Shedding lights on human values: an approach to engage families with energy conservation

Changing behaviour related to energy conservation is not an emotionally neutral task. People have to deal with individual and group interests, contextual constraints, eventually trading-off between their values and effective actions in terms of savings. This paper presents a set of dynamics and artefacts for families to raise and share their energy awareness, and transform it into sustainable behaviour. This method based on human values was applied with 7 families to identify critical factors that must be in play when promoting energy conservation within a social group. Preliminary results confirmed that bringing families’ values into discussion and establishing shared commitments and responsibilities are promising approaches for technology design with the purpose to raise awareness collectively and promote effective changes in behaviour towards protecting the natural environment

Designing to raise collective awareness and leverage energy savings

Designing to promote behaviour change requires bringing sociocultural and psychological aspects to light. By connecting findings in these aspects from user-centred activities and behaviour change literature, a set of guidelines has been proposed to design for leveraging behaviour change towards energy saving. The guidelines include associating social media features and energy consumption monitoring to specific stages in a behaviour change process