Encouraging Sustainable Energy Use in the Office with Persuasive Mobile Information Systems

Faced with growing pressures to be more environmentally sustainable, many companies are increasingly exploring innovative ways to incorporate “green” practices into their business processes. We focus on employees and their potential contributions to organization-wide sustainability goals through their pro-environmental behaviours. This article reports on current progress with a multi-year study targeting the use of mobile media to encourage pro-environmental behaviours. To do so, we provide employees with feedback on their computer-based energy usage. We discuss our combined design science and experimental approach to developing and studying a mobile application with embedded persuasive characteristics. Our future interventions will use this persuasive media platform to examine the impact of social-psychological theories on encouraging more sustainable energy use by employees.

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