“ Annoying , but in a Nice Way ” : An Inquiry into the Experience of Frictional Feedback

Environmental issues, such as reducing avoidable energy consumption, require people to change their attitudes and behavior. For example, studies estimated that 26–36% of a household’s energy consumption is subject to variations in everyday individual behavior (Wood & Newborough, 2003). Conserving energy is thus not only a matter of advanced insulation or heating technology. It is a way of living. People who care about energy consumption must question and reconsider their most convenient and pleasurable routines, such as taking long, hot showers or luxuriating in cool, air-conditioned breezes. While general information about energy conservation and appeals to behave accordingly are abundant (for example, in Germany: Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety, 2015; Federal Government, 2013), people’s behavior is not always in line with their knowledge or intentions. At the end of the day, the longing for a hot shower after a cold and stressful day may trump more abstract, future-oriented concerns for the environment. To remedy this, designers and researchers recently began to explore the roles that interactive technologies can play in supporting behavioral and attitudinal change in general (Dorrestijn & Verbeek, 2013; Fogg, 2003), and in the context of sustainability (Blevis, 2007; DiSalvo & Sengers, 2010) or psychological wellbeing (e.g., Hassenzahl et al., 2013). At the heart of supporting and motivating change through interactive technologies is the provision of feedback (for overviews see Froehlich & Findlater, 2010; Pierce, Odom, & Blevis, 2008). Individualized feedback is expected to lead to insight, selfreflection and, ultimately, change in attitude and behavior (e.g., Holmes, 2007; Lilley, 2009). Some concepts focus primarily on awareness, such as Gustafsson and Gyllenswärd’s (2005) wellknown Power Aware Cord (see Figure 1), which visualizes the flow of energy by means of dynamic glowing patterns on the cord itself. This feedback, however, is not goal-oriented, since the glowing patterns do not suggest a way to reduce energy consumption. On the contrary, their intrinsic beauty may even provoke more consumption. Other concepts already monitor and present data in such a way as to imply appropriate goals (e.g., Arroyo, Bonanni, & Selker, 2005; Broms et al., 2010; Jönsson, Broms, & Katzeff, 2010; Laschke, Hassenzahl, Diefenbach, & Tippkämper, 2011). DESIGN CASE STUDY