Yet another energy awareness savvy article appears this weekend in the New York Times.  It discusses the powerful motivator of friendly competition to modify energy use behavior.  When people have a notion of normal behavior, they tend to change what they do.

Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, studies how to get Americans — even those who did not care about the environment — to lower energy consumption. And while there are many ways, Dr. Cialdini said, few are as effective as comparing people with their peers.

In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect, Dr. Cialdini said, was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

“It is fundamental and primitive,” said Dr. Cialdini, who owns a stake in Positive Energy. “The mere perception of the normal behavior of those around us is very powerful.”

A couple of programs mentioned in the article:

BrainShift Foundation Energy Smackdown

Central College PODS Dorm

Quality Attributes Software Green Touchsreen used on the PODS Dorm

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Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

If you read it all the way through, I would be curious to hear your thoughts.

After Nov. 4, Worldchanging, Viridian Movement’s most visible offshoot on the web, launched Inaugurate Change, a call for the incoming administration to set the nation on a course to carbon neutrality by 2030. It’s a call to the Viridian ideal:

The things we must create to fight climate change are also the things we need to generate a strong economic recovery: livable cities, clean energy, green jobs, new technologies, better transportation, healthy forests and thriving family farms.

And if you are still at all skeptical that the times have changed, it is worth considering this humble little form on a new web site called change.gov.

The government coming into power now has an active videoblog, and it wants to hear from you.

Energy & Environment Form on change.gov

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Today is World Usability Day 2008, and this year’s theme is transportation.  As part of the day’s events, the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) has announced the Global Transport Challenge, which includes a little web-based carbon calculator.

It’s an easy way for you to understand how you use transportation everyday and the impact it has on our environment.

You will be able to:

• MEASURE your everyday transportation usage
• MONITOR your  personal carbon travel footprint and compare yourself to othersaround the world
• MINIMIZE your energy usage through alternative transportation choices, carbon offsets, and simple travel changes  thereby maximizing the impact on our world.

Today there are World Usability Day events in over 40 countries, many will be webcast,  and some will take place online only.   World Usability Day is a UPA initiative to

provide a single worldwide day of events around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen and governmental groups for our common objective: to ensure that technology helps people live to their full potential and helps create a better world for all citizens everywhere. [Link]

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“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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After signing up, you’re asked to work through some questions about your lifestyle, to gauge where you are now, and where you can make an impact. This creates your Edenbee “Lifestyle Profile.” Edenbee immediately recommends some goals (”Take your next holiday close to home,” or “Use public transit whenever you can”) and then invites you to find more that match the changes you’re hoping to make.

This social goal-setting system is particularly interesting because it encourages discussions that are purpose-driven and relate directly to the environmental impact of “Lifestyle” and “Logbook”. People can tell stories and ask questions about any goal; for example, on the “I’ll compost all my food waste” page, people might trade tips on best practices in backyard composting. One can imagine even finding potential compadres who are working on making some of the same changes (And of course, groups provide a tried-and-true avenue to finding others). Like 43 Things, a pioneer in social goal-setting, Edenbee encourages not only information-sharing, but a way for people to cheer each other on.

It will be interesting to see how Edenbee puts the carbon calculator & log integrated with the site to new uses. When you combine a social network with familiar tools you can get some pretty neat things. From the synthesis we might see emergent behaviors, like a little friendly competition: the footprints of group members are averaged to create group footprints, and with a little flourish those can turn into teams, and tournaments. Throw in some collective goal-setting, and carbon footprinting’s a whole new ballgame.

If you’d like to try it out, comment here and I’ll send you an invite. Or, if you’re signed up already, let’s be friends.

*or as they like to say, “Beeta”.

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The downside of all that travel, of course, isn’t just an achey back, but a whole lot of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The beauty of Dopplr’s plans to integrate carbon calculation is that a user’s motivation to use the system — keeping in touch with colleagues — ostensibly has little to do with creating data about energy or emissions. The designers of the system made a value judgement, and added a new dimension to what Dopplr can be for its users.

It looks like there will be a graphical element to show cumulative as well as cyclical patterns, and an added social dimension, by way of sharing your carbon details with others. I’m looking forward to getting a closer look at this when it’s made public.

*I’d like to recommend Tom Raftery’s blog, where he’s covering a lot of fantastic issues, especially in relation to computing and climate change. Just this week he’s written on Microsoft’s new initiative in the energy efficiency market, and on carbon accounting software. I first spoke with Tom last November during the Web 2.o Conference in Berlin, where he gave a keynote on Reducing Carbon Footprint. He’s been involved in creating a hyper-efficient data center, and has a lot of expertise in the green computing realm.

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How can we visualize the city of the future and create more interactive steps that lead to sustainability? How can we use technical simulations and games to build understanding of the resource-balanced world? What’s the connection between an emerging Global Sustainable Society and video games?

With Jon Lebkowsky (Social Web Strategies), Dawn Danby (Aylanto), Jamais Cascio (Open the Future), Joel Greenberg (podaddies.com), Pliny Fisk (CMPBS)

I didn’t get recordings of a few other insightful sessions I attended today, “10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life” and “Green Software. Really?” and “Can Enterprise Save the World?” They all gave me much to chew on, and I’ll have a go at distilling it all soon.

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“Our first green products must be ourselves.”

In the summer of 02007, Valarie Casey, current head of software/digital experiences at IDEO, wrote an article in frog design’s bi-monthly newsletter DesignMind called the Designer’s Dilemma. She wrote,

Our addiction to sweeping change has hobbled us from seeing the most obvious opportunities for improvement. In order to create a radical position around sustainability, we need to change our concept of design. Our first green products must be ourselves.

In the article, she proposes a “Kyoto Treaty of Design” – now called the Designers Accord. The community that’s formed around the Designers Accord is now 15,000 strong. The Accord is something revolutionary – a coalition of designers and design firms committed to stimulating mass change in product design.

First, designers and design firms commit “to proactively engage in dialogue about environmental impact with each and every client and customer, and to integrate sustainable alternatives in our work.”

By pooling our knowledge, we can create a network in which every client is compelled to engage in a discussion of sustainability – no matter which firm it selects as a design partner. Together, we can advocate for the improvements – large and small – that will produce lasting change.

Second, adopters of the accord make a committment to open knowledge-sharing, “so that all may benefit and build on marketable and sustainable solutions.”

The website notes that

The Designers Accord is for all designers – interaction, digital, industrial, graphic, advertising, architecture, interior – and those involved in the design industry, including engineers, business consultants, researchers, marketers, corporations, and educational institutions. Any designer, consultancy, or organization creating consequence at scale should join.

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