Persuasive Technology for Energy Awareness

Energy awareness emerged as a strategy to thwart the increasing levels of CO2 emissions that represent the main cause for global warming. Despite the success in the industry sector, the achievements of such 'environmental friendly' schema have not proved to be sufficient to diminish the problem in the households. With this in mind, previous incursions have incorporated fixed techniques to influence people's behavior in an attempt to tackle the problem in its origins, the people's behavioral patterns. However, these attempts to induce better energy consumption habits in the people have encountered more difficulties, due to socio-cultural implications of an everyday richer environment-technologically speaking. This wider adoption of technology opens new opportunities to take energy awareness to the people. We propose to take energy awareness into the realm of persuasive technology. In this way we present and exploration of the opportunities in the problem, and propose three different design approaches to achieve a behavioural change in the users, with the ultimate purpose of reducing the household levels of energy consumption.