Persuasive Services

The project Persuasive Services (2008-2010) explored information and communication technologies promoting sustainable everyday decisions. Environmental questions have evolved from being of minority interest to widely accepted mainstream view in the developed world. Concepts such as sustainability, climate change, carbon dioxide and ecological food, have become part of the media debate and are in everyday use. At the same time information and media technology is becoming more accessible and ubiquitous. There is more information linked to the real world, more objects that can behave intelligently, and more ways in which information infrastructures and people can interact. We can use these technologies to increase efficiency of human activities and to change the way we live, which may result in reduction of harmful effects of our lifestyles on the environment.

Persuasive Services focused on using computer based information and feedback for influencing behavior. The project explored the state of the art in using information technologies for sustainability purposes and created a number of prototypes and functional applications that were released and tested. These applications focused on three gaps:

• Most information about environmental impacts is not available at the time of decision: Mobile technology can help providing the right information at the right moment to help making sound decisions. For example, Fisk.cc provides SMS information about the sustainability of different fish, giving instant advice when needed (when in a restaurant or in the supermarket).
• There is no personalized feedback: Often, there is a lack of information about users’ environmental impact. Individuals have some general knowledge and guidelines but no way of getting feedback about their environmental actions. We created applications to demonstrate the possibilities of ICT in closing this gap: OurCO2 collects carbon dioxide information from several sources so that users can track their behavior. Greenalytics explores how ICT can be used to automatically generate and communicate real time environmental impacts following a mashup approach.
• There is a lack of understanding of environmental information: An identified problem when developing the interventions was that environmental information such as kilograms of carbon dioxide is abstract and difficult to understand. We created Carbon.to as a way to increase the understanding of CO₂ information through the comparison with different everyday units.

From the theoretical studies and the interventions made we can draw several conclusions. First, there is a need for data. Data and information is key in providing a baseline and feedback for behavioral change. This data, however, is difficult to obtain. We see a need for increased data transparency, data sharing, open standards for environmental information and the use of new paradigms such as Linked Data, APIs, and mashups for increasing data availability. The other conclusion we could draw from the applications is that the evaluation of behavioral change is challenging. Pointing out concrete attitude or behavioral change to the use of a certain application has proven difficult. There is a need for better evaluation methods for this type of services.

During the period this project ran, the popularity of mobile and computer applications for sustainability have increased exponentially. This project developed applications and prototypes that have been in the cutting-edge. They are a proof of concept for what is possible and they explored the challenges that can be addressed. From them, we see the need for data as the main opportunity to be explored. There are many opportunities for creating applications that communicate sustainability and help changing behavior. Opening data sources and information so the developer community can easily develop the kind of services we have been working with can be the way forward.

Team

Alumni

• David Kjelkerud