“Using persuasive technology to encourage sustainable behavior”, from a group in the Netherlands; “Taking the Guesswork out of Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyles” from a team in the US;  and a Swiss contributed paper, “The Potential of UbiComp Technologies to Determine the Carbon Footprints of Products.”

The workshop promises to address issues around the design of augmenting, pervasive systems that aim to persuade:

Providing people with environmental data and educational information – via mass communications such as film, TV and print and new media, or micro communications such as pervasive sensor networks - may not trigger sufficient motivation to get people to change their habits towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. This workshop seeks to develop a better understanding how to go beyond just informing and into motivating and encouraging action and change.

This sounds right up our alley; I only wish I could avoid the long carbon-rich flight to Australia to justify attendance.   I hope the organizers provide an open format for publishing and sharing results and even encourage participation from remote participants.   

Do check out the workshop webpage for links to some good resources.

Speaking of conferences, this weekend is CHI 2008, the SIGCHI conference, in Florence, Italy.  This year the conference is “going green” — due to the encouragement of a few folks from the Sustainable CHI Google Group, I believe.

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Dan Lockton writes about the Orb on his blog, Architectures of Control: Design with Intent:

Recent design graduate Harry Ward’s Orb energy monitor is especially attractive: a toroidal inductor is clipped around the cable being measured, and transmits data wirelessly to the Orb itself, a hand-held unit which glows different colours depending on the power being drawn. The display on the Orb could show the user the direct electricity cost and CO₂ emissions equivalent, as well as the actual power being used and cumulative energy (kWh) used over a period.

In an email, Ward described the key principle in his design: it was to be a “a real-time energy monitor that made the concept of ‘energy monitoring’ simple and understandable.”

There are several levels to the monitoring: “First, ‘at-a-glance,’ whereby the consumer can instantly understand what is happening, by a coloured glow. Next, digital figures are available to justify the glow. Finally, the product has a self-learning feature, that uses historical consumption data to provide comparison for the user.”

I asked Ward why he felt that a product like this is important, and he replied, “I felt, as I do now, that as energy prices rise and the pressure to reduce CO2 emissions increases we will need to be able to look at what we use and when – at the point of consumption (ie not in a bill 3 months later!).”

Developed originally as part of a final-year product design project for his degree, the end product may differ from what we’ve seen thus far. So, consider the product we are seeing here a preview of a perfected design we’ll see later on.

Ward wrote that during the process of design, he “did prototyping whilst developing the product at the workshop that was available at my University. Its a very useful process that I would say is essential to ensure the product design is achievable on a production level. The orb, as it displayed in Dan Lockton’s website, is the creation from my degree after various attempts at different designs. I settled on the tactile shape to encourage the user to use the product around the home. Since then, the product has had many other embodiments.”

The design is being finalized now, and plans are underway to get the Orb into production in the next year. I’ll keep you posted.

Photo courtesy of Harry Ward

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