Motivating online engagement and debates on energy consumption

Several studies and official reports argue that changing people's behavior towards energy consumption is a vital part of our fight against climate change. Engaging people into this issue is the first step towards a social change. However, it has been shown that information campaigns and technology alone are insufficient to achieve such engagement. Understanding what motivate people, in which contexts and combinations, and for which individuals, is therefore key to engaging the public more successfully in such crucial debates. This work investigates the role and impact of motivational strategies on promoting engagement in online energy debates. We report our results from running an experiment in the workplace, in which 33 people contributed to an online discussion on reducing energy consumption. A public and tangible feedback of contributions to the online debate, as well as social comparison and competition were analyzed as motivational strategies. Our results point out that engagement goes beyond intrinsic motivation, and that a set of interplaying factors influenced by the social context was found to be the stronger motivational force of engagement.

[1]  Lena Mamykina,et al.  Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west , 2011, CHI.

[2]  Ricardo Baeza-Yates,et al.  User engagement: the network effect matters! , 2012, CIKM '12.

[3]  Helmut Krcmar,et al.  Motivating domestic energy conservation through comparative, community-based feedback in mobile and social media , 2011, C&T.

[4]  M. Bradley,et al.  Measuring emotion: Behavior, feeling, and physiology , 2000 .

[5]  Andy Boucher,et al.  Power to the people: dynamic energy management through communal cooperation , 2012, DIS '12.

[6]  Julita Vassileva,et al.  Motivating participation in social computing applications: a user modeling perspective , 2012, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

[7]  R. Stamper.  Information in business and administrative systems , 1973 .

[8]  Jennifer Preece,et al.  Designing social media for change , 2013, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[9]  Paul A. Cairns,et al.  Wattsup?: motivating reductions in domestic energy consumption using social networks , 2010, NordiCHI.

[10]  Philip M. Johnson,et al.  The Kukui Cup: A Dorm Energy Competition Focused on Sustainable Behavior Change and Energy Literacy , 2011, 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[11]  Michalis Vazirgiannis,et al.  To stay or not to stay: modeling engagement dynamics in social graphs , 2013, CIKM.

[12]  Ping Zhang,et al.  Technical opinionMotivational affordances , 2008 .

[13]  Tawanna Dillahunt,et al.  Understanding factors of successful engagement around energy consumption between and among households , 2014, CSCW.

[14]  Noah J. Goldstein,et al.  A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels , 2008 .

[15]  Rod Amner,et al.  Civic Engagement , 2009, Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging.

[16]  Paul Dourish,et al.  HCI and environmental sustainability: the politics of design and the design of politics , 2010, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[17]  Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas,et al.  Designing to Promote a New Social Affordance for Energy Consumption , 2013, I3E.

[18]  N. Sadat Shami,et al.  Experiments on Motivational Feedback for Crowdsourced Workers , 2013, ICWSM.

[19]  Philip M. Johnson,et al.  Beyond kWh: Myths and fixes for energy competition game design , 2012 .

[20]  Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas,et al.  Basis and prospects of motivation informing design: requirements for situated eco-feedback technology , 2012, IHC.

[21]  C. Vlek,et al.  A review of intervention studies aimed at household energy conservation , 2005 .

[22]  Eric Paulos,et al.  Beyond energy monitors: interaction, energy, and emerging energy systems , 2012, CHI.

[23]  Eric Paulos,et al.  Home, habits, and energy: examining domestic interactions and energy consumption , 2010, CHI.

[24]  Eric C. Larson,et al.  The design and evaluation of prototype eco-feedback displays for fixture-level water usage data , 2012, CHI.

[25]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Technology-Mediated Social Participation: The Next 25 Years of HCI Challenges , 2011, HCI.

[26]  James A. Landay,et al.  The design of eco-feedback technology , 2010, CHI.

[27]  Simon Buckingham Shum,et al.  The Evidence Hub: Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of Communities to Build Evidence-Based Knowledge , 2013 .

[28]  L. Nadel,et al.  Cognitive neuroscience of emotion , 2000 .

[29]  Edward L. Deci,et al.  Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior , 1975, Perspectives in Social Psychology.

[30]  J. Jelsma.  Designing ‘moralized’ products , 2006 .

[31]  Juliane Jung,et al.  Understanding Motivation And Emotion , 2016 .

[32]  Cecilia Katzeff,et al.  Watt-Lite: energy statistics made tangible , 2010, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[33]  Simon Buckingham Shum,et al.  Contested Collective Intelligence: Rationale, Technologies, and a Human-Machine Annotation Study , 2012, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[34]  S J Coppinger.  Energy Challenges , 2011, IEEE Industry Applications Magazine.

[35]  Lorraine Whitmarsh,et al.  Communicating climate change to mass public audiences , 2010 .

[36]  Gregory E. Kersten,et al.  Extrinsic or Intrinsic Motivation of E-Negotiation Experiments' Participants , 2011, 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[37]  Harith Alani,et al.  Energy consumption awareness in the workplace: technical artefacts and practices , 2014, IHC.