Food production and consumption present major sustainability challenges, and finding ways to reduce the environmental impact of food, for example through behavioural changes by consumers, is becoming increasingly important. In recent years, digital interventions have become important tools to change behaviours in many areas. In this review, we evaluate the status of current scientific knowledge of digital behaviour change interventions for sustainable food consumption practices. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist for how to conduct systematic reviews, we searched multiple databases for papers containing terms related to food, sustainability and digital behaviour change interventions. Only studies where the digital interventions were actually implemented and evaluated from a behaviour change perspective were included, resulting in 15 primary studies in the final review. The quality of the studies was evaluated from a behaviour change perspective, and the approaches used were categorised using two intervention frameworks, the Behaviour Change Wheel and the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1. The results show that all of the included studies had major quality issues when evaluated from a behaviour change perspective. This means that we could not find any evidence regarding whether the digital behaviour change interventions examined worked or not. Most studies further lacked theoretical grounding or a clear approach to how or why they should be effective for behaviour change for more sustainable food consumption practices. Our main recommendation for future research in the field is to expand from the current exploratory phase to conducting scientifically rigorous studies of higher quality, more thoroughly grounded in behaviour change theory and methods. Furthermore, based on our study, we suggest changes to the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1.
In this article, we present Power Agent-a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the game's evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues.
Smart electricity meters and home displays are being installed in people's homes with the assumption that households will make the necessary efforts to reduce their electricity consumption. However, present solutions do not sufficiently account for the social implications of design. There is a potential for greater savings if we can better understand how such designs affect behaviour. In this paper, we describe our design of an energy awareness artefact-the Energy AWARE Clock-and discuss it in relation to behavioural processes in the home. A user study is carried out to study the deployment of the prototype in real domestic contexts for three months. Results indicate that the Energy AWARE Clock played a significant role in drawing households' attention to their electricity use. It became a natural part of the household and conceptions of electricity became naturalized into informants' everyday language.
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