This work details a team-based feedback approach for reducing resource consumption. The approach uses paper printing within office environments as a case study. It communicates the print usage of each participant’s team rather than the participant’s individual print usage. Feedback is provided weekly via emails and contains normative information, along with eco-metrics and team-based comparative statistics. The approach was empirically evaluated to study the effectiveness of the feedback method. The experiment comprised of 16 people belonging to 4 teams with data on their print usage gathered over 58 weeks, using the first 30-35 weeks as a baseline. The study showed a significant reduction in individual printing with an average of 28%. The experiment confirms the underlying hypothesis that participants are persuaded to reduce their print usage in order to improve the overall printing behaviour of their teams. The research provides clear pathways for future research to qualitatively investigate our findings.

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Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Curbing Resource Consumption
Using Team-Based Feedback
Souleiman Hasan1
, Richard Medland2
, Marcus Foth2
, Edward Curry1
1
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
2
Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology & NICTA, Australia
Stefan.Decker@deri.org
http://www.StefanDecker.org/
In proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Persuasive Technology
(2013), Sydney, Australia.

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Outline
 Motivation and Background
 Paper consumption
 Previous work and research question
 Individual vs. team-based feedback
 Experiment Setting
 Environment
 Print monitoring
 Persuasive strategies
 Procedure
 Results and Discussion
 Conclusions
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Motivation
 Of the global wood harvest for “industrial uses”
42% goes to paper production, a proportion
expected to grow by more than 50 percent in the
next 50 years. (Abramovitz, “Paper Cuts”, WorldWatch Institute, 1999, p. 124)
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Previous Work & Question
 Using flavoured feedback to curb paper printing
(Medland et al., 2010)
 Focused on individualistic feedback
 Question: “Can membership in a group be
leveraged to persuade individuals to change their
behaviour, and hence the group overall behaviour?”
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 Individual-based Feedback
Individual vs. Team-based
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 Team-based Feedback
Individual vs. Team-based
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Outline
 Motivation and Background
 Paper consumption
 Previous work and research question
 Individual vs. team-based feedback
 Experiment Setting
 Environment
 Print monitoring
 Persuasive strategies
 Procedure
 Results and Discussion
 Conclusions
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Case Study Environment
 DERI
 130 staff members
 Interns, masters, PhDs, post-docs, research assistants,
research fellows, senior research fellows, professors,
technical staff, and administrative staff
 20 organisational units
 Reasons for printing
– Administrative printing by administrative and research staff.
– Printing research proposals, theses, academic and technical
reports.
– Printing academic papers for internal review and reading
purposes.
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Print Monitoring
 Monitoring software on the print server
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Persuasive Strategies
 Informative
 Traditional statistics
 Eco-metric statistics
 Social
 Comparative
 Competitive
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Experimental Procedure
 Data was aggregated and displayed weekly
 October 2010- May 2011: Baseline (w 1-31,35)
 May 2011- October 2011: Feedback provided (w31,
35-58)
 Voluntary participants
 Measure
 Person proportional printing over all printing every week
Team Members
Unit 1 Members 1, 2, 3,4
Unit 2 Members 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Unit 3 Members 11, 12, 13
Unit 4 Members 14, 15, 16
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Outline
 Motivation and Background
 Paper consumption
 Previous work and research question
 Individual vs. team-based feedback
 Experiment Setting
 Environment
 Print monitoring
 Persuasive strategies
 Procedure
 Results and Discussion
 Conclusions
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Results: Individual Printing
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Results: Statistical Significance
 Difference sample normally distributed
 The Anderson-Darling test P-value = 0.343
 Q-Q plot confirms normality
 Paired t-test
 Standard level of significance alpha = 0.05
 P-value = 0.025
 It is statistically significant to say that the feedback
method helped decrease the individuals’
proportional printing after it was applied
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Team Level Printing
 All units except unit 2 reduced overall unit printing.
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Discussion
 Previous survey revealed three themes
 Theme 1
 Any printing conducted by staff was viewed as necessary,
excepting accidents.
 Theme 2
 Staff viewed different metrics as relevant or alternatively,
as unnecessary for feedback on printing behaviour.
 Theme 3
 Staff viewed co-workers championing reduced paper use
as a helpful reminder to be conscious of how much they
were printing.
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Theme 1
 All printing is necessary
 About 31% of the participants – showed a slight
increase in their proportional printing
 Likely that the driving force behind the non-
responsive people is Theme 1.
 Any feedback method needs to address fully or
partially this theme to get better results
 e.g. by changing business processes
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Theme 2
 Flavoured feedback
 Software in this experiment applied various
flavours in tandem
 Stating the same information in different ways that
address different models of individual perception is
in fact a good feature of feedback methods
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Theme 3
 Comparison and competition
 Temporal comparison
 Contrasts team printing performance in a week to
performance the week prior.
 Social comparison
 Compares printing performance on a team-to-team basis
 Feedback method has been able to form an
incentive for individuals to lower printing.
 Some teams did not respond
 Outliers exist and affect overall unit performance
 Future work: hybrid personal and team-based feedback
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Conclusions
 Team-based feedback is persuasive.
 Applying several strategies in tandem helps
decrease divergence of outliers
 TODO
 Study the effect of communities dynamics
 Test hypothesis with other types of resources: e.g. energy
consumption
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