The Design of Eco-Feedback Technology (Jon Froehlich et al.) - 2010

1 – What are the two most interesting things you learned from this paper?

-      It offers a wide range of background research on key motivation techniques that environmental psychology and the behavioural sciences at large have used to change behaviour such as information, goal-setting, comparison, commitment, incentive/disincentives and rewards/penalties, and feedback. The example domain is energy consumption.

-      Provide feedback on individual or group behaviours with deeply analysed the environmental psychology. The prototypes are built after deeply studying the particular behaviour as a specific behaviour has its own set of contexts and constraints which impact behaviour change.

2 – How do you think that relates to our work on FigureEnergy?

Figure Energy is design to motivate people ease of managing and learning their own energy consumption with the ultimate goal is to help them reduce their energy usages and costs. We need to apply some key motivation techniques such as rewards/penalties, commitment, goal-setting and comparison, or even combine these techniques to our system design to achieve the goal.

Intelligent agents can learn the human behaviours to give feedback, given the set of contexts and constraints which impact behaviour change. In addition, agents then can routinely learn the connection between the amount of resources users use and the consuming behaviour.

I believe these motivation techniques are the main keys to actually make the Multi-Agent Interaction work in the future.