1. © Copyright 2010 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
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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