Abstract

Global warming, and the climate change it induces, is an urgent global issue. One remedy to this problem, and the focus of this paper, is to motivate sustainable energy consumption behaviors by people. The development of feedback technologies providing real-time, continuous feedback of one’s energy usage has been used to motivate sustainable energy consumption behaviors. However, there is one important problem- they tend to use a “one-size-fitsall” solution, providing the same feedback to differently motivated individuals at different stages of readiness, willingness and ableness to change. In this paper, we synthesize a wide range of motivational psychology literature to develop a motivational framework based on the Transtheoretical (aka Stages of Behavior Change) model. We state the motivational goal(s) of each stage, followed by our recommendation(s) for designing feedback technologies in order achieve these goals. Each recommendation is supported by a rationale based on motivational literature, followed by a simple textual example to illustrate one way to apply the recommendation. Author Keywords Sustainability, feedback, motivational theory, design.

Citations