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Footprints/Funders > Footprints/Abstract > Footprints/Projects


the use of an in-home waste data collection station

  • SoylentGreen -- Development of a framework API for the visualizations of StepGreen website

Stepgreen Website (Mankoff & Fussell & Matthews & Matthews & Johnson & almost everyone else)

The Stepgreen website provides a mechanism for allowing individuals to report on and track their environmental impact. It includes a visualization that can be displayed on an individual's social networking web page. It also represents an umbrella project that can integrate many other pieces of software for tracking activities and impact.

Stepgreen is one of our core projects, and also represents a service that we are hoping to share with non-profits that are encouraging behavior change. Please contact us at stepgreen@cs.cmu.edu if you are interested in collaborating with us.

Findings: We have deployed the site for 3 weeks to a group of 32 users and begun an open deployment exploring live use of the site. We are still in the process of analyzing our results and have no publications to date.

Polar Bear tamagochi as motivation (Dillahunt & Kraut & Mankoff)

We are beginning to explore the potential for an animated polar bear to motivate green behavior. We have conducted a 1 week study showing an increase in reported green behavior in a condition where we created emotional attachment to a virtual polar bear. We are currently following that up with a larger online study exploring a wider range of conditions.

Publications: Dillahunt, T., Becker, G., Mankoff, J. and Kraut, R. Motivating Environmentally Sustainable Behavior Changes with a Virtual Polar Bear." Pervasive 2008 workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability. Attach:dillahunt_final.pdf

Impact of demographics (Fussell & Setlock)

We are also very interested in ensuring that our message and delivery method are appropriate for a diverse set of users. This component of our work involves investigating the most appropriate message and delivery methods for a broad range of users across several socio-economic and ethnic groups. This work is currently in its preliminary stages.

Ubigreen (Landay & Klasjna & Froehlich & Consolvo & Harrison & Dillahunt & Mankoff)

The Ubigreen project is concerned with using mobile devices to track and display transportation information. We have developed a tracking system combining data from a mobile phone and MSP sensor and display feedback back to users as an ambient display on their phone (internal documentation; http://dub.washington.edu/projects/ubigreen+Ubigreen page at University of Washington with video, etc.)

Activity Prediction (Led by Anind Dey and Christian Kohler, with some input from Mankoff)

This project will use a widely accessible commodity device, the cell phone, to predict when a user is coming home, which rooms he/she is currently occupying, and for how long he/she will stay in the room. This information will be used to turn on heating, cooling, and lighting only when the user is actually needing them and thus reduce energy consumption in domestic environments.

Keeping Track of Tons (Francisco Santiago, Benjamin Kwadwo Som-Pimpong, Chris Weber PhD)

Our idea is to create an integrated trash weigh-in station to replace the conventional waste bin. Users’ trash will be weighed by the can as it is dumped; and this data will be stored and displayed on a computer application where they can chart their daily, weekly, or monthly progress and possibly compare with others. Attach:Keeping_Track_of_Tons.pdf

SoylentGreen (Ting Luo, Jeho Oh, Mi Sun, Renaud Tircher)

The current StepGreen website provides limited visualizations that are difficult to maintain, modify, and use in a different context. Moreover, the code is not optimized and doesn’t use the newly developed API to access the data. Furthermore, the current website suffers from some performance problem, which takes too much time to switch to another visualization or feature. Another key issue is about the resizing of the visualization which is not dynamically modifiable. This project aims to provide a visualization framework that allows StepGreen to build a set of visualization clients and choose which one to display. This display choice may be done by StepGreen or directly by the user. Visualization clients should be based on some generic basic sub-clients. Additionally, the visualization framework must be dynamically resizable, and easy to insert in other context (such as Facebook or MySpace).

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