Add thoughts here for Aaron Marcus' talk and article...

Here are several additional thoughts about The Green Machine.

First, we discussed that it might make more sense for the energy consumption feedback to occur at a time and in a location that are in the natural path of the behavior that we want to change. An example I thought of is the "These Come From Trees" stickers that have been deployed around Stanford's campus. These stickers are placed on paper towel dispensers to serve as a reminder to reduce consumption at just when you're about to use a paper towel. In CS 377V on Thursday, BJ Fogg noted that he believes the winning solution for behavior change is to "Put 'Hot Triggers' in the path of motivated people." It still is not entirely clear to me whether The Green Machine intended to motivate or to change behavior, which are two different tasks.

Secondly, The Green Machine used social networks to allow comparison and also competition. An interesting study might be to look at whether explicit competition or casual social comparison is better at effecting long-term behavior change.

Lastly, mobile phones can most likely be used to influence energy consumption, but they're not necessarily the right platform for all of the features expressed in The Green Machine. For example, why not integrate the monitoring service with existing social networks to provide the social functionality while keeping the mobile app itself focused on personal energy monitoring? Additionally, it will likely become increasingly inexpensive to add interactivity to home appliances, so prototyping and researching these interactions could prove to be highly valuable.

Andrew Hershberger