A recent book I read on creativity in design brought up the concept of "ritual attachments." These are ways of doing things that individuals make part of their habits, and even if more efficient and cleaner / safer / better ways of doing things are introduced, they may not be willing to try them. These authors offered a range of examples and showed how design has to take these into account if they're going to have new products get accepted. (One example of this is our affinity for familiar flavors and how newly introduced flavors and food products - even if they're highly tested - tend to fail 90%+ of the time). The authors write: "Over the years, we've developed an emotional, ritual attachment to every part of the process of opening a bottle of wine, from stripping off the lead wrapping (now aluminum) to yanking out, smelling, and sometimes keeping the cork. It's going to take considerable time and effort before wine corks are abandoned for bottle caps or an even better solution takes hold. Thousands of years of wine making have created one of the world's strongest rituals, a deeply ingrained mixture of myth, aesthetics, and habit that prevents a formidable barrier to change." -- Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman in The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm

Electronic Ritual Attachments

Recently, I had run-in with my bank, a national California-based entity that generally has provided fine service through mostly remote means. It has branches in various locations around the country, which means lower interest rates for savings accounts and what-not and higher fees to borrow money for property, but I have some sort of a loyalty thing going on. Well, that was sorely tested recently in an incident with a teller who kept my driver's license for almost a week for no reason and then finally mailed it back to me. Strange doings. Anyway, I had myself all ready to leave this bank as a customer when I realized that I would have to do a lot of paperwork shuffling...to reset automatic insurance charges, automatic deposits, automatic bill pays, and other small headaches. On top of that, I found that I had my own "ritual attachments" to logging on to check my accounts through this entity. There's something perversely enjoyable about writing a check and sending it off to pre-pay principal on a loan and see how long it actually takes to move through the various bureaucracies and mail system. Efficiency is not the only coinage.

The ID Connection

So I was watching educational CDs last night and was especially interested in the "Technology" section of one DVD on excellent teaching on my campus. There was the use of multimedia in the classroom, the laser pointer, the overhead projector, the document camera and LCD projector. Check, check, check. Nothing on real-time hand-held responders. Nothing on email. Nothing on the WWW or Internet. Nothing on eportfolios. Nothing on LMSes. Nothing on online surveys. Nothing on electronic grading. Nothing on databases. Blank blank blank.

And then, eureka: ritual attachments.