Design and Evaluation of a Social Visualization Aimed at Encouraging Sustainable Behavior

The environment is affected by our collective behavior, yet many visualizations of energy saving behavior focus on personal actions, or simple, unidimensional comparisons between individuals and groups. Based on past work in social psychology and in environmental visualization, we present a design space for social visualizations that considers issues such as anonymity, dimensionality, and competition vs. collaboration. We describe the design and implementation of a social visualization of energy saving behavior. This visualization goes beyond past examples in that it includes both uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional comparative feedback. It is designed to scale to a small group of dorms or a whole city. We evaluated our visualization in the context of a dorm competition at a small liberal arts college. While this was a preliminary study, it helps to provide formative data on the value of our visualization.