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Sustainability by Design. How to Encourage Users to Choose Energy-Saving Programs and Settings when Washing Laundry

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

One way to counteract anthropogenic climate change, is to reduce individual energy consumption. An especially energy-intensive everyday practice is doing the laundry. In Germany, laundry accounts for about 5% of domestic electricity consumption. In part, this is because users do not make use of the energy-saving programs offered by modern washing machines. Based on different principles of behavior change, we created four concepts for washing machine interfaces to encourage users to choose energy-saving programs and settings. These concepts were implemented as functional prototypes. An online experiment (N=400) showed that all concepts increased the choice of energy-saving programs compared to a standard machine. Especially effective was to interrupt impulsive actions and suggest alternative choices (concept B) and to restructure the entry of settings (concept E). This demonstrates how small changes in a standard interfaces can significantly increase the probability of energy conservation in a private setting.

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  1. Sustainability by Design. How to Encourage Users to Choose Energy-Saving Programs and Settings when Washing Laundry

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2023
      14911 pages
      ISBN:9781450394215
      DOI:10.1145/3544548
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      Published: 19 April 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. Behavior change
      2. empirical study
      3. laundry washing
      4. persuasive technology
      5. prototyping
      6. sustainability
      7. sustainable HCI
      8. sustainable interaction design

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      • (2024)I did it once, but can I do it again? The role of responsibility attribution and self-efficacy in technology for sustainable behavior changeProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685339(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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