Persuasive Technology 2008 - Oulu, Finland

Breaking News! Persuasive Technology 2008, the Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology, will take place in Oulu, Finland next June.

The 2007 version of this conference, aptly named Persuasive Technology 2007, was chaired by BJ Fogg and hosted at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab in April. This was Closed Loop Marketing’s first exposure to this community of industry experts and researchers and we were impressed. You can read a review of Persuasive 2007 here.

The mission of these international conferences on Persuasive Technology is to provide new insights into the ways video games, mobile phone applications and websites can be designed to motivate and influence people.

Next year’s conference, jointly organized by the University of Oulu in Finland and the University of Aalborg in Denmark, will also feature research themes on:

• Motivational technology
• Persuasive games
• Web 2.0
• Mobile persuasion
• Ethics of Persuasive Technology
• Business models for persuasive systems

Both universities have a long tradition in researching the human and social side of Information Technology. More recently, their focus has evolved to include Persuasive Technology. The University of Aalborg even offers the first full Master’s program dedicated to this subject.

Finland is often referred to as the “land of the thousand lakes” and becomes the “land of the midnight sun” in midsummer, complete with frequent sightings of the Northern Lights.

As it promises to build on the success of Persuasive Technology 2007, I’d recommend marking your calendars for June 4 - 6, 2008, as this will be a conference worth attending.

More details will be available during the coming months - and we’ll be sure to share them here on our blog. In the meantime, the most current source of information is located at the Persuasive 2008 site.