The various dailies I read have all been covering a VW program called The Fun Theory. It’s a contest and entries are supposed to provide evidence that making things fun can influence peoples’ behavior (presumably they mean to influence it positively).

For example, to encourage people to recycle bottles and cans more, a group turned a recycling receptacle into a “Whack-A-Mole” game of sorts. Or mounting giant piano keys (like in the movie Big) on stairs to encourage people to walk up the stairs rather than use the adjacent escalator. The site provides a lot of great videos and statistics:

I’ve mentioned Luis von Ahn before (incidentally he’s the man behind CAPTCHAs - the distorted text websites sometimes ask you to type in). His area of research is human computation, which generally takes the form of turning a repetitive or boring task into a really truly enjoyable game. Sure, it’s advice one’s mother has given them a hundred times, but how many times have you washed the floor with scrub-brush-shoes like in Pipi Longstocking? It’s non-trivial to turn something into a game, but still not a new idea, strictly speaking.

Not only is making monotonous tasks fun a great motivator, but many indicate that play is important. I’ve been watching a lot of TED Talks lately for our upcoming TEDx event, and these Fun Theory projects remind me of one I watched recently: