=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2629/3_doc_paraschivoiu.pdf
|storemode=property
|title=Persuasive Sustainable Cities: Personalized, Place-based Behavior Change Informed by Contextual Urban Data
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2629/3_doc_paraschivoiu.pdf
|volume=Vol-2629
|authors=Irina Paraschivoiu
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/persuasive/Paraschivoiu20
}}
==Persuasive Sustainable Cities: Personalized, Place-based Behavior Change Informed by Contextual Urban Data==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2629/3_doc_paraschivoiu.pdf
Persuasive sustainable cities: personalized, place-based
behavior change informed by contextual urban data
Irina Paraschivoiu
Center for Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg
Salzburg, Austria
irina.paraschivoiu@sbg.ac.at
Abstract. With the increasing rate of urbanization worldwide, cities have been
deemed places where the “battle for sustainability” will be either lost or won.
Intelligent infrastructure and increased capabilities for data collection through
wearables, ubiquitous computing and IoT offer the opportunity to better under-
stand (un)sustainable behavior at a city scale. They can also help study the effects
of urban design on individual behavior. My research contributes to a growing
body of work in the field of persuasive cities, which aims to reshape the way
people behave in urban areas. I aim to identify ways of integrating data from
different sources such as crowdsourcing, apps, analytics and sensors to under-
stand individual behavior and place-based qualities. Based on these, I will design
and implement nudging interventions for more sustainable behavior. These inter-
ventions will be based on personalization through mobile applications and in-the-
wild experiments. The outcome of this work will be used to draw conclusions
about designing interventions at a city scale and the possibilities of integrating
persuasive technology and urban interaction design.
1 Background
“Persuasive cities” was coined as a term in 2016 as an approach to designing persuasive
technology at an urban scale, in order to “intentionally reshape how people think and
act” [1]. Inherently, the term shares a place-based approach with “urban interaction
design” [2], concerned with interaction in public spaces to improve everyday urban
experience. However, there are still few examples of public space interventions that
make explicit use of behavioral or persuasive frameworks or theories, even when de-
signing with the goal of changing a behavior.
The deployment of intelligent infrastructure, wearables and IoT has opened up two
exciting possibilities for persuasion in cities. On one hand, access to location-based
data can improve understanding of user behavior and therefore increase personalization
of interventions for sustainability. For example, integrating data from multiple sources
such as public transportation, GPS and weather can help nudge users towards sustain-
able travel plans [3, 4]. Automatically tracking transportation modes can be used to
“challenge” the user to meet sustainable mobility goals [5, 6], to improve smart urban
water management [7] or offer context-aware recommendations of points of interests
Persuasive 2020, Adjunct proceedings of the 15th International conference on Persuasive
Technology. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
2
in cities [8]. Anagnostopoulou et al., for example, incorporate both personal character-
istics as well as context-aware recommendations, such as weather and destination, to
design personalized persuasion strategies for urban mobility [9].
On the other hand, location-based data can offer insights into place-specific charac-
teristics that may encourage or discourage sustainable behavior. Environmental psy-
chology has long postulated the strong interlink between human behavior and environ-
ment [10, 11], but this overlap has been less addressed in persuasive technology re-
search. Ambient, persuasive applications have identified the opportunity for designing
interventions in the right time and place [12], but less research has been carried out on
the context and spatial qualities embedded in a location. One of the few examples using
a behavioral framework for public space interventions, Bloeme et al. [13] explored the
spatial (in)visibility of public urinals in central Amsterdam. They designed nudging
installations as light projections, arrows and graphics, to make them more recognizable
by inebriated pedestrians [13]. Footprint stickers, lights and sound-enhanced staircases
have also been explored as ways of increasing physical activity in public spaces [14,
15]. Installations placed on building façades can determine pedestrians to change their
route [16], but these did not explicitly rely on persuasive or behavioral theories.
The state-of-the-art shows there is an opportunity for urban interaction design to
benefit from using theoretical constructs and frameworks from persuasive technology.
Conversely, urban interaction design offers new opportunities for designing persuasive
interventions in public spaces, through a more place-based and contextual approach.
2 Research questions
My PhD explores the way that persuasive technology can support design processes for
sustainable behavior at an urban scale. I focus on the role of personalization and place-
based interventions in encouraging sustainable behavior. My research questions are:
RQ1: How can data from different sources such as mobile tracking, wearables, apps,
sensors be integrated with each other to understand user sustainability behavior? I will
focus on analyzing data from multiple sources to derive user types and local contexts.
RQ2: How can these derived user types and local contexts inform the design of persua-
sive interventions for sustainable behavior change? I will design interventions to in-
crease sustainable behavior, based on personalization and in-the-wild experiments.
RQ3: How can personalization and place-based interventions inform urban policy and
urban design? I will reflect on potential ways of integrating urban interaction design
and persuasive technology and on ways of incorporating my results in the work of ur-
ban interaction designers, persuasive designers and local administrations.
3 Research plan and methodology
My work draws on both approaches from persuasive technology as well as urban inter-
action design. A large part of the work is being undertaken in framework of the JPI
Urban Europe SimpliCITY project, in partnership with two municipalities, in Austria
and Sweden.
3
In the first stage, a persuasive web and mobile platform is being developed which is
integrating data sources provided by the municipalities, such as sensor data, open data
and existing mobile applications. A mobile tracking feature is also being implemented
on the platform. Initial work has been carried out, with two surveys having been imple-
mented with users. Three workshops have also been organized together with local
stakeholders. The main functionalities for the application have been defined and initial
persuasive strategies have been selected. Initial user studies will be carried out in the
following 6 months. From these and the analysis of data collected through the platform,
I will define user types and local contexts. To complement these and capture qualitative
information, I will carry out in-situ observations and ethnographic data collection in
selected public spaces.
In the second stage, the information acquired will be used to design experiments.
These will take place (a) through the web and mobile application and (b) in public
spaces. The degree of persuasion and acceptability by the users will be measured and
compared to inform future iterations. For place-based experiments, similar urban con-
texts (i.e. a similar street as a baseline) will be used as a comparison.
Finally, in the third stage, conclusions will be drawn with respect to the applicability
of the experiments at a larger scale in cities. Focus groups will be conducted with local
administration staff from the two partner cities in Austria and Sweden. We will also
collect feedback other local stakeholders, researchers, designers and practitioners on
opportunities and limitations for cities to implement such strategies for sustainable be-
havior change.
References
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2. Brynskov M (ed) (2014) Urban Interaction Design. Towards City Making. Amsterdam
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