Personalised eco-feedback as a design technique for motivating energy saving behaviour at home

Abstract

In recent years, interaction designers have actively started addressing sustainability as a research topic. More specifically, persuasive applications, which aim at promoting pro-environmental behaviour, such as energy saving have been of growing interest in multiple research disciplines. Driven by the proliferation of smart meters and energy monitors as well as the rise of social media, researchers and designers of persuasive applications have developed a wide range of design solutions that address this issue. The majority of them, however, provide the same information to users irrespective of differences in their environmental concerns and different motivations to conserve energy. Our research addresses this gap. We design mock-up screens that provide feedback catering towards different pro-environmental values and concerns and ask users to evaluate them in a survey setting. The research aims at understanding what feedback different people find relevant and therefore attempts to bridge the gap between environmental psychology and HCI. At the same time it provides insights for the design of personalised eco-feedback related to energy consumption.

Experiencing a Home Energy Management System: Finding Opportunities for Design

“…At this phase, by using the system, it is important to help users to cultivate their awareness of in-home energy management. Making energy more transparent to people proved to be a key insight for changing consumers' attitude and behaviour towards saving energy [6,8]. Although it is argued that money is not a good stimulus to rise people's attention in the long run, it is still of great necessity in the early development phase when people start to experience any HEMS.…”

“…HEMs offer a worthy solution by providing timely feedback of daily energy usage. It is evident that some studies and experiments of implementing HEMS into people's life have been conducted in western countries [1,8]. Several Chinese companies have already stepped into this field and have started developing solutions.…”

Selecting Persuasive Strategies and Game Design Elements for Encouraging Energy Saving Behavior

“…Gabrielli et al [9] developed an Android prototype for sustainable urban mobility that employed four behavior change strategies including goal-setting, self-monitoring, personalized notifications, and sharing. Petkov et al [10] designed a mock-up screen for an eco-feedback system that provides different types of feedback information and the results show that people with different levels of environmental awareness are motivated by different types of feedback. Orji et al [11] examined the persuasiveness of ten commonly used persuasive strategies for healthy eating and estimated the persuasiveness of these ten strategies for seven gamer types via a questionnaire survey.…”

Perceptions and behaviour towards climate change and energy savings: the role of social media

“…EnergyWiz [31] explored social comparison one-on-one and ranking to motivate savings. This project also relies on environmental psychology to design tailored eco-feedback considering different values (altruistic, egoistic, and biospheric) related to environmental concerns [34].…”