Sustainable House Visualization
Global warming has become an inescapable issue that humans have to deal with. Many people have realized the seriousness of the problem. However, few people are aware that individuals could make significant impacts. People usually feel global warming is too big a problem to be tackled by individuals. That being said, there are many small things that everyone can do to make an impact on climate issues. In INFO 4400, I formed a group with three students who are also sustainability enthusiasts to work on a semester-long design project.
We aimed to make Cornell students more mindful of their environmental footprint and use all of those resources more sustainably.
Getting to Know How People Consume Energy
Since students don’t have much control over the energy usage in lecture buildings, we decided to focus on dorms. As I mentioned before, there are many small actions that people could take on to make impacts, so we believed it was important to find out these nuances in people’s daily lives. Therefore, we decided to use Dairy Study to investigate sustainable behaviors. The Dairy Study is a user research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. Each of us reached out to 5 friends who lived in dorms and asked them to participate in a 5-day dairy study with us. First, they needed to fill out an entry form that collects some basic information and asks about their general awareness of sustainability.
In the following five days, they were required to send us text messages when they :
Made a conscious effort to recycle or compost (what it was & where you were)
Made a conscious effort to use less electricity (context & what you did)
Made a conscious effort to avoid using plastic (context & where you were)
Made a conscious effort to use less water (context)
At the end of each day, they need to fill out another form that helps them evaluate and reflect on their daily performance on sustainability. After participants texted entries to us, we compiled all the data in a spreadsheet to track the frequency of different kinds of entries.
Based on the data collected, we noticed that many participants said they felt compelled to be more environmentally-conscious simply because they are taking part in the study. While this certainly introduces some bias, this behavior also provides valuable insight for us when we went on to creating our design solution. In essence, accountability could be instrumental in encouraging people to take actions.
It’s a Wicked Problem
As we dive deeper into the problem, we discovered that raising people’s awareness of sustainability is a wicked problem. It cannot be reducible to smaller problems although smaller problems are part of the big problem. Environmental issues can range from the glacier melting to plastic overconsumption. It is interdependent with other problems, such as financial problems and technology constraints. And it is extremely difficult to tackle. While we were discussing the potential causes of mindlessness over sustainability, we realized that different stakeholders would have different insights into this problem. For example, the Cornell Administration would need to consider monetary factors when implementing sustainable policies. Therefore, we decided to carry out a co-design session with multiple stakeholders, including 2 designers, 1 dorm staff, 1 house assistant dean, 1 expert in sustainability, 2 participants who were part of the diary study.
Leveraging Competitive Instinct
After explaining our study and findings, we led the group through the design process starting from brainstorming questions and specific problem areas to solution ideation. We identified several key insights from the results. Many ideas gravitate toward an essential point — competitiveness. Participants mentioned ideas that leverage social pressure and the competitive nature of Cornell students. For example, some students suggested that we have a GPA associated with how sustainable you were and you needed a certain sustainability GPA to graduate. Although this idea might be too extreme, we did realize competitiveness could be a valuable starting point.
Both the diary study and the co-design session helped our team identify what people deemed to be the most relevant and pressing sustainability issues to tackle on campus and helped jumpstart our own solution ideation process.
How other designers tackle similar issues?
Before we dived into our own designs, we decided to do some research on similar design studies. Since this is a research-oriented project, we chose to start with databases like ACM digital library. We found a couple papers that are highly relevant to our project and we summarized several key findings:
- Real-time feedback raises their awareness most but if it’s too frequent, it reduces the user’s engagement with the system
- Appliance-specific feedback enables users to learn more about what they can do to save energy but requires sophisticated technology to analyze
- Social comparison data with other people’s usage of data helps motivate energy saving, but needs to compare similar groups of people
- An effective loop should consist of feedback, incentives, comparison and goal-setting.
The above points serve as guidelines to our design solutions. We want to make sure our designs won’t be too broad to be ineffective, so we chose to focus on water & electricity consumption.
Design Solutions
With everything in mind, we started to envision our design solutions. We know that most students are aware and concerned about the environment but not many of them are willing to commit to changing it for the better. There’s a huge commitment gap that stops actions from happening. Therefore, our key problem turns out to be:
How might we encourage students to take actions to address environment issues?
We came up with four different solutions:
A — We did some research and found Cornell has held something similar called Energy Smackdown before. The idea is pretty much the same with our Most Sustainable Dorm Competition — having a ranking amongst all dorms on the campus and students of the winning dorm would receive some rewards. In addition, we’re concerned about the motivation level underlying this solution. Students would not feel very motivated when the competition is dorm-wise, especially when hundreds of students live in a dorm.
B — Compared to solution A, the relevance level is much higher because it is suite-wise, which would largely hold people accountable for their behaviors. However, students may not feel motivated because they have no idea what other suites are doing — they can only compare with their past performance.
C — Dorm don’t have infrastructure for swiping and guests who don’t have IDs would be very limited in such circumstances. Also, in some dorms, light have auto-censors and they would turn off automatically when people are out.
D — Although dining halls are part of the dorm building on west campus, the Tupperware solution is limited in the sense that it only focuses on recycling but ignores issues like water and electricity consumption.
We felt that none of our solutions above were satisfying enough, so we ended up combining solution A and B. To improve accountability, we chose to run a suite-wise competition in the dorm. In addition, every suite would receive some sort of reports on electricity and water consumption within the suite. The combination would not only spark competitiveness but also provide solid feedbacks that students could act on.
Interactive Sustainability House
Our design solution is an interactive digital “sustainability house” displayed at the entry to each dorm which reflects the electricity and water consumption of each suite/unit. In addition, in each suite, there will be a tablet on the wall displaying detailed statistics and tips based on that suite’s electricity and water consumption. I designed the interface for the “sustainability house” at the entry to each dorm.
The entire design is based on four important elements: feedback, incentive, comparison, and goal-setting (Erickson, 1203). Each suite has its own character, whose appearance and mood change depending on the suite’s resource use habits. There’s also a leader board next to the sustainability house. At the top of the leader board, it shows the most sustainable suite for that month. Individuals in the winning suite at the end of each month would receive 25 BRBs each, which is an incentive to maintain sustainability. Additionally, every few weeks students will have a bonus challenge that, if completed, would earn them prizes for their character. For instance, if the suite uses less than a certain amount of electric that week, their character wins a hat or a piece of furniture. On the leader board, people can view the ranking of each floor. The main reason that we decided to rank by each floor is to ensure the effectiveness of comparison. Usually, each dorm on the west campus has about 35 suites. If we rank all suites together, suites falling behind might loose the incentive. Ranking on one floor ensures a reasonable size of the comparison. On the top of the screen, the semester goal is displayed. This holds residents accountable for a general goal. If users click the semester goal button, they will see a quantitative comparison that states what they need to do to fulfill the goal.
For example, it may show “if you unplug all appliances inside your suite when not using, it will take 45 days to reach the goal.” In addition, the system will generate a daily sustainability score so residents have a rough idea of how the entire dorm is doing. If users click it, they will be able to see the electricity and water consumption of the dorm in the last month. Based on the comparison, residents can understand why they received such a score.
The other designer designed the interface for the tablet in each suite. The tablets in the suites will provide residents with a more in depth understanding of their suite’s current level of sustainability. Each tablet displays the particular suite’s character in the virtual room. They can read tips on how to become more sustainable and make their character happier.
Conclusion
This is my first research-oriented design project and I had a quite different experience compared to other industry-based design exercises. Compiling a literature review is quite useful when we can only collect limited data. Even when designing an app or website, we can still gain valuable insights by researching on the underlying principles. Diary study is a powerful tool to capture information on the routines and unconscious reactions. We are likely to fall into traps when we conduct contextual interviews with participants. Time is limited and our language could be leading. Through diary study, we’re able to gain a deeper understanding of participants. Co-design session breaks the stereotype that only designers are qualified to make design decisions. On the contrary, one single stakeholder’s opinion could be biased and limited. Incorporating multiple stakeholders brings us some inspiring ideas that we alone would never think of.
Looking Forward
By utilizing research methods that we learned in INFO 4400, we were able to address the sustainability issues in a fun and engaging way. However, there are still many sustainability problems waiting to be solved.
Lack of data on issues like recycling could make it difficult to provide enough feedback and motivation. We cannot really track how much recycling an individual has done during a time span unless they voluntarily report the data. How might we build an effective mechanism on such elusive problems?
It is relatively straightforward to ensure the accountability since we’re dealing with dorms. What if we want to tackle sustainability issues on lecture buildings? It makes the problem even more wicked because there’s no specific individual to trace the responsibility.
Also, it is easy for designers to naturally gravitate toward technological solutions. However, is technology really necessary in every circumstance? Designers might want to consider undesign or even non-design solutions.
Overall, sustainability would be a major problem that organizations and individuals would increasingly pay attention to in the next decade.
