Improving energy usage behavior with social network context

Abstract

Energy is one of the most necessary resources for people’s survival, as it is needed in every sector of the society, from food production to powering computers and machines. As energy demand tends to grow, new energy supply is a recurrent research topic, where researchers try to come up with solutions for handling the existing resources and optimizing their use.

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be included in this optimization of energy use, bringing psychological concepts to the digital environment.

In this work, we propose an ICT social platform for measuring and enhancing individual and community energy saving actions at households and workplaces. Through sharing, challenging and comparing the consumption inside a social network context the system promotes behaviour change with focus in sustainability.

This thesis depicts the conception of an unique crowd-sourced social network, from the ideation based on social interventions to the implementation using the LEAN approach.

EnergyUP, as the application is called, has the goal of raising awareness for the environmental impacts of energy use, changing the mindset and the behaviour of users in order to achieve efficient usage of energy. After prototyping several versions of this mobile application, we evaluated the application in user tests and confirmed potential for its success. The CIVIS project, under which this thesis is conducted, will continue future work towards full implementation and real test bed tests.