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Watch Piano Stairs Video: Volkswagon "The Fun Theory"

by Frank Liao | October 11, 2009 at 09:45 pm

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What if designs in our everyday lives made things more fun, and it even encouraged you do things are that are good for you, like exercise more often? That's the concept behind Volkswagon's astonishing new series of commercials, called "The Fun Theory".

They try to solve different kinds of problems, such as, how do you encourage people to use stairs instead of escalators? They believe that designing something fun is an important part of changing people's behavior.

They turned a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano. Think of the movie "Big" when Tom Hanks plays chopsticks on the floor piano in FAO Schwarz. Now imagine if they just lifted that floor piano and laid it out on the stairs in such a way so that each step represents a single note.

Among the experiments: does turning a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano encourage people to use them (answer: yes, 66% more). Another experiment asks whether making a trash can sound like a 50ft-deep well will make people pick up their trash. An upcoming experiment, meanwhile, will turn a bottle recycling center into an arcade game.

4 See all footage | View Slideshow

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