Cup Builder - Applicability of Gamification when Designing for Behavior Change towards Sustainability in Public Places

Abstract

Gamification is a widely studied concept and is applied to various contexts such as marketing, healthcare and education. Sustainability is another issue that more and more people claim to be concerned about at home, when buying food and clothes or when travelling. But this principle does not always come into practice, especially out of home, either because individuals are not aware of what impact they can have among the crowd or because it is difficult to change habits. Gamification in the context of sustainability has already been investigated claiming to succeed in increasing people’s awareness about sustainability and in turn decreasing their energy consumption. The studies have however mainly been conducted in familiar environments, such as home or workplaces where people know each other. In the context of public places, such a relation to strangers does not exist and the individual’s sense of responsibility is commonly rather low. These aspects bring along the need to find out what the addition of game elements really affects and how it should be applied to achieve a general change of behavior with this new challenge. This thesis aims to investigate gamification related to behavior change within the frame of the research project TRIBE. Bringing together several European partners, among whom the Interactive Institute Swedish ICT, the focus of this 3 year research program is set on gamification in public buildings to lower energy consumption. The specific context to be explored within this thesis is cafés on the campus and the consequent focus on the consumption of paper cups and reusable cups. A concept of a game has been developed resulting in the implementation of a high-fidelity prototype which has then been tested in a user field study. It was aimed to find out how the application of game elements can encourage people to use more reusable cups. Therefore the design solution consists of two versions, one being a visualization of the general consumption of cups at the café, the second one adding several game elements to it. Additionally, as a result of thorough investigation of former work combined with the findings of this thesis, a set of guidelines has been formulated which intends to support designers and researchers investigating in a similar area.