appreciate your post. Thanks
blog comments powered by Disqus