3.0 Preliminary Research
Ten interviews were conducted with our friends from different countries with the age range from 17 - 35. The interview aims to find out people’s view of the plastic bag ban and their contribution to the environment, their habit of plastic bag usage and finally, their thoughts on visualising people’s contribution to the environment. We found that 2/3 of the participants have the habit of using reusable bags either before the ban or after the ban. Interestingly, some of the reason of not using plastic bags are “the space under the sink is full” or “the plastic bags hurt my finger when I am taking a bus” or “carrying some many plastic bags don’t look good.” However, when the participants use reusable bags because of an environmental reason, it’s always related to the marine life especially after they saw the images or video of dying and wounded marine animals. When asked about how they think is their contribution to the environment. Most people believe that merely personal effort is not helping much and it requires a collective effort to help make a bigger impact on the environment. All they can do is trying to influence the people around in doing a similar behaviour. After each interview, we also invited the participants to draw a picture of visualising people’s contribution to the environment. 4 participants drew things related to the marine life and 3 drew some metrics associated with the trees.
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From the interview, we learnt that raising awareness and collective actions are essential.
We also discovered that we should visualise personal effort with a metric that people are familiar with and can relate. In this way, people can understand better about the impact of their behaviour. We also decided to make a visualisation of things related to marine life since most people care about them and can easily connect plastic with plastic pollution and the marine environment.
Besides, an observation was conducted around the cashier area in Coles inside Toowong Village on a Monday and Saturday at the time from 5:00 - 5:10. We discovered that more people bring their reusable on Saturday which is usually groceries days compared to Monday which is a regular weekday. A similar insight is also found from one of the interviews with a participant coming from Malaysia. He mentioned that in Malaysia, people are only charged extra on Saturday for plastic bags but not on weekdays because people usually go groceries shopping on Saturday and have reusable bags prepared beforehand. From this, we noticed that people are willing to bring their reusable bags when they planned to go groceries shopping, but they can easily forget when it’s on a random day when they didn’t plan in doing groceries.
Another interesting insight from the observation is that, we found that there is a big screen outside Coles that display different product sales. Surprisingly, no-one look at the screen, People are usually on a rush, chatting with friends or they just walk pass without paying attention to the screen. From this insight, we decided to moved from the idea of building a static installation to an interactive one to attract people’s attention and raise awareness.
With the direction of data visualisation, we came up with the idea of building a mobile application and an installation. We decided to choose the idea of creating an installation because there are existing applications which provide similar features to what we have proposed. We started brainstorming and came up with a bunch of ideas. We thought about building an installation in the cashier area in the retail store in visualising what plastic pollution has done to the environment. We also thought about building a system in the paying system to show a positive message as an appreciation when people are using their reusable bags trying to motivate them to continue such behaviour. We also considered building an installation outside the supermarket visualising how many plastic bags have people saved not using every day and compared the data with supermarket in different areas trying to persuade people to reduce the usage of plastic bags so that the people in that area will look better and have a sense of pride of being the one saving the most number of plastic bags. However, after the observation, we noticed that a static installation might not be effective as people may walk past without much attention on it. Therefore, we started conducted more literature review.
According to the interviews we did to understand users’ perceptions of using plastic bags, many of them did not believe that personal effort of not using plastic bags can make any changes to the environment. Therefore, we reconsider the research question of visualising personal contribution. In the paper “Collective Awareness Platforms: Engines for Sustainability and Ethics”, Sestini (2012) discussed the significance of building collective intelligence and awareness through Internet networking to influence decision-making and behaviour to promote sustainability. The article provided insight on social connectivity to reduce sustainability issue by outlining how collective knowledge can be built through the Internet with today’s technology. This article strengthens our understanding of the concept of collective awareness and shed lights on how visualising collective awareness may potentially encourage an individual’s participation in collective effort.
We moved on to looking at reviews of interactive installation since a static one may not work. A study suggested that a playful interactive installation is effective in involving, educating, and changing people’s environmental behaviour (Gardeli et al., 2017). An article supported the effectiveness of interactive installation and games in promoting and raising awareness of environmental issues. The articles presented a total of eight projects with two digital games and six interactive installations designed and developed by students for a campaign under the theme of “week without plastic bags”. The authors mentioned that gamification and playfulness has a more significant impact on motivation compared to static installations that only display a message. Besides, according to procedural rhetoric model, a model of persuasion, through using a simulation of game elements based the abstraction of the physical world, the effect of the action in the game can be linked to and directly connected to a real-world situation and behaviour (Oinas-kukkonen & Harjumaa, 2009) This, in turn, increase the persuasiveness of such action. Presenting information with interactive installation is proved to be a fun way help raise people awareness, engage them in understanding the issue and promote discussion around the problem. This, in turn, helps persuade and motivate people in participating in pro-environmental behaviour in real life.
In looking at designing persuasive technology, we also studied the chapter written by B.J Fogg (2002) which presented how different social cues can increase the persuasiveness of technology. One of the social cues is language. Wordings of the message can matter. Positive feedback especially praise has a powerful effect in reinforcing behaviour change. Even though the praise is not from a real human but a computer system, it can make people feel good and engage them. Besides, another article also studied the effect of the emotion of pride and guilt in influencing people’s pro-environmental behaviour (Bissing-Olson et al., 2016). When people perceive their behaviour to be socially valued, they will be more likely to experience a sense of pride which further motivate them to continue such behaviour. However, studies also showed that when people feel guilty of their behaviour, they will be more likely to make a change(Mallett et al., 2013; Tangney et al., 2002; Tangney et al., 2007). It is insightful that both negative or positive messages is able to motivate behaviour change. We can try different language use when conducting user testing.
Finally, we also reviewed the emotional design by Don Norman (2004). According to Don Norman, attractive design can help broaden people’s mind and lead to more creativity and open-minded. Environmental behaviour is a serious issue, if we can present it in a visually attractive way, we can potentially lead to better user experience and perception of such problem which in turn persuade people more in engaging in such behaviour.
Bissing-Olson, M. J., Fielding, K. S., & Iyer, A. (2016). Experiences of pride, not guilt, predict pro-environmental behavior when pro-environmental descriptive norms are more positive. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 145-153.
Fogg, B. J. (2002). Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do. Ubiquity, 2002(December), 5.
Gardeli, A., Vosinakis, S., Englezos, K., Mavroudi, D., Stratis, M., & Stavrakis, M. (2017). EAI Endorsed Transactions.
Oinas-Kukkonen, H., & Harjumaa, M. (2018). Persuasive systems design: key issues, process model and system features. In Routledge Handbook of Policy Design (pp. 105-123). Routledge.
Mallett, R. K., Melchiori, K. J., & Strickroth, T. (2013). Self-confrontation via a carbon footprint calculator increases guilt and support for a proenvironmental group. Ecopsychology, 5(1), 9-16.
Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Civitas Books.
Sestini, F. (2012). Collective Awareness Platforms: Engines for Sustainability and Ethics. Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE, 31(4), 54-62.
Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Emotions and social behavior. Shame and guilt. New York, NY, US.
Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). What’s moral about the self-conscious emotions. The self-conscious emotions: Theory and research, 21-37.