- Stepgreen Website -- leveraging social networks to engage individuals in green behaviors
- Tamagochi as motivation -- keep your polar bear alive!
- Impact of socio-economic status and ethnicity on green behavior, motivation and technology
- Ubigreen -- a mobile transportation tracking application
- TBD: Energy Conservation in the home -- tools and techniques for supporting energy conservation in the home.
Stepgreen Website (Mankoff & Fussell & Matthews & Matthews & Johnson & almost everyone else)
The Stepgreen website provides a mechanism for allowing individuals to report on and track their environmental impact. It includes a visualization that can be displayed on an individual's social networking web page. It also represents an umbrella project that can integrate many other pieces of software for tracking activities and impact.
Stepgreen is one of our core projects, and also represents a service that we are hoping to share with non-profits that are encouraging behavior change. Please contact us at stepgreen@cs.cmu.edu if you are interested in collaborating with us.
Findings: We have deployed the site for 3 weeks to a group of 32 users and begun an open deployment exploring live use of the site. We are still in the process of analyzing our results and have no publications to date.
Polar Bear tamagochi as motivation (Dillahunt & Kraut & Mankoff)
We are beginning to explore the potential for an animated polar bear to motivate green behavior. We have conducted a 1 week study showing an increase in reported green behavior in a condition where we created emotional attachment to a virtual polar bear. We are currently following that up with a larger online study exploring a wider range of conditions.
Publications: Dillahunt, T., Becker, G., Mankoff, J. and Kraut, R. Motivating Environmentally Sustainable Behavior Changes with a Virtual Polar Bear." Pervasive 2008 workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability. Attach:dillahunt_final.pdf
Impact of demographics (Fussell & Setlock)
We are also very interested in ensuring that our message and delivery method are appropriate for a diverse set of users. This component of our work involves investigating the most appropriate message and delivery methods for a broad range of users across several socio-economic and ethnic groups. This work is currently in its preliminary stages.
Ubigreen (Landay & Klasjna & Froehlich & Consolvo & Harrison & Dillahunt & Mankoff)
The Ubigreen project is concerned with using mobile devices to track and display transportation information. We have developed a tracking system combining data from a mobile phone and MSP sensor and display feedback back to users as an ambient display on their phone (internal documentation)