StepGreen

StepGreen is an umbrella project by the Human Computer Interaction Institute department at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Jennifer Mankoff. This project brings research from several disciplines including behavioral science, environmental engineering, and computer science with the main purpose to understand and address the problems inherent in changing energy consumption behavior. An important goal of the project is to deploy widely, reach critical mass, and study these factors in the field. One way StepGreen plans to accomplish this is by using their website to encourage individuals to reduce their energy consumption by leveraging online social networks. The site was taken down in 2013, but the online documentation and research is still available.
Background
StepGreen.org is a site intended to promote energy saving behaviors. Participants were able to sign up and use the site for free. For a field study StepGreen participants chose to engage in different actions and reported when they had completed them. The results suggest that motivating factors like public commitment and competition are effective, and better leveraging these factors will likely lead to even greater appeal and effectiveness. Their contribution is to create an understanding of the impact of different decisions on the success of StepGreen.org that can benefit the designers of other multifaceted, online systems for behavior change.
Design
A major feature of StepGreen.org is that it piggybacks on popular social media as a social network plug-in for the user’s preferred site. For this project, participants would receive prompts to do energy saving actions such as turning off the lights or taking shorter showers every time they logged in to MySpace. The actions would include the CO2 and dollar impact and the users would be able to see a visualization of their progress on their MySpace profile. These green practices were selected from ten existing websites including www.epa.gov and www.earthday.net, and after an online survey with 122 participants, the team decided to include actions that were easy to commit even if the impact was not very large. The visualization takes the form of an interactive graph which is on the StepGreen.org page and imbedded scaled-down version on the user’s social media platform. The visualization provides the users with constant feedback about their actions, thus motivating them to commit and fulfill new actions.
On StepGreen.org, users can explore suggested actions and view popular actions through a tag cloud. The users can also see the benefits of these green practices in detail, for example, their projected per-year dollar savings, projected per-year CO2 savings, category, and overall popularity. Reporting a fulfilled action is also done through this site; actions are color coded to remind the users of how often they have completed one.
Redesign
During the study, the team observed that there was a reduction of user activity near the end. As a result, the redesign focused on enhancing the social interaction of StepGreen.org, to not only retain current users and encourage more contributions, but also to attract newcomers. The redesign featured discussion boards for actions, an option to compare visualization charts between users, and a home screen that highlighted these new functions. To also sustain the user’s positive activity of fulfilling actions, the redesign also included a carbon calculator that affirmed the user of the impact they were making.
Support for Organizational Planning
The StepGreen team hoped to investigate methods in which they could support organizations who were also proactive in making green decisions. As a result, they had collaborated with the Green Workplace Challenge to design a software system for small businesses. The system was influenced by work done earlier with businesses and campus planners that also cared about reducing their organization’s carbon footprint.
Related Work
The StepGreen team conducted a variety of research around leveraging social networks and energy sensing in homes.
Polar Bear for Motivation
The StepGreen team explored the potential for an animated polar bear to motivate green behavior. Leveraging Facebook, they used an animated polar bear to persuade people to pare down their energy use. The researchers 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. They also showed that both a polar bear and a tree lead to engagement in a mobile application.
Impact of Demographics
StepGreen explored the unique problems that arise when looking at low-income communities, tenants & landlords, and diverse cultural groups. They conducted a series of research projects exploring different how demographics play a role in green behaviors. The main contribution of their work is a set of open research questions and design recommendations for technologies that may affect and be affected by the conflict between stakeholders around energy use.
Impact
Through the StepGreen project, researchers were able to bring new findings to the academic community by understanding the decisions made for in the production of StepGreen.org. One, the Stepgreen project proved that existing networks on social media platforms are imperative for support. Two, visualizations needs to be flexible in that many visualizations are needed to get the point across. Finally, users want to explore data from many perspectives. Although Stepgreen.org has been taken down, the API and documentation is still available for public access.
API
The StepGreen API is based on a stateless RESTful architecture. Each listing states the HTTP method associated with it such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. StepGreen works on a weekly reporting cycle that runs from Sunday to Monday. To make a data REQUEST a date should be included in the request. A data REQUEST returns all the information associated within the week that date falls into. For example if the date in request falls on a Wednesday, all the data from Monday to Sunday of that week will be returned. All requests and responses are XML. Generally all parameters which modify the state are in the body of the request. Dates and times in general are given as UTC in ISO8601 format. It is up to the client to convert times to a user’s locale.
Common Errors
One of the most common errors is not checking status codes returned and behaving appropriately.
A current error that has not been fixed is a which is believed to be caused by a library load error in the version of Ruby being used.
A workaround for this is to wait and resend the request.
StepGreen uses OAuth 1.0 for authentication without callbacks. In order to use OAuth with your clients, you have to setup your Clients. These libraries help you to configure your OAuth library of choice.
Documentation
The following are some examples of API calls to the StepGreen API. A complete documentation of the API is available on the StepGreen website.
Returns the most recent version of our Study Consent & Confidentiality Statement. The body element contains a CDATA block containing HTML text of the statement. The client is responsible for ensuring that this is correctly rendered to the user.
Returns the specified consent. This is typically used to retrieve the text of the consent the user actually agreed to. The body element contains a CDATA block containing HTML text of the statement. The client is responsible for ensuring that this is correctly rendered to the user.
Create a new comment for action with id=y. Comment data must be POSTed in a valid XML block. A successful post returns the newly created comment.
User Actions
Lists locations (country and postal code) where users reside, plus the number of users in each location.
Gives basic information about the currently logged in (OAuth authorized) user. Returns exactly the same information as the above call, i.e. returns the same data as if test_user is the user who authorized the OAuth access.
Electricity Use
Get a list of currently known electricity suppliers/companies.
Gives basic information about a specific supplier.
Accounts (requires authentication)
Get information on a users electricity accounts.
GET /api/v1/users/username/electricity/accounts/x.xml
Readings (requires authentication)
Gives basic information about a user (their current number of committed actions and weeks since last report on any commitment). You can only access another user anonymously unless that user allows named access to their data.
Unofficial Documentation
The UnOfficial API are URLs which are currently available to be used, but are essentially unsupported. They have been used previously within StepGreen for client interaction. These calls are all due to be deprecated at some point, and replaced in the Official API.
Get the current polar bear image for a user. This image is created using information about the users commitments and reports.
Returns the users complete history of action commitments and savings from when they joined to that particular moment in time. Due to the amount of data being processed, this call may take a while (> 2 minutes) to return. Also, summaries for weeks which have no data may return empty or be missing.
Returns the users history of action commitments and savings for the weeks of the startdate and enddate inclusive. Dates should be in the form 'YYYY-MM-DD' or 'YYYYMMDD'. Due to the amount of data being processed, this call may take a while (> 2 minutes) to return a result, especially for multiweek requests. Also, summaries for weeks which have no data may return empty or be missing.

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