Motivating Sustainable Behavior

Personal resource consumption is a major issue in sustainability. Consequently it has attracted a great deal of attention in the research community across domains including psychology, design and, more recently, HCI. Extending this body of work, this paper proposes the theoretical basis and general design of a system intended to enable users to understand the effect of their resource consumption practices and the direct influence that changes in their behavior patterns will have. The system has not yet been constructed. The design is motivated by the desire to enable users to experiment with, draw conclusions on and personally optimize their personal energy consumption. This vision is fundamentally one of citizen scientists, empowered to take responsibility for and reason about the consequences of their own actions. A further key element in this paper is to support communities of users as they develop, share and promote these sustainable conclusions and best practices, essentially aiding activists to spread their local message about this key global issue. Author Keywords Motivation, sustainability, resource consumption ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION In the face of environmental scares, rising costs for fuel and food and diminishing availability of these resources [14], sustainability and the environment have become prominent economic and political issues across the globe, literally becoming make or break issues in elections [e.g. 3]. In spite of this, the level of change individuals enact in their own behavior remains worryingly low. This matters: resource consumption in the home and commercial sector is reported to be almost 20% percent of overall consumption in the USA [15], and up to 20 times per head greater than that in the third world. Europe and developed Asia fare little better with multipliers of 12 and 10. This paper explores the issues underlying this discrepancy: why do vote green, but not act it? And, more importantly, it offers a theoretical understanding of how we as technologists and interaction designers can influence this trend. It achieves by reviewing the literature on theories of motivation and linking the conclusions of this discussion into a framework of activism supported by technological systems and services which allow individuals to capture, understand and communicate not only the impact of their behaviors but also the impact of their changes in behavior. By designing infrastructures that facilitate citizens in understanding and acting in their everyday energy consumption practice, we hope to promote a positive vision of accepting personal responsibility for the resources we consume and foster the image (and reality) of achieving a better quality of life through the adoption of sustainable practices [9]. We also anticipate that providing users with these kinds of tool will support the grassroots development of products and service solutions [10] tackling sustainable issues. MOTIVATING SUSTAINABILITY This position paper suggests the fundamental factor underlying our unwillingness to integrate sustainable practices into our everyday lives is one of motivation. Introducing DOTT 2007, John Thackara illustrates this suggestion vividly [13]: "The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the grey water toilet is blocked again. As a way of life, sustainability often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs. Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behavior as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy. Could one planet living be made desirable, better than what we have now?” Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. UbiComp 2008, Sep 21-24, Seoul, South Korea. Workshops Proceedings. Copyright held by the authors. Indeed, this is a theme which has long been examined in the design community (in, for example, the SusHouse project in the late 90s [18]). It is concisely expressed by Manzini [9]: “the action of consuming less has to be combined with a perception of living better”. However, how this objective can be realized remains a topic of some debate and this paper turns to psychological theories of motivation for insight. Although some of these have been explored in the context of computer science under the general banner of captology [5], this paper provides a brief review specifically focusing on how they can be used to explain the lack of adoption of sustainable practices in the developed world. In particular, we highlight goal-setting theory [7]. This framework identifies three major factors of an end state that contribute to how motivated an individual is to attain it: proximity (the length of time it will take), difficulty (how hard it is) and specificity (how well defined success is). It suggests that people are most motivated to achieve goal states which are clearly defined and not too challenging or long-haul. Unfortunately, most goals in sustainability do not take this form. For example, reducing a home energy bill is a task which will take several months, may involve arduous efforts to enforce good practices on other family members and the influence of any given action (say using less of an appliance) does not have a clearly observable impact on the final result. Goal-setting theory predicts that motivating oneself to achieve a task of this nature would be extremely difficult. Another key concept is the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations [11]. The latter term refers to motivations related to the achievement of external goals such as avoiding an unpleasant circumstance, impressing another person or attaining a particular prize or status. In contrast, intrinsic motivations (which have generally been studied by educational psychologists) lack obvious external incentives but are generally thought to be more powerful. They have been linked to an individual’s belief that affecting the desired outcome is within their control and a high internal level of interest (as in the pursuit of a hobby). Although sustainability concerns are often couched exclusively in terms of extrinsic motivations such as saving money or attaining respect, combining these with appeals to intrinsic, self-driven motivations might make a more effective approach. Thackara hints at this issue in the quote given earlier: why is sustainability something we must be compelled to embrace? A better approach would surely be to make it more internally desirable, frame it as something people might actually want to do. CITIZEN SCIENCE AS SELF STUDY This paper proposes to embody the motivational factors reviewed above into a framework of citizen science. To ground this discussion, it deals with a specific example of the use of electricity in the home, although we believe the concepts discussed can apply more generally: to water, fuel use and transportation. One key component of this system is a diverse set of devices to measure, display and control resource usage and the efficiency of that usage. In the electrical domain, this includes a network of power meters attached to individual sockets, room activity sensors, ambient displays and on/off device controllers. Although numerous, these kinds of device are generally small and consume relatively little power. They have been studied in the context of sustainability by many previous researchers (see [2] or [12] for brief reviews) and some commercial products are already available. The novel aspect of the approach proposed in this paper is to focus on collating data from these devices with more normal diary and activity logs in an on-line social networking site. The main goal of this site will be to allow users to visualize and understand their own resource usage over time through encouraging and supporting them in asking meaningful questions about it. These questions might relate to the current state of their energy consumption, to some change they have enacted in their habits, to outcomes of future changes they might adopt or to a comparison between their usage data and that of one or more other users of the system. By supporting this kind of sophisticated hypothesis generation and test, people will be able to better understand the consequences of their own actions and therefore to adjust their behavior in full knowledge of its effects. This represents a fundamental shift in motivational strategy with the objective of demonstrating to users how small changes in their behavior can have clear significant effects in their consumption. For example, many people may find it hard to connect the use of the lights in their kitchen and restroom with their monthly electricity bill. Rephrasing this as a percentage change in usage based on improved behavior acted out over the course of a single day or week and then projecting that forward on to a period of weeks or months will make the impact clearer. Goal setting theory predicts this simpler, more immediate and precise expression of goal states will increase people’s levels of motivation. Similarly, by empowering users with the ability to understand the impact of their actions, we can appeal to intrinsic internal motivators. The value of setting achievable goals has been stated previously in this domain [e.g. 16]. The system propose