GoEco! – A Set of Smartphone Apps Supporting the Transition Towards Sustainable Mobility Patterns

How can we encourage people to engage in more sustainable mobility lifestyles, reducing car use? Taking advantage of the wide availability of smartphones, we overcome the traditional awareness-raising approach and exploit eco-feedback, social norms and peer pressure elements in an ICT-based motivation system. We developed two smartphone Apps, which are currently being tested in a real-life, large-scale living lab experiment. The GoEco! Tracker App monitors the mobility patterns of the participants, identifying the routes they travel and the means of transport they use, and it is primarily meant to collect baseline data. Exploiting individual achievement and competition game mechanics, the full GoEco! App additionally nudges users towards personal goals for change and engages them in individual and collective challenges, strengthening competition with a “hall of fame” section. In this paper we introduce the GoEco! Apps and their theoretical eco-feedback and gamification framework, describe their key functionalities and comment on the main strengths and limitations after one month of large-scale testing of the GoEco! Tracker App.