Jazz calculator is a flash web site advertising the new eco-fuel VW Passat. It compares its low carbon emissions with the emissions a jazz band generate while playing (breathing generates CO2..). Even if the comparison is quite absurd (that’s the point) I think that its persuasion intent, to show how small the car emissions are, is pretty effective. This idea is quite in line with some of the discussions we’ve had at persuasion, and in line with carbon.to.

By DDB stockholm

The same agency developed a similar idea for the iphone, where your breathing emissions when blowing in the iphone mic were compared with how many km the car could drive emitting the same.

The food is tagged, in this case a QR code.

The screen at the shop plays a video of the producer telling the story behind the food.

At greengaged they set up a confession cabin for lightening our environmental souls. I think it is a pretty interesting topic they are pointing out.

Photography by Travis Drever

Info at : Greenengaged.

Together with Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud I participated in the 24h development camp Ecomo09 inLondon. The ideas was to spend 24 hours, from 6.pm to 6.pm developing an application from scratch, in this case with an environmental theme. After some brainstorming sessions we decided to focus on an application to improve transform carbon information between different units.

Hacking at 3.a.m

The result is carbon.to a web application that allows to:

• Transform carbon dioxide information to other units for example km of train.
• Compare different footprints for instance how many apples footprints equal a 4 hours flight
• Use as an API to transform CO2 information and present it in your own service in another unit. For instance: carbon.to/apples?co2=10 gives you back an XML with how many

Screenshot

We will keep in updating the service and we will also try to analyze the impact and what it needs to be improved. Have a look and play around with it!

The light novel (adapted to anime) Shangri-la presents a dystopical future where the economy market is ruled by the trade of carbon emissions. It plays with concepts as carbon taxes, carbon police corp, turning tokyo into a jungle absorbing carbon, carbon economical speculation… It is set in a high technological world where physical books are banned (cutting trees for storing information.. so last century). It seems that climate change and carbon dioxide reduction are now part of our social imaginaries.

More info // See (legally) online

Here is the abstract:

ICT has reshaped our society, and with the current accelerating development of technology, and its wider distribution throughout the globe, they will continue doing so even more. These changes in society are important for sustainability. They affect the physical way the society and the environment interact, but they also affect the way people think, learn and behave.

We suggest that the persuasive power of ICT can be oriented towards climate change. For this purpose we define the concept of “climate persuasive services” as ICT applications that change personal attitudes regarding climate change and/or change behavior towards reducing greenhouse gases emissions. We consider mobile phones, pervasive sensors and social media as three key technological drivers for the development of climate persuasion applications.

We have analyzed the use of persuasion principles in existing web and mobile applications forming three clusters: tracking carbon footprints, sharing goals and making green behavior easier. Based on this analysis, we suggest a more planned use of persuasive principles, and propose six different opportunities for improvement.

But one risk of ICT is that it works also in the other direction, hiding environmental impacts and processes behind a web façade. One example I experienced recently was when I ordered postcards from Moo (from where I used to get my visit cards sent from London) and I discovered that the package was sent “par air” from New Zealand. For the consumer this process is completely opaque and there was no way for me to know that my postcards would fly half world to arrive in my postbox.

We need to think of ways of minimizing this, how do we provide consumers transparent information about the products they are buying? How do we make people to care of that information?

The speakers and keynotes were really interesting, and there were three intense days getting in information.

One inspiring presentation was by B.J. Fogg where he suggested a eight step design process for persuasive applications.

The main message was to start small, to do not overdo interventions trying to do everything the first time.

Pick a simple behavior that you’re able to measure and create an application that try to change it, then if it success, grow (by repeating, replicating to another behavior, make the behavior harder, scale to more people…). Do fast iterations, a bit agile style, or getting real.

He also presented a quite simplified view of where to “attack” using persuasion: First try to trigger the behavior, if it doesn’t work look if the behavior needs to be simplified, and if not, go back to increasing the motivation.

Now I’m in San Francisco for some days, I’ll keep posting some more reflections about the conference these days.

The sky is more blue, originally uploaded by It’s a mobile world.

How do we persuade people to live more sustainable and make better choices? This is one of the big questions of my research.
In China I saw this example of local adaptation, using images of blue skies to promote solar energy. In Spain for instance this would not work, but in grey-skied Beijing blue skies can be what is needed to make consumers aware of the benefits of sustainable choices.