Patterns of persuasion for sustainability

Knowles, Bran and Blair, Lynne and Walker, Stuart and Coulton, Paul and Thomas, Lisa and Mullagh, Louise (2014) Patterns of persuasion for sustainability. In: DIS '14 Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems. ACM, CAN, pp. 1035-1044. ISBN 9781450329026

Abstract

Research into the values motivating unsustainable behavior has generated unique insight into how NGOs and environmental campaigns contribute toward successfully fostering significant and long-term behavior change, yet thus far this research has not been applied to the domain of sustainable HCI. We explore the implications of this research as it relates to the potential limitations of current approaches to persuasive technology, and what it means for designing higher impact interventions. As a means of communicating these implications to be readily understandable and implementable, we develop a set of antipatterns to describe persuasive technology approaches that values research suggests are unlikely to yield significant sustainability wins, and a complementary set of patterns to describe new guidelines for what may become persuasive technology best practice.