Derek Foster

Motivating physical activity at work: using persuasive social media for competitive step counting

Previous research has suggested that social and competitive interaction over online social networking sites could be harnessed in order to motivate behaviour change in users. This paper presents the design and in-the-wild evaluation of StepMatron, a Facebook application designed to provide social and competitive context for daily pedometer readings in order to motivate physical activity in the working environment. A study was conducted in order to determine whether interactions between users via the application more successfully motivated physical activity than simply recording daily step counts in a similar application. Ten participants (1 male), all nurses working in a UK hospital, used the application across two conditions over the course of the study. In the socially-enabled condition, participants could view each others step data and make comparisons and comments. In the non-social condition, participants could only view their own personal step data. A significant increase in step activity was observed in the socially enabled condition. Our findings highlight the potential of social media as a means for generating positive behaviour change. They also suggest that simple mobile devices can function as an inexpensive, accessible and powerful trigger towards this behaviour change without necessitating the use of overly complex and expensive mobile applications or devices.

Watts in it for me?: design implications for implementing effective energy interventions in organisations

The design of technological interventions to motivate behaviour-based reductions in end-user energy consumption has recently been identified as a priority for the HCI community. Previous interventions have produced promising results, but have typically focused on domestic energy consumption. By contrast, this paper focuses on the workplace context, which presents very different opportunities and challenges. For instance, financial consequences, which have proved successful as motivations in the domestic environment, are not present in the workplace in the context of employees. We describe the outcome of a sequence of workshops that focussed on understanding employee perceptions of energy use in the workplace, with the locus of activity on energy intervention design. Using a grounded theory analysis, we produced a framework of key themes detailing user perceptions and energy intervention design considerations. Our findings provide a framework of considerations for the design of successful workplace energy interventions.

‘Liking’ carbon: can social media play a role in carbon management?

Contemporary social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have seen huge growth in recent years with a respective 1 billion and 500 m registered users. Given such large numbers of the global population are using online social networks regularly, tapping into this audience to raise awareness of, and bring about positive behavior change in, societal issues such as energy consumption and healthier lifestyles has promising potential. There are a number of challenges around using social media platforms to support the delivery of successful energy interventions, due to characteristics of both user behavior and current technology. Specifically, there is a no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for changing behavior – users have different beliefs with embedded social and cultural practices. There are also currently no standardized means for supporting interoperability across different energy monitor vendors. Effectively, each monitored household is a small, unconnected silo running on a proprietary system. Work towards solving these challenges requires cross-discipline expertise in behavioral psychology, social computing and pervasive technology.

Effects of group performance feedback and goal-setting in an organisational energy intervention

End-user energy demand (EUED) in the workplace is affected by a complex interaction between behavioural, social, technological, regulatory and organisational factors. Designing technology-led interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviour that acknowledge and support this complexity is a significant challenge. This paper discusses the design and evaluation of an EUED intervention implemented in the corporate infrastructure of a UK university administration department. Two intervention types, group feedback and group goal-setting were implemented. 16 participants were recruited and engaged with a four stage study (baseline, group feedback, group goal setting, and baseline) for a duration of 4 months. This study design allowed us to track clearly any changes in mid-term energy usage behaviour during and beyond intervention. Findings suggest that, surprisingly, participant energy consumption increased during the intervention period compared to baseline conditions. These results demonstrate that simple group-based behaviour change methods can be counter-productive in the workplace, illustrating the complex and unpredictable nature of intervention in this design space.

I Can Haz Emoshuns?--Understanding Anthropomorphosis of Cats among Internet Users

The attribution of human-like traits to non-human animals, termed anthropomorphism, can lead to misunderstandings of animal behaviour, which can result in risks to both human and animal well being and welfare. In this paper, we, during an inter-disciplinary collaboration between social computing and animal behaviour researchers, investigated whether a simple image-tagging application could improve the understanding of how people ascribe intentions and emotions to the behaviour of their domestic cats. A web-based application, Tag puss, was developed to present casual users with photographs drawn from a database of 1631 images of domestic cats and asked them to ascribe an emotion to the cat portrayed in the image. Over five thousand people actively participated in the study in the space of four weeks, generating over 50,000 tags. Results indicate Tag puss can be used to identify cat behaviours that lay-people find difficult to distinguish. This highlights further expert scientific exploration that focuses on educating cat owners to identify possible problems with their cats welfare.