Elina Eriksson - Digital Behavior Change Interventions to Catalyze More Sustainable Practices

um yes so i'm having a cold and uh i'm i'm hoping that my voice will be carrying all through this presentation but i'll also try to mute if i need to cough or something so who am i then yes i'm an associate professor i am a computer scientist in my background and i did my phd in human computer interaction but since 2013 i have mainly been working with sustainability issues both in my research and in my teaching so i also teach sustainability topics here at kth and uh to situate me somewhere i'm at the school of electrical engineering and computer science at the division of media technology and interaction design and there i am co-leading a research group called mid 4s media technology and interaction design for sustainability and we are a research group that does research in the intersection of ict and sustainability and we're aiming for the transition of a more sustainable society and a good life within planetary boundaries and so far we've mostly been doing research in the areas of food energy transport and cities but it's rather uh wide what we're working with we're also very interested in future studies featuring different ways of exploring what the future could be or how we could approach the future better and then also we do then teach and also do research on our own teaching on how to integrate ict and sustainability brilliant someone is not muted but i'm not sure who so if everyone could please mute i would be very happy brilliant so we're we're a research group they're uh working with these issues and uh when doing this kind of presentation it's kind of hard to draw the lines of who you should include on a list of people who you're collaborating with but i hope that i've covered most of the people who have been talking about these issues that i'm presenting in this presentation and they are both at my research group but also at other schools or at other universities so if your name is not here and you still think that you've contributed to this you're in my heart that's for sure yes and then let's come to the topic then so today um i'm presenting part of my research agenda or the things that i'm doing and it has to do with digital behavior change intervention because we have a couple of projects focusing on this at kth and you might wonder what do i mean by uh digital behavior change interventions and and there's many things that could fit within this definition it could be echo feedback giving you information about your energy use or any other metrics that you have around some environmental impact and whenever i'm going to use environmental impact in this presentation it's it's going to be something that has a negative impact on the environment in any way this is something i learned the hard way by collaborating with people who are more environmentally oriented than myself because in the beginning when we were discussing impact i was always positive like that's brilliant we're having an impact uh because within my own field impact usually means positive societal impact i didn't do so um and work full time it doesn't always have to be than this positive kind of impact but environmental impact is usually uh some kind of more negative uh impact on on the environment uh there's also the the persuasive technologies ways of uh trying to to without really making you super aware of it change your behavior uh where also nudging fits within this so making making it easy for you to do the right decision uh this could for example be all the default settings that make sure that you don't use too much of of streaming services or or whatnot and another word that often comes up when you're talking about digital behavior changing interventions are gamification of course using game mechanism in other settings in order to make it more interesting or making you more engaged or or doing stuff that you maybe weren't doing before etc in general it's like this overall idea that you can have an app for that so different ways that we can use digital technologies in order to to make people change their behavior or or somehow change either switching behavior or changing the behavior somewhat to more environmentally sustainable behavior and the picture that you have on this slide is from an article by yolanda strangers called smart energy in everyday life are you designing for resource man and i think this uh the criticism within my own field human computer interaction especially when it comes to persecuted technologies uh and but i guess it it it has to do with all this kind of this idea that we can use a simple app to make people change their behavior is that they they are very often designed for a particular type of person and and we're not all the same so i don't really myself see my see myself as this man standing here like the superhero of understanding energy and uh knowing all about the numbers uh around my house and wanting to at any given moment be able to go and tweak on the settings on my uh electrical equipment in order to save energy so this is a kind of a an archetype archetype of the kind of users that might be uh interested in these kind of gamifications app or or echo feedback of course this is a an archetype so there's many different personalities and people who might be interested in it but i think it's important to remember that we're not all always looking at the numbers okay so what kind of areas am i going to talk about in this presentation today so i'm going to have an environmental impact perspective and that means that i mean you can do behavior change interventions for many different reasons but in this particular case i'm looking at how can we make a smaller impact on the environment in in in any way and i'm also going to focus on food energy mobility and then slide over into the everyday practices and there's a reason for that um and i guess that you could see behavior change interventions digital or not uh in in many of these fields without them having to do with environmental impact so for example when it comes to food there are many digital tools you could use for for healthy reasons for health and wellbeing being reasons connected to food etc or when it comes with mobility there's tons of training apps or apps that should make sure that you you start walking more or moving around more etc for your health but what i'm looking at is then with the aim of trying to reduce the environmental impact so let's go into to business to some research studies and um some results i'm going to start off with a systematic review that we did a few years back um and it was bjorn hidden who led this study and and so we wanted to understand what what kind of behavior change interventions have been done digital ones regarding food consumption so we're not looking at the agricultural sector or we're not looking at the production of food or um or anything like that but we're looking from from the point where you you would be consuming food and we did it very systematically following the prisma protocol and and you know searching green file scopus and acmd to the library which includes also the ieee library and we got 2039 papers that was caught in our net through the through this search terms terms we were using and then through um looking through the title the abstract and then finally looking through the whole paper um we ended up with five included studies in the paper that we're analyzing so um that's a lot of paper that disappeared on the on the way and i should say that not all of these papers are uh not necessarily bad but they were not for fulfilling our purpose of there having to be a empirical study where you could see some kind of change in individuals after using the digital behavior change intervention and we were quite generous in what we deemed as a digital behavior change intervention it could be any kind of intervention where some kind of ict information and communication technology was used in the intervention package you could say interesting interestingly most of the studies that we found were around food waste and i should say that they were mostly done in the western world so western educated industrialized rich and democratic countries weird uh there were only two papers that that wouldn't be classified as that uh and um they were unfortunately not so well conducted in the sense that um there were theories missing or they were missing um a well-defined control group or that they had done some kind of baseline measurements etc so it's really hard to draw to draw any summarized findings from this study except that we actually do need to have more research done on uh digital behavior change interventions uh etc um and when we were doing this study we were using a framework to analyze these papers so we used the behavior change wheel and behavior change technology taxonomy to kind of break down the different interventions according to what kind of functionalities they were using in order to to make people then change their behavior i should also say that there's really a lot going on so i mean there are many great ideas both in the research papers even though we don't really know if they will lead to any long-term change and i should i should also say that that that's one of the major issues with most of the studies in founding this review is that they don't have any longitudinal follow-up so it might be a study that were during a week or a couple of weeks or up to even a month but then they didn't have a follow-up after half a year or a year to see if these changes that they had seen during the study if they were continuing after the intervention has stopped and there's also quite a lot of different commercial examples uh that that wasn't found in the research literature that are ongoing and happening right now like karma or olio or too good to go and it would be really interesting to see what happens when these kind of technologies are used in in everyday life um but i have an example of a digital behavior change technology that was actually implemented at kth so this is a study um that cecilia annika and jorge sapiko has done here at kth at kth campus and they were interested to see whether or not it's possible to share food through a digital app and um so they developed this app called rada martin or save the food and they made a trial run of this at cathage campus before the pandemic i should say and some of the conclusions from the study was that you need a critical mass of users so this is always the problem when you try to launch these kind of new i um technologies where for example sharing is needed that you need a critical mass of uses before it becomes um interesting for more people to use the app so it's kind of a hen or the egg situation it was also clear that some people had i mean issues around food brings up um other problems in the sense that you might not want to only be the one who receives food but you actually want to be a person who also gives away food so only taking food would would stop some of the uses um so that that was also an issue that was raised but they also saw that it was easier to share leftover food from catering rather than home cooked food and it had to do with ideas of what is a proper meal and how do we know that this meal has been well cooked etc and then one of the major challenges was actually that the place where someone would be able to leave food was in a office kitchen and these are behind lock the doors at kth so it would be it would be hard for other people to come in and collect the food since they didn't have maybe a key card to that particular office so if this would be something that you wanted to scale up uh it might be that you need to also change the infrastructure in the sense so that there would be special fridges or kitchens that you could go to were where you could come easily access the fridge where the food was left for you but still i think it's an interesting study and then just as a comment to this fact that in the in the literature literature review we only saw uh examples or not only i think all but two or some something like that were around food waste so um i think there's huge opportunities here to explore how we can use digital tools to to reduce the environmental impact from the food system on the consumption side but not looking only on food waste now food waste is a huge problem but there might be other things to do here and one thing that is not really um digital necessarily but i think is an invoking evocative idea is that today we have these climate and energy devices atmos municipality level but what if we would have someone who would do advice on how to grow your own food or what kind of food you could forage or find in a city setting yes and there's also interesting uh examples of digital intervention i would say for example cogro which is a sharing platform where you can advertise that you have a garden that you're not growing anything in and you want to have people to come and and grow food in your garden or you can put up an ad that you're looking for a garden to grow food in so it's a kind of a sharing initiative around places to grow your your food and most import one thing i find very important when it comes to food is that it connects connects to so many other sustainability um issues or or things in the sense that it so clearly connects to health and well-being but also biodiversity etc so working with food is is kind of interesting since it has these connect clear connection connections to many of the other sdgs beyond for example climate impact brilliant and unfortunately this is going to be a cliffhanger for you but we have gone through the very orders process of doing another systematic literature review uh looking at digital behavior change interventions but within the field of energy but it's still ongoing so i can't really say more than some very very tentative results from this but i'm looking forward to see where there's areas of interest for doing more research i should say that this is an area where research has been going on for much longer i think so it's it's not maybe surprising that we found many more studies and of course this is connected to the proliferation of smart meters and smart homes and and things and data that you can get out of of these sentencing tools what we can see from reading the paper so far is that a majority of the papers are on electricity even though we have quite broadly looked at energy but there are also papers on heating and water use etc and there's more studies outside of households in this um literature review than in the literature review on food where most of the studies were in households and unfortunately again then surprisingly few studies are longitudinal so we don't really know about the changes over time and and whether or not the um if there are uh savings done during this period of the intervention if those savings are kept after a few months or something like that already today i mean most of us can get access to our own data when it comes to our own energy use etc so this is also maybe an a field where it's easier to find data that you actually can use in digital behavior change interventions um and then i'm going to talk shortly about mobility and and here you we haven't done a systematic literature review but there is a plethora of ict-based tools that you can use uh when it comes to mobility uh for example travel planners or mobility as a service etc and i wanna just shortly mention but not go deep into it since it's it's not really a digital behavior change intervention uh but there has been a product that green leap called a car free year which i find really really interesting it was done a couple of years ago and what they did in that project was to remove the car from three families within the stockholm area and then follow them for one year and instead they were using light electrical vehicles like box bikes or a renault tweezing and they were looking at what happened with these families and how they experienced this um change and and what they needed uh what kind of hindrance and barriers and and opportunities there were around this setting and one year that's like now having done these literature reviews that's a pretty long project so that's amazing if i'm gonna say something uh from the car for a year and from other studies that i've both been involved in but also read about uh it's really really hard especially when it comes to mobility to separate um kind of the mobility practices uh compared to from other practices because mobility is so highly entwined with other things that we do in in our life so how we cook food mobility comes in there since we have to get the food to our homes et cetera et cetera so now i'm shortly going to tell you about an intervention or or actually a set of interventions done at kth that had to do with mobility so this was done at mr sums and what they did in this study was that they were looking at the cost of mobility so in in one setting they let people know the real cost of the car so whenever they took a trip uh in a mobile app they got to know how much how much that particular trip cost if you included all the fixed and semi-fixed costs around the card and not only the fuel costs and what happened was that the people who took part in the study a few of them knew the real cost of their car or the trip of the car um you kind of ignore it so why when you have bought your car you you store the uh the information about the the fixed and sigma fixed costs somewhere so you don't really know think about them when you're driving your car um and the people who took part in the study they had relatively old cars so that made the costs relatively lower i mean if they had had much newer cars um the cost of one trip would have been higher since there's this the depreciation of the of the car is most like highest in the beginning of cars life rather than if you have an older car and after the study few of them ha could imagine having a caring car sharing scheme instead of owning their own car partly because the difference in cost wasn't so big but there's also other things coming in here so it turns out that it's not maybe the everyday travels that that is the reason why they have a car but actually the the trips for a vacation or if they own a summer cottage or similar um that's when they really need a car and that and those are longer trips and then they own a car because of that um and then they use it when they already have the car the other intervention they did was to try to see if they through subsidizing tickets on the public transport if they travel during off-peak hours if that would make any change and it turned out that few in the study did any changes at all maybe if a couple of them maybe changed a couple of trips because well that was mainly because they were very close to the cheap ticket time so they didn't actually change their practices so much around this and then finally they tried to reward bicycling so if if the respondents were bicycling uh to a place and then back again so not only uh biking for the pleasure of it uh they would get one kroner per bike kilometer up to a maximum level of 400 corner per month but none of the participants were motivated by this reward however they thought that maybe if the reward was higher they would be motivated or maybe others would be motivated by this reward um and i think this is interesting because it shows that it's it's kind of hard to change the mobility of of um or the practices of our mobility uh and that the monetary value of it is not always the thing that that drives us really um but rather other things um around this i should also say that mr sums run other interventions which i find really really interesting so they also have a job hub in the suburb of tooling and i would think that i think is really interesting but it's not really a digital intervention or it is in a way but not the behavior change intervention in the way i'm talking about it in this presentation brilliant so coming then through from um food and energy and mobility and i mentioned um practices as a way of looking at um how we behave in in the world and and where our environmental impact come from and how hard it is to change some practices because they're bundled together um i would like to go over to a type of digital baby change interventions that are looking at the whole life or or the whole everyday life of a person so one way of looking at your environmental impact is to use carbon footprint calculators and they can be designed in many different ways um the one on the slide here is from wwf called climate calculator which is one of perhaps one of the most easy to use you answer a couple of questions and then you get an estimate of your carbon footprint for a year there are other types of of carbon calculators that can be more um detailed in in terms of how many questions they ask and what kind of questions they ask around your consumption uh but there's also for example svalna which is a carbon calculator that takes financial days data and make a a estimation of your footprint from your financial data so you connect it to your bank card basically they are of course then um criticized by research of course uh they might be really good to give you a baseline um maybe give you knowledge that you didn't have before or show you hot spots where you could change your impact but uh resettle research has also shown that they are uh it's kind of hard to act on this kind of data so you don't really know what you're supposed to do or or at least some users feel that they don't really know what's what's the next steps for me if i want to do anything about my environmental impact and this follows in general this kind of knowledge action gap that we might have knowledge about our environmental impact but then we still uh continue to work or do like we did before and not really changing this environmental impact um yes so what could be done then if you want to kind of uh develop on these carbon footprint calculators since they they are more all encompassing and showing you impact from your whole life and then i'm gonna tell you about two of these tools that have taken the carbon calculator a step further so this is a commercial system called deetster it's a carbon footprint calculator but they also have in the app a kind of knowledge journey where you can know get to know more things about sustainability issues there's challenges that you can do in order to lower impact so they have defined actions that you can make but they also have these habits so that's like challenges that you have to do over a period of time and over and over again and by doing that they then become or form a new habit so this app is available for private use but their main business model is to sell it to or companies and having kind of a step competition but instead of taking steps to better your health you actually engage in these challenges to lower your carbon footprint and at our division we've had a master student who were working together with digister and they were looking at push notifications so whenever you're hearing about challenges that could easily be reoriented into gamification or a game-like feature so that you could compete with others so um what sebastian did in this master thesis was to look at push notification he had push notifications that were competition oriented so they were kind of implying that you were competing with someone else or they were collaboration oriented so they they uh evoked um thoughts about us doing something together uh basically and then there was also a control group that didn't get uh or receive any notifications uh and the study fund found out that uh getting notifications uh increased engagement with the app compared to the control group which maybe isn't so surprising if you're reminded by the app you're going to go into the app more often but the the and the uh only other like um statistically significant result was that men in the competition group logged in more frequently and did more habits habits deeds so doing these repeated activities to form a new habit so in this case the competition-oriented notifications made men at least do more of these activities in the apps and we have one more of these kind of tools so another tool commercially developed is habits it's a web app it also combines carbon footprint calculator with challenges and again is the main business model is to to sell this as a step competition to the companies and we currently have an ongoing research project collaboration with habits and the project was habit-wise and it's just the product manager of this uh project and currently for one week we've had a campaign at sweat bank so somewhere around 199 individuals at sweat bank is currently using the app and they're going to do it for for eight weeks and then we're gonna um of course evaluate what happened during these eight weeks and a little bit later in in the spring we're going to do a similar campaign uh at it's going to be a smaller user group but we're going to do the same kind of campaign and then also evaluate what happens when you do this in a organizational perspective is it uh can the uh the kind of organization or or the company um help these users uh to address sustainability issues and what do they think about it when they do it they're very kind of engaged and enthusiastic of being part of this research both swedbank and yatuboya nuisa it's going to be super interesting and we will have results later in the autumn but before we did the started these campaigns during the autumn so i should say that we were supposed to start the campaigns last last spring uh so we're a bit late on that but due to the corona pandemic we have we've had to postpone it a bit but now finally we are up and running but during the autumn we did a interview study and it was axel bjorn hansen who did the interviews we were looking for people who had found the app by themselves so both i think both leads their inhabits are it's possible to use it as a private person but then you're not kind of part of this campaign and the packaging around the campaign and and these are some temptative results from from that study uh we've written a paper and submitted it but uh so it's in that process right now um what was clear from this interview study was that the individuals who found the app by themselves um they are already deeply engaged in sustainability issues like you don't you don't kind of stumble upon this tool uh by accident but if you find it you you are already quite engaged in sustainability issues and then maybe they are not the the primary user group for this kind of app so they were very enthusiastic about it but they hadn't been using it for any prolonged time and some of them were also um i'd say far beyond the the functionality of the app they were keeping their own records in excel sheets on very detailed uh emissions from the food they were eating and such and the simple carbon calculator that were used in the app didn't really match this very engaged perspective that they had some of the some of the people that we were interviewing um they were super motivated by gamification but most of them were not uh and uh even though it may be not very salient in the in the web app that it's it is a competition uh it still has these gamified mechanisms like leaderboards and statistics around who's currently doing most of of the challenges etc so it's also interesting to see whether or not this matches the the people who are using the app most of the respondents felt a lack of social context and this is perhaps not surprising since they found this as a private user um and and we think that this will be counteracted in in the in the company campaign that we're following since then you have the social context of being uh within an organization and you can see the other teams and know who they are or at least where they are in the organization etc but in in in the private use you have these leaderboards but you don't really know who the other people on the leaderboards are so it doesn't motivate you particularly um and even though it's an extension then of the carbon footprint calculator um the added challenges are not really enough so i think that there's something maybe missing here um for uh for at least this particular user group um so they they felt that uh um it was an interesting concept maybe other people would be interested in using this uh but most of them had used it for a short while and then the interest in it had veined um yes and i'm nearing the end of my presentation so if you're sitting there and eagerly waiting to to ask me questions um i'm soon there so uh to summarize some of what i've been talking about today um when it comes to digital behavior change interventions we should remember that competition isn't for everyone so it's very easy to go to gamification i think that that would be something that would engage people in uh looking at their own environmental impact uh so then you have to think about what kind of other mechanism can be used and how would they be designed so if we want to to make people more engaged how would we do that without necessarily using competition as the as the main driver and the social is important so how do you design for that not only so that you feel that you are in a social context uh but perhaps also making change that isn't on an individual level so most of the baby change uh technologies i've been talking about today have been very geared towards individual behavior change but what would what would it like look like if we try to do this or make these tools that would work on on group level that's something also that i'm interested in in exploring and then there's this fact that many of these tools they become like a transition to not only in that they help in the transition to a more sustainable society but rather that they have a transitional meaning for the users so use using a carbon calculator that might be a first step in understanding the hot spots or or your environmental impact in general and then you have to do something else to continue with changing your practices or or making other adjustments to your life and and that might be okay um we we might just have to be aware of that but if we would like the use of these technologies to stretch over a longer period of time how do we design for that and probably we also have to work with personalization and making sure that they are adaptable to where people are in the change process that might take several years to go through so how can we design for longer use and then also very very important we have to think about how this digital intervention fit within a larger societal changes so it's it's uh uh you might be super engaged and interested in changing your own practices or or lessening the environmental impact from your life but if the infrastructure around you the the urban fabric or uh what not the the food system uh is opposing you or or making making it hard for you to change um it doesn't matter how much digital behavior change intervention we throw on them these other hinders barriers will will make sure that the changes doesn't come so how do we cooperate over different fields to make sure that we can drive this change together with or without digital baby changing detentions basically yes so actually that was my presentation and i am happy to open up for any questions from you the listeners

2021-04-19 13:55

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