Short-term Spark or Sustained Impact? Investigating the Long-term Effect of Real-time Feedback

In order to adopt sustainable practices and strategies, organizations and individuals need to understand the environmental impact of their behavior and the knowledge about successful resource conservation strategies. Information Systems research and real-time feedback systems in particular can help to bridge this "environmental literacy gap”. In previous work, we presented an IS artifact that presents consumers with behavior-specific information on their energy and water consumption in real time. We found that this approach reduces energy and water consumption by 22%. In this work-inprogress paper, we address the open question of effect persistence in the long term. We analyze 17,612 data points collected in a 12-month field study from 50 households. First analyses indicate that the effect remains stable over time. In line with literature on “data push” systems, we argue that feedback systems should not require an additional step of user action to access the feedback which may be a barrier to longer effect persistence of information systems.

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