=Paper=
{{Paper
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|title=Nudging People at Work and Other Third-Party Locations
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-722/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-722
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==Nudging People at Work and Other Third-Party Locations==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-722/paper12.pdf
Nudging People at Work and Other Third-Party Locations
Max L. Wilson1, Derek Foster2, Shaun Lawson2, Simon Eddison1
1
Future Interaction Technology Lab Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre
College of Science School of Computer Science
Swansea University, UK University of Lincoln, UK
m.l.wilson@swansea.ac.uk, simon.d.eddison@gmail.com {defoster,slawson}@lincoln.ac.uk
ABSTRACT A recent report [1] has indicated that if the 17 million UK
Nudging people towards positive behaviour change is an workers, who regularly use a desktop PC, powered it off at
important issue recognised by academia, individuals, and night this would reduce CO2 emissions by 1.3 million tons
even governments. Although much research has been - the equivalent of removing 245,000 cars from the road.
published in this area, little has focused on non-domestic Similarly, if a UK business with 10,000 computers leaves
environments such as the workplace. It is widely reported them on all night for one year, it will cost £168,000
that changing individual behaviour of employees can make ($220,000) and emit 828 tonnes of CO2. The same report,
a significant contribution to sustainable resource however, suggested that at least three in ten workers in the
consumption. This position paper focuses on the unique UK do not always power off their PC overnight. Further,
aspects that make nudging consumption behaviour in third- many more machines are in use or provide services 24
party environments like the workplace a very different hours a day, all year round.
problem to that of nudging in people’s domestic and private
lives. Several studies are discussed to provide context as As an example in our own context, Figure 1 compares the
well as evidence towards our position. electricity usage at the University of Lincoln campus for the
first week in December in 2009 and 2010. There are two
Author Keywords compelling features of Figure 1 that characterise the typical
Persuasion, Nudge, Work, Ownership, Sustainability, energy consumption of a workplace. First, the graph clearly
Behaviour Change. shows how little energy the university uses at the weekend.
Second, this period in 2010 coincided with severe weather
ACM Classification Keywords that meant that many staff members were unable to travel to
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): the campus. The dramatic reduction in energy consumption
Miscellaneous. can be clearly seen in the first 3 days of the graph and
highlights that people can have a significant impact on
General Terms consumption at work, as well as in their own personal
Theory, Human Factors, Design. environments.
INTRODUCTION
The HCI community has recently shown a great deal of
interest in the development of interactive systems that
facilitate behaviour change for sustainability. Much of this
research has exploited ideas recently re-popularised by
Thaler and Sunstein [10] in that individuals can be ‘nudged’
to make better lifestyle decisions, given the right
information and the environment in which to do so. Much
of this work has focused on how individuals might improve
their own private and domestic lifestyle, behaviour, and
sustainable resource consumption; however such work has
Figure 1 Campus electricity usage December 2009/10
rarely taken account of the fact that people spend a
significant amount of their waking hours at work where Despite environmental concerns now playing an established
they also contribute towards resource consumption. role in the public sector, as well as the corporate and
business agenda, there is still much to gain by exploring
new ways of persuading people to adopt positive energy
usage behaviour. The first and obvious research question is:
Copyright © 2011 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Do domestic PINC (Persuasion, Influence, Nudge &
Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is Coercion) methods simply translate to workplace and other
published and copyrighted by the editors of PINC2011.
third-party environments? In this position statement we
review initial evidence that they do not, and discuss the environmentally friendly is, as Stebbins called it, a Serious
reasons why. We propose a framework for thinking about Leisure, where people work hard at achieving their goals.
Nudge methods in different contexts, and discuss our future Installing home technology is often a temporary project,
work in this area. and can be seen as Project Leisure, where people take
behaviour change to be a new task. The aim of much
RELATED WORK nudging research, however, is to be embedded in people’s
Thaler and Sunstein [10] have recently re-popularised the Casual Leisure, so that good consumption is encouraged
interest in the idea of Nudge, where the right environments simply and unobtrusively within our lives. These forms of
and the right information delivered at the right time can leisure, however, are very different from our work lives,
encourage people to adapt and improve their behaviours. which are goal-oriented, formalised, and externally driven.
Much research has focused on directly improving one’s
own behaviour, whether it be reminders to exercise, or to EARLY EXPERIMENTAL FINDINGS
notably reduce energy consumption. Research into simple
Study 1 – Water Consumption in the Work Place
home energy monitors [3], for example, suggests that pay- One early finding in this space was from Kuznetsov and
as-you-go meters typically reduce consumption by only 3%, Paulos [7] who anecdotally saw unexpected results in a
while those that focus on reducing their payments often work environment, and so proceeded to focus on domestic
reduce their consumption by 0-10%. Having an in-house scenarios. Their anecdotal findings saw consumption
monitor that provides instant feedback has been shown to increase – double in fact.
reduce consumption by between 5 and 15%. Other
prototype systems, such as Kuznetsov and Paulos’s One of our recent studies in Swansea University, UK,
domestic ambient light display [7] successfully encouraged focused directly on this surprising issue. We created a series
people to reduce their water consumption, by visualising of feedback installations, and installed them in a shared
better or worse consumption to their previous average use. work-place kitchen. Like the work by Kuznetsov and
Paulos, the installations used a Phidget microphone to track
Other research typically provides anonymous averages from water flow through the pipes. The installations were
a group or community to a user, so that the user can see supported by informational posters, which included a link
their own behaviour or consumption in the context of to a website to provide feedback. Otherwise, we remained
others. In previous work [5], we reduced domestic energy as un-intrusive as possible in order to record normal usage
consumption through a carefully designed mixture of online as closely as possible. After recording baseline average
social media and home energy monitors. Our findings readings, we first recreated the ambient light display
suggested that the use of energy feedback delivered in a provided used by Kuznetsov and Paulos, which: glowed
social context significantly reduced consumption when green with less-than-average consumption; glowed yellow
compared to energy feedback without a social context. We 10% either side of the mean; and glowed red thereafter.
have also shown similar results in a personal fitness/activity
domain [4].
A related approach involves facilitating ‘friendly’
competitive behaviour; for instance it has already been
shown that the work environment affords powerful
opportunities for facilitating such behaviour – for instance
Siero et al [8] demonstrated that when a group of
employees received information not only about their own
energy usage, but also about that of a ‘competing’ group of
employees from the same company but a different
workplace, they significantly altered their energy usage
behaviour compared to a situation in which they only Figure 2: Our ambient-light installation
received information about their own usage.
Three further displays were installed in subsequent weeks.
Despite the success of the work by Siero et al some thirteen The first used similar measures, in respect to average
years ago, little research since has explored energy consumption, to create competitive gaming-style text-
behaviour interventions based on competition between oriented messages on an LED display, such as: “You’re
employees. Therefore, a key question for Nudge researchers beating most people” and “Sorry, you lost”. The second
going forward is how do differences between the work and display converted the light system into a series of audible
domestic leisurely sides of life affect the potential of beeps. The final display tried a different tack altogether, by
behaviour change interventions? Also, what theoretical simply providing environmental information relating to
grounding can we draw upon to begin to explore any their water consumption, such as the average amount of
differences? Stebbins [9] introduced a seminal framework water available to people in the third world on a daily basis.
for understanding people’s leisure time. For some, being
Initially, as per the prior anecdotal evidence, the ambient To mitigate the absence of financial motivation in
light display did double the average consumption of water employees and to develop workplace energy metaphors, we
during the 2 weeks it was displayed. In comparing studying intend to run a series of focus groups and participatory
the additional displays, we saw all but the audio condition design workshops to engage and empower the employee in
increase the consumption. While the increase shown by developing an understanding of both the economic and
these alternatives was significantly less than the ambient environmental impact of their working practices. The
light display in particular, none were significant. Although participatory design workshops will provide an opportunity
the audio feedback did marginally reduce consumption, we for employees to be directly involved in designing the UX
also recorded a significant number of opt-out button presses element of Electro-Magnates therefore helping to address
in the audio condition, indicating that people disliked this ethical concerns over privacy and appropriate disclosure of
particular installation. Qualitative comments from an energy data.
optional online survey confirmed this. Given the surprising
Early work to date includes prototyping a high-impact
increase created by the ambient light display, we concluded
energy interface for overall energy usage in Figure 3, page
the study by reinstalling the ambient light display for a final
viewed on 09/01/2011, as well as a competitive league table
week. Although not quite double the average consumption,
for buildings. Both prototypes are designed for large
we again saw a significant increase in energy consumption.
situated displays and are abstracted presentations of what is
In the end, none of the displays managed to significantly possible with raw energy sensor data which in itself is
decrease consumption of water. It is promising, however, intangible and difficult to interpret.
that not all the displays increased consumption
significantly. This means that such displays do not simply
have the opposite effect in work environments. Instead, the
results suggest that people simply do not care for the
consumption of the company as a whole, and potentially do
not mind entertaining themselves with the resources of the
company by using additional resources. The fact that
significantly more users opted out of the audio display,
which was the only one to reduce average consumption,
further indicates that people do not mind avoiding resources
in this area; that they do not feel personally motivated to
accept the nudging technology.
Study 2 – Energy Consumption in the Work Place
Our recently commenced Electro-Magnates study [6] aims
to reduce energy usage in the workplace by utilising a suite
of social persuasive applications to encourage pro-
environmental behaviours. Personal desktop applications
(social widgets) and situated displays will be used to deliver
energy feedback to individuals, groups and communities Figure 3 High-impact visualisation of overall energy usage
about their own – and others’ – energy usage to foster
exchange of performance and to support constructive DISCUSSION
competition to reduce consumption. The workplace in the The workplace, as an example of a non-domestic, non-
context of this study is educational and public sector work- personal environment, creates many unique issues for the
place environments in the county of Lincolnshire, UK. ideas behind nudging behaviour. Consequently, we have
identified three initial dimensions that differentiate
In previous work [5], we reduced domestic energy domestic and workplace environments that might be used as
consumption through social norms and social technology. a formative framework for thinking about applying nudging
However, designing a similar system for the workplace technology in different environments:-
presents greater challenges across a range of design, ethical
and technical issues. From our study focus groups in the Expression of Self. First, the workplace may be termed a
domestic environment we discovered that for some people special environment in that there are usually constraints and
cost was the primary motivating reason to reduce their rules in how employees can interact and carry out activities
energy use. In the workplace employees are not typically in the workplace compared to their less inhibited personal
responsible for paying energy costs, neither are they life. This is particularly important when considering
directly responsible for meeting any governmental carbon employee consumption of resources with emphasis on
policies in place that could lead to institutional ‘carbon’ ownership, freedom of choice and sustainable behaviour.
fines. Ironically, an individual may be committed to pro-
environmental behaviour when at home but is forced to
engage in negative practices at work such as using ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
inefficient energy-intensive equipment or sitting in an over- We’d like to thank the NIMD2010 participants for
heated environment. discussions. The Electro-Magnates project is funded by the
HEFCE LGM fund.
Sense of Responsibility. Second, prior research typically
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In our future work, we are focusing on this issue in two
ways. First, our funded research is focusing further on
encouraging community-driven nudges for reducing
business and employee consumption. Second, we are
planning future studies that specifically investigate the
nudge of groups and communities rather than of
individuals, as to meet the UN’s Millennium Goals1, we
need to nudge the behaviour of the global community and
not just that of individuals.
1
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/