An Overview Of Our Solution
Early humans experienced intimate and continuous feedback from the natural world that informed and constrained decision-making and helped them see themselves as part of larger wholes. Environmental Dashboard (ED) leverages social psychology to reintroduce multiple scales of “ecofeedback”: 1) “Building Dashboards” dynamically display resource consumption in individual buildings; 2) “Citywide Dashboard” animates whole community resource flows; 3) “Community Voices” combines images and words to celebrate actions that advance sustainability; and 4) ED calendar promotes crowd-sourced civic engagement. Research suggests that the project goals of engaging, educating, motivating and empowering pro-environmental and pro-community thought and action are being realized through a comprehensive pilot in the City of Oberlin and dissemination beyond.
- Population Impacted: 20,000 people
- Continent: North America
Last name
Organization type
Context Analysis
For > 99.9% of our evolutionary history humans experienced intimate and continuous feedback from the natural world that informed and constrained all decision-making and helped us to be “systems thinkers” -- to see ourselves as integrated parts of the larger ecological and social systems we inhabited. Today, North Americans spend over 90% of their lives in buildings, removed from this ecofeedback. These buildings are responsible for ⅔ of electricity use and ⅓ of GHG emissions. In the face of unprecedented environmental challenges, there is a powerful need for fundamental changes in thought and action at individual and community levels. Yet the increasing scale of impact and increasing psychological and physical separation between humans and nature challenges our native abilities to effectively process and respond. New solutions are needed to reconnect us with our resource use and foster greater integration of ecological, economic and social dimensions of decision-making at all scales.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
Environmental Dashboard (ED, environmentaldashboard.org) is a novel technology that reintroduces feedback at multiple scales to motivate conservation, promote systems thinking and build pro-environmental and pro-community identity. Specifically, ED harnesses insights from social psychology, communications and environmental education and advances in monitoring and communication technology to provide four levels of ecofeedback:
1) Building Dashboard dynamically displays water and electricity consumption in individual buildings;
2) Citywide Dashboard animates whole community resource flows and quality;
3) Community Voices combines images and text to reinforce thought and action that advance sustainability;
4) ED community calendar provides a crowd-sourced vehicle for promoting engagement.
Digital signs, “empathetic character gauges” and “Environmental Orbs” are core components for delivering data where it is salient and in ways that elicit emotional as well as rational response.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
Community based social marketing identifies and tightly targets specific behaviors for modification. In contrast, while the individual features of ED are targeted towards particular psychological objectives, the suite of multi-scale approaches taken is designed to more broadly refocus individual and community thought, identity and behavior; we are concurrently promoting energy and water conservation, local shopping, volunteerism and civic engagement. As an example, Building and Citywide Dashboard are designed to collectively situate individuals’ resource use decisions in a broader community context. This fosters the kind of systems thinking necessary to motivate actions on large-scale challenges such as climate change. By discovering and then reinforcing local pro-environmental thought and action already taking place, Community Voices leverages the power of social norms to build a community’s capacity for mitigation, adaptation and resilience. Resource-reduction competitions enabled by ED technology in schools have proved to be highly effective at both engaging interest, transferring knowledge from kids to adults and stimulating significant conservation of electricity. Environmental Orbs, which glows different colors depending on current levels of water and electricity use relative to typical levels, provide “ambient feedback” that communicates limited and potentially subliminal information requiring low cognitive processing to enhance awareness and action.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
We explicitly designed empathetic characters to stimulate an emotional response. On both Building Dashboard and Citywide Dashboard “Flash” the energy squirrel and “Wally Walleye” exhibit different emotions and behaviors depending on current levels of consumption relative to typical levels. Community Voices and Environmental Orbs were also designed to promote emotional and other less rational decision-making processes. Identifying and then promoting desirable social norms is at the heart of the Community Voices technology. Rendering data in ways that are comparative and in some cases competitive has likewise been central to data visualizations developed for Building Dashboard. Displays on public signs prime ED content and keep it salient.
Describe your implementation
We have balanced the goal of creating a successful pilot of fully implemented ED technology in Oberlin with the goal of broad regional and national adoption. Towards the former goal, in the last two decades hundreds of meters have been installed in Oberlin College buildings, enabling feedback on the bulk of on-campus GHG emissions. In the City of Oberlin monitoring now includes electricity and water use in all public schools, whole city electricity and water use and water flows and quality in the local watershed. Community Voices content has been developed to meet eight core psychological criteria that maximize message impact. Thirteen digital signs on campus and 19 installed in store fronts, schools, nonprofits and government buildings display all four ED components including the community calendar. ED technology has also enabled annual resource-use reduction competitions among Oberlin College dorms and public schools.
Beyond Oberlin: the Building Dashboard component of ED was commercialized by student members of our team in 2004 and has since been deployed in thousands of buildings across the U.S.; “Lucid” is the industry leader and remains a key ED partner. Grants have enabled us to pilot ED in four similar sized colleges - Antioch, Hope, DePauw & Albion. In its peak year, the “Campus Conservation Nationals” program initiated by ED engaged nearly 200,000 college students at 91 participating schools in resource reduction competitions among dormitories. The ED team has received several grants to instrument schools and to collaborate with teachers to develop an “Instructor toolkit” (see environmentaldashboard.org)-- an online searchable repository of ED-related lessons to promote STEM learning and systems thinking. We are in the process of developing a third generation of Community Voices software that moves us towards our ultimate goal of a crowd-sourced content development and display application that can be easily adopted by organizations and communities.
External connections
Examples below illustrate the diversity of local, regional and national partners engaged in ED.
Business: As a Lucid reseller, Palmer Energy has been a key partner in installation of ED technology in Ohio schools, notably Akron, Cleveland and Toledo as well as Oberlin. We are currently collaborating closely with LIFX to complete development of an off-the-shelf Environmental Orb to replace our prototype technology. Locally, the Oberlin Business Partnership has been a key collaborator in user-testing and program development for the ED Calendar and Community Voices software.
K-College: In addition to the ED pilot in 4 colleges, we have a formal partnership with Toledo Public Schools to support integration of ED in their STEM curriculum. Metering for gas, water and electricity and lobby displays are now installed in 44 TPS schools. ED has led six curriculum workshops for TPS teachers with plans for more.
Nonprofit organizations: The ED team initiated a successful partnership among Lucid, USGBC, NWF, and Alliance to Save Energy to develop and study the impact of “Campus Conservation Nationals”.
Government: The Great Lakes Protection Fund has been a key supporter of ED and has facilitated project engagement with mayors and city managers across the region. The Cleveland Foundation is supporting a partnership among ED, the City of Cleveland, Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland 2030 District and others to create an ED learning hub centered at the Great Lakes Science Center.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
Research evaluating the impacts of ED has been published in peer reviewed venues (see tinyurl.com/EDPubs123). For example:
>Students using ED retained more factual content and developed greater systems thinking skills than those learning without ED.
>The empathetic character gauge is significantly more interesting, meaningful and motivating than traditional presentations of resource use data. Children grades 4-5 with exposure to ED experienced an emotional response to electricity and water use and expressed a more collectivist perspective on resource conservation behavior than students in a similar control school.
>Exposure to Citywide Dashboard resulted in enhanced systems thinking as evidenced by increased perception of ecological embeddedness, increased connectedness to nature and enhanced perceptions of causal linkages.
>Exposure to Community Voices resulted in significant increases in desirable social norms, concern for environmental issues, and commitment to action.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
The target changes in thought and behavior for ED are broad in scope and focused at the community level; it is challenging to quantify direct GHG reductions of Citywide Dashboard, Community Voices and the Community Calendar. We do, however have exceptional data to assess the impact of combining Building Dashboard with resource reduction competitions. In 2007 we published a widely cited paper that documented substantial and sustained reductions in resource use in response to electricity and water use reduction competitions among Oberlin College dorms made possible with Building Dashboard. We have likewise quantified substantial savings in Oberlin Public Schools. These are, however, dwarfed by the Campus Conservation Nationals program. In a paper published in 2015 we documented overall savings of 1.5 mWh of electricity, 1,100 metric tons of carbon and 1.2 million gallons of water.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
Our focus on systems thinking includes an explicit recognition that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. We have been pleasantly surprised by a variety of findings that have emerged from our research. As examples, we found that exposure to Community Voices elicited a larger enhancement in pro-environmental thought among people of color than among white people. We found that exposure to content enhanced the sense of youth engagement in the community. We also found evidence for positive behavioral “spillover” effects in several studies. For example, when asked to report their behavior response to electricity and water reduction competitions, many students reported increased recycling, bicycle riding and political engagement - activities clearly unrelated to competitive success. Likewise, we found that exposure to Citywide Dashboard related to enhanced systems thinking in domains unrelated to the environment.
Sustainability
While grant funding has provided seed money, our goal is to develop self-sustaining technology, knowledge and programming. Lucid’s commercialization of its enterprise-scale software for data monitoring, analysis and display is certainly a prime example of success. However, even at the pilot scale we have sought financially sustainable models. As an example, grants supporting curricular development have now been replaced by a contract with Toledo Schools to support STEM learning. Likewise, grants paid for initial ED screen installations in Oberlin. However, the four most recent installations were paid for by host organizations. Ultimately we envision local governments and business organizations funding Community Voices and the ED calendar.
Return on investment
Our focus on R&D and broad dissemination makes it challenging to calculate return on investment. However, as stated, Campus Conservation Nationals ultimately resulted in savings of $150,000, 1.5 mWh of electricity, 1,100 metric tons of carbon and 1.2 million gallons of water. More locally, during a 2015 competition within Oberlin Public Schools, children in Eastwood Elementary (K-2) were upset by the erratic behavior of the empathetic character “Walley Walley”; adults prompted to fix the Dashboard discovered a major water leak instead, which saved $10,000 in utilities. Lucid’s customers, who used technology pioneered by the ED, have likely saved many fold dollars and tons of carbon.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
A fundamental premise of our work is that while every community is unique, technology can be developed to leverage this uniqueness in order to amplify pro-environmental and pro-community thought behavior. Everything our team develops is designed with an eye towards broader dissemination. Throughout our project we have cycled between the goal of developing a successful and replicable pilot in the City of Oberlin and reaching out to promote regional and national adoption. We have provided examples of the range of successful partnerships that are resulting in broader adoption. But getting from successful pilot to broad adoption is enormously challenging. We are committed to doing everything in our power to contribute to the transformation of culture and behavior necessary to promote adaptation, mitigation and resilience. We can use all the support we can get!